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

Robert Reich highlights the fact that American taxpayers, through the current bailouts, are gaining part ownership of the weakest aspects of the U.S. economy—poorly managed banks, GM and Chrysler, Fannie and Freddie, while the industries with the ...   read more

Writing for Politico, Josh Gerstein takes a closer look at President Obama’s executive orders regarding terror suspects and the use of torture.  A few significant delays and loopholes stand out.  1. Torture: Obama's order on interrogations instru...   read more

Every two years the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issues a report to Congress regarding the federal government’s most “high-risk” areas in terms of fraud, waste, mismanagement and general inefficiency. This year’s list includes 30 issues....   read more

In 1998, Lilly Ledbetter, a 19-year employee of Goodyear Tire & Rubber, sued her former employer claiming that she had not been paid as well as men in similar job positions. The case wound its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled, in May ...   read more

At a welcoming ceremony with the rank-and-file at the Department of the Interior, the new Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, fielded questions, while sidestepping the controversial issue of whether he would support the Bush administration’s last-min...   read more

President Barack Obama issued an executive order requiring all intelligence agencies, including the CIA to limit their interrogation techniques to those approved in the Army Field Manual. Among the techniques authorized by the Bush administration ...   read more

Agents from the FBI, the IRS and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service raided the Windber, Pennsylvania, offices of Kuchera Industries and Kuchera Defense Systems. The Kuchera companies received $8.2 million in defense earmark contracts in 20...   read more

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), for the first time, gave permission for clinical trials on humans of therapy derived from embryonic stem cells. The study will be financed by Geron Corporation, based in Menlo Park, California. Ten years ago...   read more

President Barack Obama took a major step in closing one of the darkest chapters in American history by ordering an end to the use of torture, and the closure of secret prisons and the prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. The decision to close Guantán...   read more

On March 23, 2001, only five weeks after assuming the presidency, President Bush ordered the National Archives not to release to the public 68,000 pages of records from the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, t...   read more

Now that the banks and large corporations are already receiving their bailout money, attention is turning to the Obama/Democratic proposal for stimulating the economy. In the House of Representatives, the Democrats have submitted an $825 billion p...   read more

On the day he took office in 2001, President George W. Bush reversed twelve executive orders issued by Bill Clinton in his final weeks as president. Now, eight years later, Barack Obama is using the same tactic against Bush’s late regulatory chang...   read more

Four prisoners at the U.S. detention center at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan are asking to be given the same right to a fair trial as the prisoners at Guantánamo. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Guantánamo detainees have a constitution...   read more

The Chinese Communist Party, accustomed to unqualified support from the administration of George W. Bush, was unnerved by parts of Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address and censored it for domestic consumption. When Obama spoke the line, “Recall that e...   read more

In one of his first acts as President of the United States, Barack Obama asked military prosecutors at the naval base at Guantánamo Bay to delay for 120 days all legal proceedings against Guantánamo prisoners in order to give his administration ti...   read more

A longtime friend of Barack Obama, venture capitalist Julius Genachowski is expected to give the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) a direct line to the White House, something the agency has not had in many years. It is also expected that Gen...   read more