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

Tired of being told about the nation’s bad air quality, China’s government demanded the United States stop publicizing pollution readings taken from its embassies in Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai.   For the past four years, American officials ...   read more

Police in Kansas City had a tough time solving shootings last year because the majority of victims who survived refused to cooperate with authorities.   The Kansas City Star found that out of nearly 300 shootings in 2011, 175 victims declined ...   read more

Having barely avoided execution late last year, convicted murderer Hank Skinner is finally getting the DNA test he first requested nearly a dozen years ago.   Skinner was found guilty in 1995 of killing his girlfriend, Twila Busby, and her two...   read more

Many observers have said that today’s recall election of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is a harbinger of what to except in November’s general election…not because of the issues, but because of the way it is being financed. In Wisconsin, the ba...   read more

Jittery investors gobbled up Treasury notes last week, sending their value down to historic lows.   Unlike stocks and commodities, Treasury bonds’ value goes down when demand is high. The rush last week sent Treasuries with 10- and 30-year yie...   read more

Women earn less money than men in the workforce as a general rule. They also peak at a younger age, it turns out, in terms of salary growth.   According to the company PayScale, college-educated women on average reach their pay ceiling by age ...   read more

State officials have been lining up like kids outside a theater box office, spending more than $1 billion to coax Hollywood to film movies and television shows in various states.   Forty-three states currently offer subsidies to production com...   read more

With the coming withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the rule of President Hamid Karzai also will be coming to an end by 2014. But this doesn’t mean Karzai or his family members will be lacking for opportunities in their home country.   ...   read more

As Congress and the Executive branch investigate the recent trading disaster at the nation’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase (JPM), many are asking what role bank regulators played in the debacle, expected to cost JPM between $2 billion and $7 bill...   read more

The Department of Energy (DOE) wastes too much energy, and could see great improvements at very little cost, according to an Inspector General report released May 25. DOE IG Gregory Friedman audited energy usage at the agency’s approximately 530...   read more

Elections have consequences, a truism demonstrated last week in Grants Pass, Oregon (pop.: 34,533), where dozens of inmates poured out of the Josephine County jail Wednesday, some running, yet none pursued by law enforcement because voters two w...   read more

Growth in the number of Latinos was single biggest reason why Texas was awarded four more congressional districts after the 2010 census. And yet when the next Congress convenes, Latinos are not expected to make gains in Texas’ delegation to the ...   read more

The new ambassador to the United States from the Persian Gulf oil emirate of Qatar is a former career military officer turned diplomat since 2001. Born in 1956, Mohammed Bin Abdullah Bin Mutib Al Rumaihi graduated from the St. Cyr Military Acade...   read more

Why aim high when it’s so much easier to bust the little guy? That’s the approach being employed these days by those running the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), according to Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone.   Taibbi has drawn attention ...   read more

The Public Buildings Service (PBS) of the General Services Administration (GSA) has yet another scandal on its hands. PBS has been plagued by a series of scandals since April 2008, when GSA Administrator Lurita Doan was asked by the Bush White H...   read more

Like the ancient Persian King Xerxes, who ordered the sea whipped and chained for destroying a bridge his army needed to cross, real estate developers in North Carolina are pushing a law to prohibit rising sea levels owing to global warming–or a...   read more