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

The U.S. government has been ordered by a judge in Guatemala to return a six-year-old girl kidnapped from her family four years ago and adopted by an American couple.   Loyda Rodriguez Morales, the mother of Anyelí Liseth Hernández Rodríguez, ...   read more

Career diplomat Aminata Djibrilla Maiga Touré became Niger’s ambassador to the United States in March 2006. When a military junta staged a coup in February 2010, Touré was named foreign minister. However, she is still officially her nation’s amb...   read more

There’s a new challenger for the title “America’s Meanest Bank” after Bank of America chose to robo-call a widow in Hawaii to demand its mortgage payment, calling early, often and even every 15 minutes during the wake for the husband.   Debora...   read more

The bank that played a major role inflating the house bubble, and consequently helped cripple Wall Street in 2008, has become the state bank of Kentucky.   Name the financial transaction and JPMorgan Chase is now in charge of it: deposits, pay...   read more

For only $500, soldiers in Afghanistan came up with an ingenious way to help detect roadside bombs and reduce the threat of casualties.   The money was spent on a remote-controlled toy truck (Traxxis Stampede) that a soldier’s brother, Ernie F...   read more

A career member of the Senior Foreign Service, with prior experience serving in Africa, Jeanine E. Jackson was confirmed as ambassador to Malawi on June 30, 2011.   Jackson is a native of Sheridan, Wyoming, who earned a bachelor’s degree in ar...   read more

On June 28, President Barack Obama announced his intention to replace one top donor with another in making his latest pick for ambassador to Luxembourg: Florida real estate developer Robert A. Mandell.   Obama first went with Cynthia Stroum, a...   read more

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will have to defend himself in court following a federal judge’s decision to green-light a lawsuit from an Army veteran who claims he was imprisoned and tortured by the U.S. military in Iraq.   The vete...   read more

Alabama’s new anti-immigration law is so harsh it could turn Good Samaritans into outlaws, according to leaders in the Catholic, Episcopal and Methodist churches.   Three bishops and an archbishop are suing Governor Robert Bentley because they...   read more

You know the government has gone too far with classifying information when the person who spent more than three decades secreting away documents comes out and says enough is enough.   J. William Leonard, Washington’s former classification czar...   read more

Running amok in the streets is going to get a lot tougher if law enforcement picks up the latest crowd-control “toys” developed by the U.S. military.   One system under consideration by police is the Active Denial System (ADS), which operates ...   read more

Environmentalists have taken the U.S. Forest Service to court over its approval of mineral mining in Idaho that, they say, could pollute local waterways and habitat.   With the approval of the Forest Service, Mosquito Consolidated Gold Mines o...   read more

Anders Behring Breivik, the man who murdered 77 people in Norway, is apparently quite the fan of American right-winger haters of Islam, based on the citations in his 1,500-page manifesto.   The American most cited (55 times) in Breivik’s writi...   read more

Security company McAfee recently discovered the largest series of cyber attacks to date, and while officials refused to say who was behind the hacking, they’re certain the culprit was a single national government.   Privately, computer experts...   read more

Imagine if your boss told you that due to budget cuts, you would have to go without pay for an indefinite period of time, and pay for your own job-related travel expenses while jetting around the country? That’s the unwelcome situation 40 safety...   read more

Amounting to less than a slap on the wrist, the CIA was ordered by a federal judge on Tuesday to reimburse the American Civil Liberties Union for legal fees after it failed to have the spy agency sanctioned for destroying evidence of torturing det...   read more