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

A holdover from the George W. Bush administration, Nancy Nord has been a constant thorn in the sides of Democrats on the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) and consumer advocates. She has been criticized for repeatedly fighting against inc...   read more

Just weeks after a landmark study found that even low dose exposures to endocrine disrupting chemicals like bisphenol-A (BPA) produce significant, adverse health effects on people, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last week rejected a petiti...   read more

Can a federal agency refuse to do its job for so long that the statute of limitations would prevent legal action to force the agency to act? That was the question federal judge Richard W. Roberts answered with a resounding “No” last week in the ca...   read more

The Baltic nation of Latvia, which has been independent for two decades after being part of the Soviet Union from 1940 to 1990, has a new U.S. ambassador in residence who has previously served in neighboring Estonia. President Barack Obama announc...   read more

The Balkan nation of Kosovo, which owes its existence to U.S.-led intervention in 1999 against the nation of Serbia, of which it was a part, is welcoming a new ambassador from Washington. On January 23, 2012, President Obama announced his intent t...   read more

The United States has quietly stepped up its secret war in Yemen, launching dozens of airstrikes, including drones, according to a report by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. U.S. drone attacks in Yemen are now as common as those in Pakistan...   read more

As of April 1, the mangalitsa will be a wanted pig in Michigan. And that has some farmers very upset.   A new regulation developed by the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) will prohibit the fur-covered pigs. State officials claim the...   read more

After years of significant budget cuts and rising demand for classes, one community college in California plans to become the first of its kind to offer a two-tier pricing system for popular courses.   Santa Monica College intends this summer to...   read more

The Balkan nation of Croatia, known to most Americans as the homeland of NBA stars like Toni Kukoč and Dražen Petrović, will soon have a new ambassador from the U.S. President Barack Obama nominated career diplomat and current ambassador to Haiti ...   read more

Estonia, a former Soviet republic and now a staunch U.S. ally, will soon get a new ambassador from the U.S. who is a specialist on post-Soviet countries. President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate diplomat Jeffrey D. Levine to be next...   read more

Contending with insurgents in foreign countries may prove to be a more manageable task for the Department of Defense than balancing its books.   Since 2003, the Pentagon has spent more than $2.6 billion on a new accounting system for the armed s...   read more

As far as U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez is concerned, despite the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, corporations don’t enjoy the same rights as individuals when it comes to submitting ballot propositions.   In a ruling out of San Diego...   read more

The federal government’s effort to crackdown on tax evaders using overseas banks has become hampered by the sudden loss of almost one-third of its tax prosecutors can civil litigators.   Within the Department of Justice, 25 of the 95 attorneys i...   read more

Reactors inside Japan’s crippled nuclear power plant are still too hot for man and machine to get close enough to assess the damage from last year’s disaster.   Radiation levels inside reactor No. 2’s containment vessel are so high—(73 sieverts ...   read more

          Born under a bad sign,           I’ve been down since I began to crawl;           If it wasn’t for bad luck,           I wouldn’t have no luck at all.                     —“Born Under A Bad Sign” by Booker T. Jones and William Bell ...   read more

The U.S. intelligence community might have known ahead of time about al-Qaeda’s plan to attack the United States on September 11, 2001, had it managed to follow through in the 1990s on plans to eavesdrop on Afghanistan’s proposed new phone system....   read more