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 senior Foreign Service officer with 31 years of experience in Europe, the Caribbean and the Middle East, Marcie Berman Ries was nominated by President Barack Obama in May 2012 to serve as ambassador to Bulgaria. Over the course of her diplomat...   read more

The West African nation of Liberia, which has had close relations with the U.S. since its founding by American former slaves in 1847, has sent a new ambassador to Washington who has played a key role in the nation’s reconstruction after back-to-...   read more

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been accused of playing favorites when it comes to clearing material in books authored by former government officials.   At the center of the controversy is the CIA’s Publications Review Board, which i...   read more

The Obama administration has proposed making it easier to provide federal agricultural loans to young farmers in need of financing.   New rules proposed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), aimed at the 70% of American farms that gross ...   read more

Based on the assessment of one leading international children’s organization, the U.S. has one of the worst child-poverty rates among wealthy nations.   Nearly a quarter (23.1%) of young Americans (17 and younger) are living in relative povert...   read more

The ambassador from the new Balkan nation of Kosovo is, at 38 years of age, a leading representative of the generation of Kosovars who came of age during the autonomy and independence struggles against Serbia during the late 1980s and early 1990s....   read more

Career diplomat Greta C. Holtz was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 24, 2012 to be the next U.S. ambassador to Oman.   Holtz received a Bachelor of Science in political science from Vanderbilt University (1982) and a Master of Arts i...   read more

With the transition from checks to debit cards for disbursing college student aid, financial institutions have found a new way to make money that at the same time has increased debt risks for young people.   Today some universities arrange for s...   read more

Arab-American entrepreneurs should enjoy the same assistance from the federal government as American Indians and Hasidic Jews, according to a civil rights group.   The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee recently asked the Department of ...   read more

Virginia-based Osiris Therapeutics Inc. has become the first U.S. company authorized to sell a stem cell-based treatment. The approval, though, did not come from the U.S. government. Rather, Canada’s government-run health system okayed the use of ...   read more

There is money to be made on the high seas, lots of it. With the rise of piracy off the eastern coast of Africa, private security companies (PSCs) have found no shortage of commercial and private ship owners willing to pay top dollar for protectio...   read more

When Grammy and Emmy award winning songwriter Christopher Cerf composed songs for Sesame Street, little did he know that the very same music would be used decades later for dark purposes by the U.S. government.   As part of its torture program d...   read more

The Obama administration was supposed to begin declassifying key rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) two years ago. But to date nothing has been made available.   The court is responsible for hearing requests by federal...   read more

Less than four years after it was rescued with nearly $50 billion in taxpayer money, Bank of America has decided to add offshore call-center jobs in the Philippines.   BofA follows other major banks—JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo—that...   read more

The head of the National Weather Service (NWS) has stepped down following revelations that his agency spent years redirecting funds without approval from Congress.   Jack Hayes ran the NWS for six years before his abrupt retirement last week. Hi...   read more

Executives at Ikea are probably looking forward to the start of June, given how bad the month of May was for the Swedish furniture giant.   The latest piece of bad news for Ikea involved accusations that the company has been cutting down old-gro...   read more