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 Food and Drug Administration has approved clinical trials for a new HIV vaccine manufactured in Canada.   With the financial backing of the South Korean pharmaceutical venture company Sumagen, scientists at the University of Western Ontario,...   read more

With the end of the world slated for December 21, 2012, Mayans in southeastern Mexico are hoping to draw scores of tourists next year. More than 50 million people are expected in 2012 to visit the regions of Chiapas, Yucatán, Quintana Roo, Tabasco...   read more

Boston College may have to violate its promise of confidentiality given to members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) who participated in an oral history project.   The school’s Belfast Project recorded about 25 interviews with IRA paramilitarie...   read more

Bart S. Fisher, a veteran international trade lawyer, is not a popular guy these days in Washington after agreeing to work for Sudan’s government and lobby the Obama administration.   Human rights groups and Republican lawmaker Frank Wolf of Vir...   read more

America’s streets are now home to more than 1.5 million youths, with more than 40% of them under the age of seven.   Out of the 1.6 million children in the U.S. who were homeless at some time last year, 672,000 were babies, toddlers and other ki...   read more

The off-shoring of call-center jobs has become not only a frustrating reality for Americans, but also a potential risk for individuals’ personal information.   One study produced for PricewaterhouseCoopers found that 83% of outsourcing companies...   read more

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, already the costliest weapons program in U.S. history, is going to eat up even more taxpayer dollars now that more than a dozen flaws have been found in the aircraft.   A secretive review panel convened by the Depa...   read more

President Barack Obama has finally brought the Civil Liberties and Privacy Oversight Board, an independent advisory group created at the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, back to life with the nomination of three new members.   Dormant sin...   read more

The toxic partisanship fouling Washington, DC, has cost another Obama administration appointee his job.   William Boarman was nominated in April 2010 to head the Government Printing Office (GPO). The Senate Rules and Administration Committee una...   read more

American youth are landing in jail far more often than most realize, according to a new study that found about one-third will be arrested for a non-traffic offense by age 23. The research shows that between 25% and 41% of 23-year-olds have been ar...   read more

Incompetence and greed have made the simple necessity of turning on the tap an expensive, and increasingly prohibitive, part of ordinary life.   In Alabama, home of the nation’s largest public bankruptcy (Jefferson County), local residents are s...   read more

Since the BP oil spill last year devastated the Gulf region, the federal government has encouraged the purchase of local seafood to help fishermen get back on their feet. But a new study raises the question of whether this fish is safe to consume,...   read more

While the U.S. pulls out the last of its troops from Iraq, a new difficulty back home begins: Finding jobs for thousands of returning veterans.   With the Iraq occupation over and Afghanistan expected to wind down as well in the near future, the...   read more

U.S. corporations complaining that their overseas earnings are trapped there because taxes are too high to bring home have already moved huge sums back onto American soil, a Senate investigation found.   The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Inve...   read more

The death of Kim Jong-il probably marks the end of an era, the end of one family controlling the fates of 24 million people. Despite the fact that I have written about living dictators for many years, I managed to visit North Korea in 2007. It was...   read more

Having written about dictators for many years, I thought I would try to visit North Korea, the worst of the worst. Because I had written harshly about Kim Jong-il, and included a chapter about him in my book Tyrants: The World's 20 Worst Living Di...   read more