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 report issued by the Department of Interior’s Inspector General harshly criticizes Julie MacDonald, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks. According to the report, MacDonald “frequently contested the scientific findi...   read more

The Senate Armed Services Committee has issued a devastating report that concludes that the use of torture at Abu Ghraib prison and other sites was not the work of isolated “bad apples,” but the direct result of directives issued by Secretary of D...   read more

The Federal Reserve has refused a request by Bloomberg News to reveal who has received more than $2 trillion in emergency loans and what the Fed has accepted as collateral. Of the total, $1.23 trillion has been doled out in the last three months. ...   read more

El Paso County in Western Texas, which has a larger population than the state of Alaska, has filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court to stop construction of hundreds of miles of fencing on the Mexican border. Homeland Security Secretary Michae...   read more

The Railroad Retirement Board is a rich but obscure agency that distributes $10 billion a year in retirement benefits to more than 600,000 beneficiaries and $74 million annually in unemployment benefits to 29,000 claimants. According to an investi...   read more

The Bush administration is rushing to sign a nuclear cooperation deal with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) despite the fact that the UAE has been used as a transshipment point for military technology headed to Iran. The nuclear trafficking program ...   read more

In an attempt to redeem itself after almost eight years of relative inactivity, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued an FBI-style most wanted fugitives list for people charged with environmental crimes. The fugitives are wanted for...   read more

Allison Barber, the chief of the American Forces Information Service, was in charge of the “America Supports You” program meant to show the public’s support for U.S. troops and their families. Instead, she funneled $8.8 million in contracts to the...   read more

Tom Lasseter, writing for the McClatchy Newspapers, reports, “Seven years ago, a convoy of container trucks rumbled across northern Afghanistan loaded with a human cargo of suspected Taliban and al Qaida members who'd surrendered to Gen. Abdul Ras...   read more

The U.S.-supported “get tough” anti-drug strategy in Mexico has achieved some success, but has come at a price: 5,376 deaths so far in 2008—15 a day. This approach has caused drug trafficking groups to collapse and splinter. The U.S., which releas...   read more

The 5-member Congressional panel tasked with overseeing the $700 billion bailout has issued its first report. The Department of the Treasury has so far doled out $165 billion to 87 banks in exchange for stock and warrants. Treasury also gave AIG $...   read more

The Bush administration issued revised endangered species regulations that will eliminate some of the mandatory, independent reviews that government scientists have performed for 35 years on dams, power plants, timber sales and other projects. In ...   read more

Fragments of bricks, engraved with cuneiform characters thousands of years old, lie mixed with the rubble and sandbags left by the US military on the ancient site of Babylon in Iraq. From April 2003 to June 2004, US troops built embankments, dug d...   read more

With so much attention centering on the developing financial crisis, it isn’t surprising that other important stories have slipped through the cracks. Nevertheless, as the Bush administration winds down, there has been a surprising flurry of activ...   read more

Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner [Obama’s nominees for Director of the National Economic Council and Secretary of the Treasury] are both protégés of another master of the universe, Robert Rubin. His appearance in the photo op for Obama-transi...   read more

When George W. Bush took charge of the White House, he chose as his National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who spent 14 years on the board of directors of Chevron Corporation and even had an oil tanker named after her. When Barack Obama won e...   read more