Zelenskyy explained, “I told him that if he gave us the weapons we need and stopped supporting Putin, we would let him build Trump-branded hotels and other Trump-branded buildings in Ukraine’s ten largest cities, as well as Trump golf courses in the countryside. He was quite excited.”   read more

Although Larry Flynt’s attempt to secure $5 billion in bailout money may have been little more than a comedic ploy, it raised the question of who exactly is receiving government funds, and why they deserve it. Cerberus Capital Management, a premie...   read more

Nine Food and Drug Administration (FDA) scientists have written to Obama’s transition team, complaining of managerial corruption abetting business interests, and calling for reform of the evaluation and approval process for new products and device...   read more

Derogatory insinuations about Juan Valdez, the Colombian coffee industry’s mythical icon, have been a call to arms for the Colombia Coffee Growers Federation, which threatened to sue cartoonist Mike Peters for $20 million. The Valdez character was...   read more

In the recently released details of its $13.4 billion, 3-year loan to GM, the government included a condition permitting it to call in its loan and bankrupt GM, if “any labor union or collective bargaining unit shall engage in a strike or other wo...   read more

In a recent article for the Boston Review, economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, reexamines the way the debate over deregulation has been defined. He writes, “In general, political debates over regulatio...   read more

Former Navy admiral Dennis Blair is no stranger to controversy, thanks to a career that has included water skiing behind a combat vessel, ignoring orders from civilian officials by offering  the Indonesian dictatorship military assistance without ...   read more

Nancy Sutley’s selection as chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality not only pleased environmentalists, but gay rights activists as well—thanks to Sutley’s “green” credentials and the fact that she is openly gay. Throughout her c...   read more

Citing safety concerns, the Israeli military has barred foreign journalists’ access to Gaza, defying a mandate last week from the Israeli Supreme Court ordering that a small number of international journalists be allowed into Palestine. Yet despit...   read more

The U.S. has reclaimed its preeminence as the leading arms supplier to developing nations in 2007, a position Russia had occupied since 2004. Arms transfer agreements totaled $60 billion in 2007, with $42.3 billion (70%) going to the developing wo...   read more

In advance of the upcoming Guantánamo trial of six 9/11 conspirators, military judge Stephen R. Henley issued a protective order on December 19th which will allow classification of any information, including that already in the public domain, that...   read more

The controversy surrounding embattled Governor Rod Blagojevich is nothing new for Illinois politics.  Five of the last 10 Illinois governors, including Blagojevich, faced criminal charges, but the tradition of paying for a Senate seat actually str...   read more

Hillary Clinton was the first First Lady to be elected to Congress and will be the first First Lady to serve in a cabinet position.   Born Hillary Diane Rodham on October 26, 1947, in Chicago, IL, Clinton was raised by her parents, Hugh Ellswort...   read more

While running for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan asked, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Most Americans answered: No, and Reagan was elected one week later. As the era of George W. Bush draws to a close, the answer to a sim...   read more

Mary L. Schapiro is Barack Obama’s choice to take over the Securities and Exchange Commission—a demoralized agency that failed repeatedly to head off financial disasters involving Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Bernard Madoff. Some observers co...   read more

Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi-born U.S. legal permanent resident, won $120,000 in a court settlement with JetBlue and employees of the Transportation and Security Administration (TSA) after being forced to cover up his T-shirt which said in both English a...   read more

In response to conservative economists’ claims that FDR’s New Deal actually prolonged the Great Depression, two-time New York Times bestselling political commentator David Sirota reviewed detailed unemployment data (PDF) from the U.S. census to di...   read more