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

A towering cross on federal property atop Mount Soledad in San Diego may have to come down after the U.S. Supreme Court decided to let stand without comment an appeals court ruling that the memorial illegally conveys a religious message. But it ...   read more

The water Americans drink is threatened from below. For the past half-century or so, U.S. corporations have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid waste deep into the earth, believing that multiple layers of rock would prevent th...   read more

In yet another ominous sign that the Great Recession is threatening the future, a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that in 2010 public school system spending declined by 0.4 percent, a small decrease to be sure, but this marks the firs...   read more

Although during his 2005 confirmation hearing Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts tried to reassure the Senate that he would be unbiased because “Judges are like umpires,” he and his fellow Republican justices seem to have a strike zone tha...   read more

Two unnamed women are suing Blue Cross and St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Westchester County in New York state over the Catholic hospital’s refusal to grant benefits to same-sex couples. One of the women is an employee of the hospital.   The l...   read more

On October 7, 2012, hundreds of conservative political activists will intentionally violate federal law by engaging in illegal electioneering despite the presence of a law on the books since 1954 that forbids them to do so. They believe, apparen...   read more

On at least two occasions, the Apple Store in Alpharetta, Georgia, refused to sell iPads and other products to Iranian-Americans, citing U.S. government policy.   In both cases, the shoppers were speaking Farsi, which alarmed sales representativ...   read more

San Francisco’s 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals called the lower-court ruling “practically unworkable,” but on a 7-2 vote, U.S. Supreme Court justices upheld the decision that closed union shops, like those in California government, must give wo...   read more

C’est jeudi en fin d’après-midi que devait être annoncé le gouvernement Ayrault II. Et le moins que l’on puisse dire, c’est que l’attente a été (très) longue. 18 heures : rien. 19 heures : rien. 20 heures : toujours rien. Ce ne sera finalement qu’...   read more

Four men sued the federal government in 2011 claiming they were unfairly terminated from their government positions for not registering for the draft.   Their case was founded on the argument that the Selective Service System was sexist since ...   read more

A United Nations Group of Experts has uncovered information revealing Rwanda’s support for a Congolese rebel leader who is wanted internationally for using child soldiers. But the UN report, completed earlier this month, has not been released be...   read more

Piracy in Somalia is a booming business that is getting more violent and deadly. With the world economy in crisis and their anarchic nation topping an annual list of failed states for the fifth straight year, Somali pirates in 2011 took in an es...   read more

A new ethics watchdog for federal employees is on the way. Walter M. Shaub, Jr., was nominated by President Obama on May 24 to serve a five-year term as Director of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), succeeding Robert I. Cusick, Jr., whose t...   read more

Workers at the Congress Plaza Hotel in downtown Chicago went on strike in 2003 to protest low wages and benefits being offered by management.   The members of Unite Here Local 1 are still on strike, although most of the employees who walked ou...   read more

Erika Bonilla is suing the U.S. Department of Justice because she was discriminated against … for being too attractive.   Formerly an employee of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Bonilla moonlighted as a professi...   read more

A federal judge has invalidated a lawsuit by victims of U.S. experiments involving venereal disease in Guatemala during the 1940s and 1950s.   For at least eight years, the U.S. Public Health Service experimented on Guatemalans without their k...   read more