Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) sent messages to all members of Congress terminating their positions, stating “Your performance has not been adequate to justify further employment.” All Democratic and independent members of Congress, as well as two Republicans, found themselves locked out of their offices after everything inside had been confiscated.   read more

In choosing James H. Thessin as ambassador to Paraguay, President Barack Obama selected a career member of the Senior Executive Service who, previously, had never served overseas in almost 30 years with the State Department. Thessin was nominate...   read more

Once Libya‘s dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, gave up attempts to develop weapons of mass destruction in 2004, the CIA under President George W. Bush came calling to Tripoli to enlist the Arab country’s help with the extraordinary rendition of terrori...   read more

The CIA failed this week to convince a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit claiming the agency used American soldiers during the Cold War as guinea pigs for drug experiments.   Led by the Vietnam Veterans of America, the plaintiffs are suing th...   read more

Charles Ludlam and Paula Hirschoff, who served two different stints in the Peace Corps, are suing the agency for not releasing data from its annual surveys of volunteers.   Ludlam and Hirschoff are seeking the release of the country-specific s...   read more

Roirdon Doremus of Idaho spent four years operating an illegal ore mining operation in the Nez Perce National Forest before the U.S. government took action to stop him.   With the help of “an International 125 bulldozer/backhoe, a trammel, a p...   read more

La Celia A. Prince was appointed ambassador to the U.S. from The small (population 120,000) Caribbean nation of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines on May 30, 2008. She is the youngest ambassador to the United States from any nation.   Born in Ki...   read more

Last week’s earthquake that rattled the Mid-Atlantic region also left federal safety inspectors a little shaken after they examined a Virginia nuclear power plant that was shut down by the seismic event.   Regulators with the Nuclear Regulator...   read more

Since the U.S. presence in Iraq began in 2003, the town of Ishaqi twice has suffered civilian massacres, allegedly involving American soldiers.   Five years ago, on March 15, 2006, the town, about 80 miles northwest of Baghdad, made headlines af...   read more

Energy company Exelon has been ordered by a federal judge to turn over data regarding radiation leakage from one of its power plants.   The demand came about after the parents of a girl sued Exelon claiming their daughter developed brain cance...   read more

Since July 2007, the ambassador to the U.S. from Latvia has been Andrejs Pildegovičs, a career diplomat who has defended U.S. spending on the Latvian military as necessary to the ongoing war in Afghanistan and to US security interests generally....   read more

Bockari Kortu Stevens has served as ambassador to the U.S. from Sierra Leone since November 2007. In addition to his position in the U.S., he also represents his country to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, Canada, Jamaica, Brazil...   read more

No matter how you look at it, the decision to spend more than $200 billion on contractors for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars proved extremely wasteful.   The congressionally-created eight-member, bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in ...   read more

One problem with entrusting the secret transport of detainees to private companies is that the process may end up spilling information about clandestine operations, if issues of money arise.   This development now plagues the CIA, whose contra...   read more

It took eight years and five months, but the U.S. finally got through a month in Iraq without any soldiers dying.   There are about 48,000 personnel still in Iraq, but not a single one was killed in August, marking the first no-fatality month ...   read more

It was heralded as the first beneficiary of the Obama administration’s energy loan guarantee program, and it was supposed to demonstrate how green technologies and job creation could go hand-in-hand. But instead of being a shining beacon for the...   read more

Feed-the-meter has a whole new meaning in the German city of Bonn, where prostitutes working the streets must plunk money into converted parking meters before going to work.   In certain areas of Bonn where sex workers can operate legally, the...   read more