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

Manhattan Federal District Judge Shira Scheindlin is allowing some claims against companies that allegedly did business with the racist South African government during the 1970s and 1980s to go forward.  More than a dozen lawsuits were initially f...   read more

Surprising as it may seem to most Americans, about three billion people still eat meals that are cooked using firewood. This adds considerably to deforestation and global warming. Introducing a solution: a cardboard box.   A Kenya-based company,...   read more

Considered a leading real estate economist, Raphael Bostic (42) has spent most of this decade teaching and researching at the University of Southern California, during which time he incorrectly refuted the notion that a “housing bubble” existed in...   read more

Only ten days after taking office, President Barack Obama changed the way government-hired contractors can hire employees—which may result in less outsourcing of jobs by federal offices. It sometimes happens that the federal government will replac...   read more

Some day the nation’s energy needs might be entirely solved through the use of hot water, and the man to thank didn’t get his business started until he was 83. Bob Potter, now 88, started Potter Drilling five years ago to develop a novel way of dr...   read more

Cathy Zoi, President Barack Obama’s choice to serve as Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, has been an advocate for more environmentally-conscious and conservation-oriented energy policy, with a long history i...   read more

Heading up the federal government’s key agency for managing water resources is Michael L. Connor, a lawyer who has spent most of his career in Washington, DC, quietly working for the Senate and the Department of the Interior during the Clinton adm...   read more

The American media have been happy to parrot the message coming out of the US military that things are better in Iraq these days, based solely on the fact that American soldiers aren’t dying in the numbers they were three or more years ago. But th...   read more

While bank leaders publicly clamor about returning federal bailout funds to avoid restrictions on executive pay, the Obama administration is working on ways to quietly allow financial institutions to avoid the salary rules. On Friday, following a ...   read more

The Abu Ghraib scandal raised all kinds of speculation over whether U.S. personnel crossed ethical lines or even broke the law. But in the case of one CIA interrogator, the U.S. government has stated that Mark Swanner committed the worst crime of ...   read more

The Center for Environmental Health conducted testing on faux leather purses, wallets, tote bags, and other accessories and discovered that many of these products contain lead levels exceeding state standards in California. The testing was done on...   read more

The big news coming out of the recently held American Mosquito Control Association convention was provided by none other than the Pentagon, which these days not only fights terrorists but bugs as well. Five years ago the Department of Defense laun...   read more

Just in time for spring fashions, the US Air Force is moving closer to adopting a new dress-blues coat for personnel to wear. A group of approximately 360 Air Force men and women were selected to review three different new styles of jacket—two fea...   read more

Crime doesn’t pay, but lobbying sure does. Researchers at the University of Kansas (KU) reviewed expenditures from 2003-2004 when big business blew more than $280 million on lobbyists to convince Congress to pass a one-time tax holiday that lowere...   read more

Comedy fans may remember the movie Born in East L.A., in which Cheech Marin plays a Mexican-American who is caught up in an immigration raid and mistakenly deported to Mexico. Unfortunately, sometimes real U.S. citizens do get detained, and the re...   read more

Approximately 250 holdovers from the Bush administration at the Defense Department had until yesterday to sign President Barack Obama’s ethics pledge, or pack their bags, according to an internal memo issued on Tuesday. In December, the incoming p...   read more