Now, President Barack Obama must limp into his final two years in office. All second-term presidents lose considerable clout at this mark. But Obama’s time as a lame duck comes amid a political climate so fractured that compromise with Congress is all but impossible.
The Justice Department has handed over to House investigators 64,280 pages of documents related to the notoriously botched Operation Fast and Furious — data President Barack Obama had claimed was exempt from congressional review. Calling the information an “election eve dump,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa on Tuesday hailed the hand-over. “This production is nonetheless a victory for the legislative branch, a victory for transparency, and a victory for efforts to check Executive Branch power,” Issa said in a statement.
Over the telephone, in jail and online, a new digital bounty is being harvested: the human voice. Businesses and governments around the world increasingly are turning to voice biometrics, or voiceprints, to pay pensions, collect taxes, track criminals and replace passwords.
Voters in Oregon and Washington, D.C., have voted to approve sweeping pro-marijuana legalization, according to a CNN projection.
New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, has ruled that a marriage between a half-uncle and a half-niece is legal in a unanimous court decision. According to the ruling, while “parent-child and brother-sister marriages . .
Even Southern Baptists know not to turn down an invitation from the Pope. Rick Warren, senior pastor of Saddleback Church, and Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberties Commission, will meet Pope Francis and offer an “evangelical Protestant” perspective as part of a Vatican colloquium on marriage and family held this November 17-19. “I am willing to go anywhere, when asked, to bear witness to what we as evangelical Protestants believe about marriage and the gospel, especially in times in which marriage is culturally imperiled,” wrore Moore on why he’s going to the Vatican despite his disagreements with the Pope.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), declaring himself “humbled” by Tuesday night’s many Republican wins, says it’s not time to celebrate, it’s time to pass jobs, energy, tax and regulatory reform bills: “It’s time for government to start getting results and implementing solutions to the challenges facing our country, starting with our still-struggling economy,” Boehner said in a statement. “Americans can expect the new Congress to debate and vote soon on the many common-sense jobs and energy bills that passed the Republican-led House in recent years with bipartisan support but were never even brought to a vote by the outgoing Senate majority, as well as solutions offered by Senate Republicans that were denied consideration.
A Russian Northern Fleet nuclear submarine on Wednesday fired a test intercontinental missile from the Barents Sea to the country’s far eastern Kura Range on the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement Wednesday. “Within the frameworks of testing the reliability of marine strategic nuclear forces, the Tula [nuclear submarine] launched a Sineva intercontinental ballistic missile from the Barents Sea to the Kura Range [in Kamchatka],” the statement says. The RSM-54 intercontinental ballistic missile Sineva (NATO code name SS-N-23 Skiff) is part of the D-9RM launch system.
Likely Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton actively supported more than 25 candidates in the midterms, but half of those candidates found themselves on the losing side of their races by the end of Tuesday night. In some cases, Clinton made public appearances with the candidate; in others, she attended fundraisers. The most stinging losses for Clinton were in Kentucky and Arkansas, where both Democratic Senate candidates relied on Clinton to get southern Democrats to the polls.
China has developed a laser cannon to shoot down small, low-flying drones, according to China’s state-controlled news agency Xinhua. The weapon can zap targets within a radius of 1.2 miles.
Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen warned that close to half the people trying to reach the IRS by phone might not get through during the upcoming 2015 tax filing season. “Phone service could plummet to 53%,” he told an audience of tax practitioners at the AICPA National Tax Conference in Washington, D.C.
A Christian couple accused of desecrating a Koran have been killed by a mob of Muslim vigilantes in Pakistan. The husband and wife, known only as Shama and Shehzad, were beaten to death. Their bodies were then burned in the brick kiln where they worked.
The more things change, the more things stay the same. As I write this, it looks like the Republicans are going to take control of the U.S.
Did you know that we buy nearly five times as much stuff from the Chinese as they buy from us? According to government numbers that were just released, we imported 44.9 billion dollars worth of stuff from China in September but we only exported 9.
Not all viewers considered it a treat to see a steamy scene air after a family-friendly Halloween special. The Parents Television Council has criticized ABC for its Oct. 30 programming choices, when the network followed up its annual broadcast of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown with an episode of Scandal that opened with a sex scene.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has sounded a stark warning over California’s sustained drought, publishing its latest findings where satellite surveys show a rapidly depleting groundwater supply. And with California as the United States’ most valuable agricultural state, and thus key to America’s food supply (and much of the world’s as well) that could mean drastic consequences for food commodity prices and potential shortages. The Nature Climate Change journal carried the report, which Think Progress summarized: