President Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed outrage to aides because there have been no violent mass street demonstrations against his statements and policies. He believes he needs violent demonstrations against him in order to declare a national state of emergency that would allow him to do anything he wants.   read more

On April 11, President Obama announced his intent to nominate Jay Nicholas Anania to be the next Ambassador to Suriname, which is the smallest independent nation in South America and the only independent Dutch-speaking nation in the Western Hemisp...   read more

Restricted from gouging many of its middle-class customers because of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, banks have focused on hitting low-income Americans with new, exorbitant fees.   Financial institutions are taking advantage of customers w...   read more

Lamar Advertising Co. in Florida is being sued and faces criminal prosecution for illegally killing thousands of trees for the sake of making roadside billboards more visible.   The controversy came to light after a company employee, Robert Barn...   read more

Inability to land properly was enough for the U.S. Navy to ground its most important unmanned helicopters. But the “mishaps” weren’t enough to stop Navy commanders from ordering a new-and-improved version of the aircraft.   About two weeks ago, ...   read more

In his memoir coming out this month, the Central Intelligence Agency officer who ordered the destruction of the CIA’s torture tapes defends his actions, saying he was erasing “some ugly visuals.”   Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., the former director of t...   read more

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) upset many of its longtime grant recipients this week when it cut funding for numerous PBS programs. But it also won praise from videogame makers for awarding its first grants to non-profit game developers...   read more

Barack Obama campaigned in 2008 as a civil libertarian, a former professor of Constitutional Law who promised to close the military prison at Guantánamo, Cuba, undo the unconstitutional excesses of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” and sto...   read more

Patients in Minnesota and possibly other hospitals have been greeted with the unpleasant sight of bill collectors seeking payments for medical services.   The unethical and possibly illegal practice belongs to one of the nation’s largest collect...   read more

In what some legal analysts characterized as a small catch aimed at snaring a larger fish, the Obama administration filed criminal charges this week against a BP engineer who was involved in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill cleanup.   Kurt Mix, who ...   read more

African-Americans facing trial in Florida need to hope for one thing: A black person on the jury.   After examining more than 700 non-capital felony criminal cases in Sarasota and Lake Counties over a 10-year period, researchers at Duke Universi...   read more

The greenhouse gas effect behind global warming is not only causing the ice in the Arctic sea to break apart, but also unleashing potentially even more gases that could accelerate the earth’s rising temperatures.   A new study from the National ...   read more

The net flow of immigrants from Mexico to the United States has ended, with just as many, if not more, people now heading south than north.   From 2005 to 2010, about 1.4 million Mexicans moved from the U.S. to Mexico. This total was twice the n...   read more

A new multi-part series on PBS discusses four major economic issues affecting the United States and, it just so happens, the interests of the program’s corporate sponsor.   Dow Chemical underwrote the series “America Revealed,” whose four instal...   read more

Two fishermen from Panama adrift in their disabled boat might have lived had an American cruise ship bothered to stop and pick them up last month.   While sailing from South America to the United States on March 10, the Star Princess cruise ship...   read more

Federal and state officials have joined together to go after DuPont for allegedly dumping hazardous substances into Kansas’ waterways and soil.   In a lawsuit filed in federal court, the U.S. Department of Justice, along with environmental offic...   read more

Monsanto has purchased a research company whose mission is to combat the massive die off of honeybees—a problem blamed in part on the biotech giant’s genetically modified corn.   Last fall, Monsanto quietly purchased Beeologics, which is “dedica...   read more