When Pope John Paul II visited Damascus in May 2001, Bashar used his welcoming speech to denounce the Jews, saying, “They tried to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus Christ and the same way they tried to betray and kill the Prophet Muhammad.”   read more

A federal plan designed to boost sales of automobiles with better gas mileage is getting closer to passing Congress, despite its uneven provisions for improving fuel efficiency. The Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save and Act (CARS) will provi...   read more

President Barack Obama tried late last week to quietly fire an inspector general who had investigated a close political ally, a move that prompted attention from several media sources anyway. Obama terminated Gerald Walpin, inspector general of th...   read more

Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co. made Zyprexa its best-selling drug, largely through marketing it to patients with dementia, even though Zyprexa was only approved for use in cases of schizophrenia and the company’s own research showed the medi...   read more

A footpath running from Washington state to Montana will soon become part of the National Trails System, devised by President Lyndon Johnson forty years ago to allow Americans to hike from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The new Pacific Northwest Nat...   read more

On April 10, 2009, President Obama named Sandra Henriquez as the new Assistant Secretary for Public and Indian Housing (PIH), a position within the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and she was confirmed on May 21. PIH manages programs ...   read more

On April 14, 2009, President Obama appointed Thomasina V. Rogers to be Chair of the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, an independent, quasi-judicial agency responsible for hearing appeals from decisions made by the Occupational Saf...   read more

John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who took a leading role in crafting the Bush administration’s legal rationale for torturing terrorism suspects, can be sued in federal court for his actions, according to a Republican-appointed judge....   read more

Intent on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, San Francisco officials this week approved an aggressive expansion of the city’s recycling program, requiring all residents and businesses to separate recyclable materials and food waste from garbage th...   read more

Since it was reported weeks ago that North Korea’s Kim Jong Il was preparing to hand over power to his youngest son, Kim Jong Un, experts have wondered what title the 26-year-old would take on as part of the cult of personality tradition that has ...   read more

Humankind has been warned of all kinds of apocalyptic dangers raining down from the skies, from nuclear weapons to earth-colliding asteroids. But there’s a growing kind of threat looming high overhead, one that is threatening to severely disrupt m...   read more

In taking over the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, Jeffrey D. Feltman is no stranger to the issues and key players of the region, having spent much of his Foreign Service career in diplomatic posts in Israel and Lebanon. Feltman...   read more

An employee of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has been fired for telling his supervisors about the illegal hunting of mountain lions in Nevada by coworkers. Gary Strader worked for APHIS, which is part of the U.S. Departmen...   read more

The Food and Drug Administration tried almost 10 years ago to start regulating the tobacco industry by going after the use of nicotine in cigarettes, but that effort was shot down by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled Congress first had to give s...   read more

L-L-L-L-Let’s get ready to Robo! It’s time again for the RoboGames in San Francisco, the world championships of advanced robotic technology. This weekend marks the sixth annual gathering of the world’s best, and most versatile, robots squaring off...   read more

When Danielle Smith of O’Fallon, Missouri, started blogging and posting on social networking sites, the last thing she expected was to find her family’s image hawking the services of a grocery store in the Czech Republic. But that’s the situation ...   read more

Ever since the beginning of the Web 2.0 phenomenon and the sudden popularity of social networking sites, experts have raised fears that people will give up on real relationships in favor of virtual ones. Having decided to see if there really has b...   read more