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

The federal government went too far in shielding an FBI informant from the 1970s through the 1990s, not only tipping him off about state and local police investigations, but even covering up his involvement in several murders. Last week a three-ju...   read more

Sometimes a picture does say a thousand words, and the hearing chaired last week by Congressman Darrell Issa (R-California) was such a time. The hearing, prompted by a White House announcement of a compromise rule requiring health insurance compan...   read more

In the early days of the computer industry, companies like Texas Instruments and Intel were racing to become the first to invent a microprocessor chip, the computation engine on a single wafer otherwise known as a central processing unit, or CPU. ...   read more

Monsignor William Lynn of the Philadelphia archdiocese is about to become the first Catholic official in the U.S. to stand trial for his actions during the child sex abuse scandal that rocked churches across the country.   With jury selection sc...   read more

Fueled by a flood of influential books and documentary films, the locally grown foods movement has basked in the media spotlight (including a Time magazine cover in 2007) and enjoyed astronomical growth since the turn of the century. In fact, loca...   read more

For the first time in nine months, the South American nation of Ecuador has an ambassador at its Washington, DC, embassy. On January 18, 2012, Nathalie Cely Suárez replaced Luis Gallegos, whom the U.S. expelled in April 2011 as retaliation for Ecu...   read more

From the Northeast to the Midwest to the Deep South, five states still have not elected a woman to Congress: Delaware, Iowa, Mississippi, Vermont and North Dakota. In 1992, Jocelyn Birch Burdick of North Dakota was appointed to serve a three-month...   read more

The same week Citibank settled one lawsuit alleging fraudulent business practices, the bank was hit with another civil case, this one involving the luring of consumers to open accounts through frequent flyer miles promises.   A federal class act...   read more

Having decided enough’s enough with all the manmade space debris floating around the earth, Switzerland plans to develop a special satellite that will clean up Swiss space junk.   Dubbed CleanSpace One, the project will employ a new kind of “jan...   read more

President Barack Obama has welcomed a new ambassador from Morocco, which was the first nation to recognize the newly-independent United States in 1777. Mohamed Rachad Bouhlal was appointed ambassador by King Mohammed VI on December 6, 2011, and pr...   read more

The former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, located in the Caucasus Mountains west of the Caspian Sea, south of Russia and north of Iran, has sent a new ambassador to the U.S. Elin Suleymanov is quite familiar with the U.S., having lived here ten ye...   read more

A court in Italy garnered worldwide attention this week when it convicted two wealthy foreign executives of involuntary manslaughter for exposing thousands of people to asbestos.   The defendants, billionaire Stephan Schmidheiny of Switzerland, ...   read more

Half a dozen lobbyists are suing the Obama administration claiming they are being denied their free speech rights by not serving on federal advisory committees.   The six lobbyists were either serving on or were seeking to be on the Industry Tra...   read more

A federal prosecutor’s decision to drop the investigation of cyclist Lance Armstrong has raised more questions than answers, especially given the timing of the decision.   U.S. Attorney André Birotte Jr. announced that the 20-month probe was ove...   read more

As part of doing business with the federal government, large U.S. corporations receive annual multi-million-dollar contributions to their private pension funds.   About $3.3 billion in taxpayer funds were paid in 2010 by federal agencies to the ...   read more

The Small Business Administration (SBA) has published new guidelines that will result in more companies qualifying as small businesses, allowing them to enjoy certain contracting advantages.   After conducting its first comprehensive review of s...   read more