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The head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is telling Congress the agency "pulled no punches" in its investigation into Chevy Volt batteries that caught fire last year. Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform repeatedly raised questions about whether the government's partial ownership in General Motors created a conflict of interest as it investigated the electric car. Republicans also challenged why the agency took several months to inform the public about last June's fire.

Tempers flared Tuesday night at a Los Angeles Police Commission community forum on a controversial proposal to ease the towing and impound policy for unlicensed drivers. Under current laws, the cars of unlicensed drivers are towed and impounded for 30 days if they are stopped by officers. LAPD Chief Charlie Beck has proposed lifting the 30-day impound and giving the registered owner or a licensed driver a reasonable chance to retrieve the vehicle. Critics, including the LAPD police union, say the changes just reward lawbreakers and put politics above safety. The meeting in Northridge was packed with residents who were...

ALBANY — Police Chief Steven Krokoff roared to the defense of his department Thursday night, singling out city lawmakers by name in a blistering speech as he accused two of being "too weak to stand for the truth" and capitalizing on recent traumas for their own political gain. The normally mild-mannered chief's scorching offensive, which he began by citing the number of officers injured in the line of duty in each of the last two years, seemed to stun some members of the Common Council, who had summoned Krokoff before them to explain his department's actions during the Dec. 22...

President Obama’s decision today to replace White House chief of staff William Daley with the director of the Office of Management and Budget Jack Lew is raising eyebrows on Capitol Hill as Washington watchers recall Mr. Lew’s past statements. On Feb. 13, 2011, Mr. Lew appeared on CNN’s State of the Union with Candy Crowley and said of Mr. Obama’s proposed budget: Our budget will get us, over the next several years, to the point where we can look the American people in the eye and say we’re not adding to the debt anymore; we’re spending money that we have...

In the face of a growing controversy over whether two Supreme Court justices should disqualify themselves from the challenge to the 2010 health care overhaul law, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on Saturday defended the court’s ethical standards. The chief justice’s comments came in his annual report on the state of the federal judiciary. In it, he made what amounted to a vigorous defense of Justices Clarence Thomas and Elena Kagan, who are facing calls to disqualify themselves from hearing the health care case, which will be argued over three days in late March. He did not, however, mention...

GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters)- Israel killed the leader of an al Qaeda-inspired faction in the Gaza Strip on Friday, accusing him of involvement in firing rockets and a planned attack on the Jewish state from the neighboring Egyptian Sinai. The deadly air strike was Israel's second against a Salafi Islamist militant this week. Militants identified him as Momen Abu Daf, chief of the Army of Islam, among a loose network of Palestinian groups which profess allegiance to al Qaeda and have been reinforced by volunteers who slip in from the Sinai. Gaza's Islamist Hamas rulers, who have sometimes reined in more radical...

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta spoke sternly on Friday to America’s closest ally in the Middle East, telling Israel that it is partly responsible for its increasing isolation and that it now must take “bold action” — diplomatic, not military — to mend ties with its Arab neighbors and settle previously intractable territorial disputes with the Palestinians. “I believe security is dependent on a strong military, but it is also dependent on strong diplomacy,” Mr. Panetta said.

Let's talk about the Radical-in-Chief!

Socialism in action. The Hill reported, via Memeorandum: President Obama’s education reform efforts will address growing income inequality in the U.S., Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Wednesday. Speaking on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Duncan promoted the administration’s jobs plan, portions of which are targeted at updating school facilities and hiring teachers. He also blasted Congress for not moving forward with Obama’s jobs bill, saying the nation needs to “stop subsidizing banks and give that money to young people.”

Before he became Solyndra's chief financial officer, Wilbur G. Stover was at the center of one of the largest price-fixing scandals in U.S. history. From 1994 to 2007, Stover was CFO of Micron Technologies Inc., a maker of computer memory chips. During that time, the Justice Department investigated Micron and four other companies for colluding to drive up the price of memory in violation of federal antitrust laws. "This was a big deal case," said Robert Lande, a law professor at Baltimore University who has written extensively on the case. "It was price-fixing on a crucial component that everybody uses,...

Across an often contentious three-hour congressional hearing Thursday, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson vigorously defended her agency’s policies promoting cleaner air and water, and rejected suggestions by Republican lawmakers that the EPA is a chief factor in the country’s stagnant economic recovery. “The American people have a right to know whether the air they breathe is healthy or unhealthy,” Jackson said during her appearance before a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Time and again, she dismissed the notion that stubbornly high unemployment should prompt policymakers to roll back robust environmental protections. “It is analogous to a...

Report: Ex-labor chief works 1 day, nets $158,000 city pensionFormer president of Chicago Federation of Labor, city officials defend payout as legal msnbc.com news services updated 48 minutes ago A retired Chicago labor leader has secured a $158,000 public pension — roughly five times greater than what a typical retired public-service worker in the Windy City receives — after spending just one day on the city payroll, local news reports said. According to The Chicago Tribune, Dennis Gannon stands to collect approximately $5 million in city pension funds during his lifetime. He now draws the pension while working for a...

NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- AFDI/SIOA co-founder and Executive Director Pamela Geller has won an important victory for free speech. Omar Tarazi, a lawyer linked to the Hamas front group the Council on American-Islamic Relations, has dismissed his ten-million-dollar libel lawsuit against Geller with prejudice: it cannot be re-filed. Geller explained: "This is a huge victory for the First Amendment, truth, and the anti-Sharia movement in this country, which is exposing an insidious cancer that brings progressives and Islamic supremacists together in common cause to attack anyone who criticizes Islamic supremacism with the threat of lawsuits,...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for international action against Syria on Thursday, saying President Bashar Assad has repeatedly broken promises to reform. Using unusually strong language, Ban accused Assad of "escalating violence and repression" and ignoring appeals to stop, most recently by the Arab League. "It's been almost six months. I have been speaking with him several times, and he made all these promises, but these promises have become now broken promises," Ban told a news conference. If Assad's promises haven't been kept, the secretary-general said, "then enough is enough - then (the) international community should really...

Airport Authority chief dismisses Turkish claims of mistreatment by Israeli security officers Turkish officials are twisting reality by claiming that the detention of Israeli passengers at Istanbul airport is related to the mistreatment of Turkish passengers at Ben Gurion Airport, Israel's Airport Authority director general said Monday evening. "The attempt to tie security at Ben-Gurion Airport to the Israel-Turkey relationship does not reflect reality," Kobi Mor said. "The Airport Authority strongly rejects the attempts to tie security procedures undergone by the passengers at Ben Gurion Airport to the relationship between the two states," he said. "Security forces are doing their...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Standard & Poor's wild month continues. The president of S&P is stepping down just two weeks after the rating agency stripped the United States of its AAA credit rating. At the same time, an activist hedge fund is calling for S&P's parent to break into four separate companies to unlock more value for shareholders. McGraw-Hill Cos., the parent company, said that the resignation of Deven Sharma was not related to Jana Partners' break-up proposal or to S&P's polarizing decision to downgrade its rating on U.S. debt. McGraw-Hill named Citibank's chief operating officer, Douglas Peterson, to the...

Asked how Iowans view President Barack Obama, Michael Gartner, the President of NBC News from 1988 to 1993, insisted on this weekend’s Bloomberg TV’s Political Capital: “I think people have a fondness for him and I don’t think people blame him for anything that’s wrong in this country,” except, that is, “the far-right of the Republican Party.” For the Bloomberg TV show which first runs on Friday nights, Al Hunt interviewed Gartner, an Iowa native, at a game of the Iowa Cubs, the Triple-A affiliate of the Chicago Cubs which Gartner co-owns. From the end of the August 12 Bloomberg...

Aug 12 (Reuters) - Bank of America Chief Executive Brian Moynihan met privately this week with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Federal Reserve governor Daniel Tarullo amid the campaign to calm investors and employees about the bank's share price fall, the Wall Street Journal reported. The separate meetings took place on Wednesday in Washington, the WSJ said, citing people familiar with the situation. The intent of the meetings with the two top federal officials was for Moynihan to discuss issues related to housing, consumer spending and the U.S. economy, two people familiar with the meetings told the Journal.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said Vice President Biden should apologize for reportedly calling Tea Party members "terrorists." Biden is said to have made the remarks Monday during a closed-door meeting with Democrats on Capitol Hill. Priebus said on Twitter: .@VP more than crossed a line today when he called fiscal conservatives "terrorists". I demand an apology.

Kenneth Melson of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms faces controversy over the agency's surveillance program that allowed U.S. guns into Mexico. He is said to be eager to testify to Congress. The acting director of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is strongly resisting pressure to step down because of growing controversy over the agency's surveillance program that allowed U.S. guns to flow unchecked into Mexico, according to several federal sources in Washington.

Ex-IMF chief Strauss-Kahn set to receive 318,000 dollars 'golden parachute'By ANI | ANI – 43 minutes ago New York, May 20(ANI): Former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who is accused of a sex attack on a New York City hotel maid and is currently awaiting release from jail after having been granted bail on Thursday, will reportedly get an exit package which includes an annual pension of over 318,000 dollars. According to ABC News, it is common practice for executives of big organizations to get golden parachutes when they retire or are terminated, and Strauss-Kahn's deal with the IMF...

The new head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is pushing for screenings of all gun purchases. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said the current law, which allows private firearm sales without background checks, is "outrageous." The Florida Democrat is sponsoring a soon-to-be-released proposal extending the screening requirements to all gun purchases, commercial or private. "It is outrageous that gun buyers evade the background check system every day, even in broad daylight," Wasserman Schultz said Monday at a gun reform rally in Miami sponsored by Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

The Center for Public Integrity is reporting that an unnamed former ABC News journalist was an FBI informant during and after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, passing along tips and revealing a source. We know who it is...

He’ll be handing over leadership of the mission to someone at some point, but the details are still as vague and gassy as one of those “jobs created or saved” graphs. Adm. Gary Roughead, the Chief of Naval Operations, said that he has received no guidance on the path ahead for command and control of the no-fly zone, no-drive zone, no-sail zone, arms embargo enforcement, and any other missions currently being managed by U.S. Africom Commander Gen. Carter Ham, who is in Germany. NATO has been battling internally over whether to take command, while the French government’s latest proposal is...

Carole Hankin, the superintendent of the Syosset Central School District, earns $506,322 a year – more than the President of the United States. Her salary, paid for by taxpayers, is compensation for running a tiny school district comprised of 10 schools and 6,687 students. Hankin’s total compensation package makes here the highest paid school superintendent in New York. By comparison, the head of New York City’s school system, with more than one million students, only makes $250,000 a year – plus benefits. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wants to put a cap on extravagant school superintendent salaries. He’s pushing legislation...

Washington - Is inflation a growing threat or isn't it? Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke thinks not, and he told a House Budget Committee meeting as much Wednesday even as lawmakers expressed worries about rising fuel and food prices in the United States and abroad. (Snip) “Inflation is expected to persist below the levels that Federal Reserve policymakers have judged to be consistent” with their mandate, Bernanke told lawmakers. In his first appearance before the House since Republicans

NBC News and Politico are reporting that Bill Daley, brother of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, former Commerce Secretary under Bill Clinton and long-time executive at Wall Street’s JP Morgan Chase will join the Obama Administration as White House Chief of Staff.

Chief Justice John Roberts to swear in John Boehner aidesBy RICHARD E. COHEN Updated: 1/4/11 9:35 AM EST In another statement of the new House Republican majority’s commitment to the Constitution, aides to incoming Speaker John Boehner plan to take their oath of office Tuesday morning — a day before the same oath is administered to the 435 House members of the new Congress. At Boehner’s request, Chief Justice John Roberts will preside over the staff ceremony, which may be a first in congressional history. Aides in Boehner’s Washington and district offices are expected to take the oath in the...

U.S. Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Mullen prefers dialogue with Iran, believing that a military strike would only delay, not halt, its nuclear plans. The United States needs to be realistic about its efforts to engage Iran, whose leaders are lying about Tehran's nuclear program and are on a path to building nuclear weapons, the top U.S. military officer said. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in comments released on Friday that the U.S. military has been thinking about military options on Iran "for a significant period of time" but added that diplomacy remained...

Part Two of Howard Kurtz’s interview with Fox News chief Roger Ailes is out today, and based on his frank and candid assessment of Jon Stewart, NPR and a defense of conservative bias, no one should ever call Mr. Ailes a shrinking violet. His provocative comments are sure to predictably raise eyebrows, but one could just as easily read the enlightening Q & A as a plain-spoken conversation in which one of the most powerful media figures of the day isn’t afraid to speak from the heart, and perhaps confirm what everyone already thinks about him. As usual, the the...

President Obama's picture book for kids, Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters (Knopf, $17.99), pays tribute to 13 Americans whose traits he sees in his own children. The 31-page book, for kids ages 3 and up, is filled with lyrical questions for Malia, 12, and Sasha, 9, opening with, "Have I told you lately how wonderful you are?" The book, out Tuesday, is illustrated with Loren Long's paintings of the Obama girls and their dog, Bo, as well as the 13 famous Americans as kids and grown-ups.

SEBEKA, Minn., Oct. 13 (UPI) -- A police chief in a central Minnesota town who reported ammunition and stun grenades missing found them in his children's backyard fort, authorities say. The Otter Tail Sheriff's Department said Sebeka Police Chief Eric Swenson reported the items missing Friday from his home. Besides the stun grenades and loaded magazines for a Glock 9 mm handgun and an AR-15 rifle, the missing arsenal included gas grenades, gas shotgun rounds, a police radio and a pair of night vision goggles, the Fergus Falls (Minn.) Journal reported Wednesday.

The threat of a terrorist attack on French soil is at its highest as authorities suspect al-Qaida's North African affiliate may be plotting a conventional bomb attack on a crowded target, the director of the country's national police said Wednesday.

Relatives of Mohammed Dababish, a top Hamas security official in the Gaza Strip, say he was arrested at Cairo airport while returning from a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. Egyptian officials confirmed Sunday a member of Hamas' military wing had been arrested before the weekend at Cairo's airport because his name was on a wanted list for using falsified travel documents. (Snip) Egypt has arrested a string of Hamas figures since an Egyptian soldier was killed in a border shooting early this year.

<p>WELLESLEY — Wellesley’s school superintendent apologized today for allowing middle school students to participate in a prayer service during a field trip to a Roxbury mosque last spring. The apology to parents came after a group critical of the Islamic Society of Boston Community Center — New England’s largest mosque and Muslim cultural center — released a 10-minute long video featuring footage of Wellesley students bowing their heads during a prayer service.</p>

WASHINGTON -- The nation's health system can't be transformed by rationing medical care, President Barack Obama's new Medicare chief said Monday in his first major speech. Dr. Donald Berwick's appointment earlier this summer without Senate confirmation was contentious because some Republicans accused him of being willing to deny care to save on costs. Since then, the administration has kept Berwick out of the limelight, turning the otherwise well-known medical innovation guru into something of a mystery man in Washington. Berwick broke his silence Monday, telling an audience of health insurance industry representatives that pushing back against unsustainable costs cannot and...

BBC Director General Mark Thompson admitted to the UK Daily Mail in an article today that Britain's state-run news outlet has had a "massive" left-wing bias. He insisted, though, that the network is taking steps to remedy the ideological slant. BBC has a history of promoting the ultra-leftist agenda on most issues. But to see the channel's top dog admit it in an interview with the Daily Mail was quite a sight. Now if only some television outlets on this side of the pond would do the same.

[oreilly] As Steve Krakauer notes, this week is the New Black Panthers’ regularly scheduled moment in the sun. The organization has been trotted out by the right several times, always with a seemingly common objective: to create a creeping Black Menace, and conflate it with Barack Obama’s America. Bill O’Reilly and Andrew Breitbart have been promoting a very disturbing clip of King Samir Shabazz, the man charged with wielding a nightstick at a Philadelphia polling place, advocating the killing of white babies. In part 2 of my interview with NBPP Chairman Malik Zulu Shabazz, he gives a nearly-as-disturbing explanation, while...

Michael Griffin, who headed NASA during the last four years of the Bush administration, says the space agency’s new goal to improve relations with the Islamic world and boost Muslim self-esteem is a “perversion” of NASA’s original mission to explore space. “NASA was chartered by the 1958 Space Act to develop the arts and sciences of flight in the atmosphere and in space and to go where those technologies will allow us to go,” Griffin says. “That’s what NASA does for the country. It is a perversion of NASA’s purpose to conduct activities in order to make the Muslim world...

US spy chief quits after intelligence failuresPosted: 21 May 2010 1657 hrs WASHINGTON: After a string of intelligence failures, US spy czar Dennis Blair announced his resignation, ending a 16-month tenure marred by rumblings of infighting in the US clandestine services. Blair, who announced on Thursday that he was quitting as director of national intelligence, will be the most high-profile figure yet to leave President Barack Obama's national security team. He faced heavy criticism after the attempt by an Al-Qaeda linked group to bring down a US airliner on December 25 and some of the 16 US intelligence agencies he...

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- Former Cherokee Nation Chief Wilma Mankiller, one of the few women ever to lead a major American Indian tribe, has died. She was 64. Tribal spokesman Mike Miller said Mankiller, who became one of the nation's most visible American Indian leaders during her 10 years as chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, died Tuesday.

This story has actually been around for a few months, but glad to see it’s finally gaining some traction. Last fall, one of the founders of Human Rights Watch came out and accused the organization of being irrationally anti-Israel. To make matters worse, members of the organization thought nothing of fund raising in Saudi Arabia, where the organization’s criticism of Israel was no doubt a selling point. And if this weren’t bad enough, the Times of London has an in-depth piece about the ensuing scandal when it was revealed that one of the organization’s lead investigators and vocal Israel critic...

Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who was killed last month in a Dubai hotel, faced two previous assassination attempts in recent years, Hamas officials said, according to a report Sunday on Channel 2 news. Mabhouh was poisoned last year and, previously, was the target of a shooting in Lebanon, Abu Dhabi-based newspaper the National reported on Friday. Mabhouh was found dead in his Dubai hotel room on January 20 in what police say they are almost certain was a hit by Israel's Mossad spy agency.

Ronald E. Kirkland, former director of sales of Aflac’s U.S. operations, was sentenced Wednesday to two years in federal prison without parole for failing to file tax returns on almost $4 million in income. Kirkland, 65, pleaded guilty in October in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri’s Southern Division to two misdemeanor counts of willful failure to file tax returns in 2002 and 2003. On Wednesday, U.S. Magistrate Judge James C. England sentenced Kirkland to one year for each count, said Don Ledford, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri.

The brazen assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh has thrown the spotlight on one of Israel’s most powerful but shadowy figures, Meir Dagan, the current Mossad chief, who yesterday faced calls for his resignation. There is a piece of folklore often repeated about him: when he was appointed in 2002, Ariel Sharon, then the Prime Minister, ordered him to run the Israeli spy agency “with a knife between its teeth”. Eight years on, Mr Dagan appears to have followed his orders to the letter. The killing in Dubai of one of the top men in Hamas is only the most recent in...

(IsraelNN.com) The Rabbi of Ber Sheva, Rabbi Yehuda Deri has slammed abortions in Israel. “The Torah clearly says that abortion is murder,” he said. Deri is Head of the Chief Rabbinate's Committee to Prevent Abortions.

(CNSNews.com) – NFL Players Association Executive Director DeMaurice Smith would not say whether the NFL had treated talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh fairly when racist quotes were falsely attributed to Limbaugh shortly after word leaked that he was involved in a potential bid to buy a stake in the St. Louis Rams.

EAST ST. LOUIS — City officials seeking a new police chief passed up the former director of the Florida Highway Patrol, who formerly was a top commander of the Illinois State Police, because he is white, two former members of a city board claim. Wyatt Frazer and Della Murphy allege in a federal lawsuit that they were forced off the Police, Fire and Civil Service Board for their advocacy of a white candidate when the chief's job was open in 2007. Their lawyer said Tuesday the spurned candidate was Ronald Grimming, a Metro East resident who rose to be deputy...

Bring on the war of words. In a frank conversation with MSN writer Lawrence Ulrich, Audi of America President Johan de Nysschen has said that the Chevy Volt will fail and that anybody who buys the car is an idiot. Not only that, de Nysschen has lumped proponents of any type of electric car into a category of "intellectual elite who want to show what enlightened souls they are." I'm guessing that means a fair amount of the people reading this would be considered idiots and pompous intellectual elites in Mr. de Nysschen's book. Funny that. Hearing an Audi executive...

Rochester likely will have a greater police presence on city streets soon, but they will be uniformed community service officers, not sworn police officers. At a community meeting Tuesday during which some residents called for more police in the city's neighborhoods, Police Chief Roger Peterson said he will try to accommodate such requests. But given the tough economic times, he said the department will have to shift resources rather than hire additional officers. He said community service officers likely will patrol neighborhoods rather than writing property crime reports. Citizens would be encouraged to file those reports online or via telephone....