The majority of voters did not vote for Donald Trump for president; the majority of voters did not vote for Republican candidates for the Senate; and fewer than 51% of voters cast their ballots for Republican candidates for the House of Representatives. The Republican Party now controls the White House, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, no matter how that came to be. I believe it is worth bearing in mind that a majority of U.S. citizens did not support the Republican winners.   read more

Following criticism from conservative circles, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) pulled its Spanish-language radio programs designed to inform Hispanics about the federal food-stamp program.   A conservative website, The Daily Caller, ra...   read more

President Barack Obama’s promise to make government more transparent has not applied to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) when it comes to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.   In each of the first three years of the Obama admini...   read more

 The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was told a year ago by a federal appellate court to hold public hearings about the use of full-body scanners at airport checkpoints. The TSA has yet to follow the court’s order while continuing to ...   read more

The Alabama town of Harpersville has been accused of running a “debtors prison” and using its courts to commit extortion.   Circuit Judge Hub Harrington said he was appalled after finding out that the Harpersville Municipal Court and a private p...   read more

Los Angeles officials have accused US Bank of being one of the city’s largest “slumlords” and filed a civil suit against it worth potentially “hundreds of millions of dollars” for its handling of 1,500 foreclosed residential properties.   City...   read more

Raising the specter of Enron’s intrusion into the California energy market a decade ago, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is investigating allegations that JPMorgan Chase & Co. manipulated the state’s market in 2010-2011 for milli...   read more

Hoping to move beyond the conflict of interest controversy that torpedoed the tenure of outgoing director Regina Dugan, the Obama administration has named a new director for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Dugan resigned i...   read more

Jean-Marie Le Guen, a doctor and a member of the French National Assembly from Paris, has proposed closing his nation’s budget deficit by taxing the profits of the tobacco industry.   "The tobacco companies are currently enjoying super-profits...   read more

It turns out that the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) spying on scientists was far greater than previously known and included communications with members of Congress, lawyers, labor officials and journalists.   Starting in 2010, FDA offic...   read more

Five years after Congress ordered it, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) still cannot guarantee that all shipping containers arriving in U.S. ports have been scanned for radioactive material and nuclear bombs.   DHS was supposed to meet...   read more

Being part of a single-mother household can be challenging for the children as well as the parent, particularly if the mother has little education and limited income.   Today, more than 40% of all children born in the United States are born ou...   read more

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) plans today to award a controversial prize funded by African dictator Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea.   The UNESCO-Equatorial Guinea Internationa...   read more

Despite lean budgetary times, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has decided to invest more money in a special program designed to identify “mystery” diseases.   The Undiagnosed Diseases Program (UDP), now in its fourth year, currently se...   read more

In the worst case scenario, the Department of Defense next year will have to make do with only $470 billion—an amount it got by on during the George W. Bush administration while the U.S. was fully engaged in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. ...   read more

In yet another likely sign of the advance of man-made global warming, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) last week declared that 1,016 counties in 26 states are natural-disaster areas, the agency’s biggest such declaration ever, as drough...   read more

Wells Fargo, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, cheated at least 34,000 minority homeowners during the 2004-2008 housing boom, either charging them more for their mortgages or steering them into risky loans. For these acts of discrimination t...   read more