VATICAN CITY — Seven months after ascending the throne of Saint Peter, Pope Francis is in the midst of a crusade against the sins of Vatican City.Read the rest here.
Since succeeding Benedict XVI, Francis has publicly sought to transform the tone of his office, extending surprise olive branches to everyone from gays and lesbians to professed atheists. But much more quietly, Vatican officials and observers say, the new pontiff has also begun to alter the atmosphere inside the Holy See, taking steps to shed light on the notoriously opaque Vatican Curia.
The government contract for the company that built the glitch-prone website for Obamacare has ballooned to three times its original cost, and some Republicans are demanding the resignation of the cabinet secretary who oversees it.Read the rest here.
Since its launch, on Oct. 1, the site has been plagued by crashes as Americans to try log on and enroll for health insurance. The Obama administration has conceded that the launch has been rockier than it had hoped.
The U.S. arm of a Canadian company, CGI, had the biggest role of the many contractors that worked on the rollout. It won the contract in October 2011. At the time, it had an estimated cost of up to $94 million. By May of this year, that cost ceiling had swelled to $292 million.
After 21 / 2 years of budget battles, this is what the federal government looks like now:Read the rest here.
It is on pace, this year, to spend $3.455 trillion.
That figure is down from 2010 — the year that worries about government spending helped bring on a tea party uprising, a Republican takeover in the House and then a series of ulcer-causing showdowns in Congress.
But it is not down by that much. Back then, the government spent a whopping $3.457 trillion.
Measured another way — not in dollars, but in people — the government has about 4.1 million employees today, military and civilian. That’s more than the populations of 24 states.
Back in 2010, it had 4.3 million employees. More than the populations of 24 states.
A woman in California recently sold a laptop computer of hers on eBay for $1,300, but it never arrived at the buyer’s house. The seller had paid the U.S. Postal Service for insurance and delivery confirmation on the package, so she should be able to get her money back and see who signed for the package. Not quite.Read the rest here.
She tells CBS Sacramento’s Kurtis Ming that USPS denied her insurance claim because the package was delivered and signed for as requested, but when she asked to see the proof of signature, the box was blank. So either the recipient had signed in invisible ink or no one had signed at all because the package was lost or stolen in transit.
Nope, insisted USPS, that’s a signature. She appealed her claim twice and no one would admit that there was absolutely no proof that the package had been delivered. In fact, all evidence seemed to show that the package had not arrived.
The French Stalinist Maurice Thorez spent the second world war in Moscow, where he called himself “Ivanov”. When France was liberated, he came home and entered government. After Charles de Gaulle stepped down as French leader in 1946, Thorez picked up one of the general’s pet projects: the creation of a school, the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, to train the new republic’s top bureaucrats. This caste, Thorez must have thought, was the “vanguard of the proletariat” that Lenin had always talked about. ENA has since produced countless members of the French political and financial elite, culminating in President François Hollande.Read the rest here.
Elite-bashing in France dates back to the guillotine but the “énarques” and their buddies are currently at an all-time low. Within a single year, governments of both right and left have become despised. France has record unemployment. Elite scandals keep coming (most recently, around the budget minister, Jérôme Cahuzac, with his secret Swiss bank account). Something has gone horribly wrong for Thorez’s caste.
ALBARET-SAINTE-MARIE, FRANCE — Although he is rich with 25 years of experience as mayor of this little town in the wooded hills of central France, Michel Therond gets advice from the bureaucrats in Paris almost every time he opens the mail.Read the rest here.
One day’s delivery brings a directive stipulating that the sidewalks must be widened to permit two wheelchairs to cross paths without bumping. Another says the school cafeteria must be made accessible by elevator. Trees must be trimmed of branches six feet up their trunks, the orders go, and only government-certified technicians can change a light bulb on city property.
“We are being strangled,” Therond complained, sifting through a pile of rules and regulations on his desk that he largely ignores — and many of which he does not even understand.
For a country always at war, the United States is remarkably not interested in taking care of soldiers it has broken in its wars. Having bankrupted the country, Washington sinks every available penny into the two purposes of the military: funneling money into the arms industry, and fueling imperial ambitions, in large part of pasty fern-bar Napoleons at National Review and Commentary. The Veterans Administration is way back in the chow line. It doesn’t work very well. As best I can tell, nobody cares.Read the rest here.
North Carolina is giving Steve Cooksey some choices. He can stop speaking. Or he can get a PhD in nutrition, or a medical degree, or a bachelor’s degree in nutrition and then pass an examination after completing a 900-hour clinical internship. Or he can skip this onerous credentialing, keep speaking and risk prosecution.Read the rest here.
He has chosen instead to get a lawyer. His case, argued by the libertarians at the Institute for Justice (IJ), will clarify the First Amendment’s relevance to an ancient human behavior and a modern technology.
Four years ago, Cooksey was a walking — actually, barely walking — collection of health risks. He was obese, lethargic, asthmatic, chronically ill and pre-diabetic. The diet advice he was getting from medical and other sources was, he decided, radically wrong. Rather than eat a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet, he adopted what he and other enthusiasts call a Paleolithic diet, eating as primitive humans did — e.g., beef, pork, chicken, leafy green vegetables. Cooksey lost 75 pounds and the need for drugs and insulin. And, being a modern Paleo, he became a blogger, communicating his dietary opinions.
If only I’d known what I was getting myself into.Read the rest here.
It was early April when my 29-year-old son, who lives in Boston, told me that he and five friends were planning a trip to Russia this summer and asked if I’d go to the consulate in Washington to apply for their visas.
Russia has five consulates in the United States — in New York, Washington, San Francisco, Seattle and Houston — and they don’t accept mail or electronic visa applications from residents of the continental United States. They require each would-be visitor to fill out an application online, print out a copy and have someone (not necessarily the applicant himself) hand-deliver it.
Checking the Russian Embassy Web site, I learned that as of April 10, the visa processing duties would be transferred from the consulate to a contractor called Invisa Logistics Service (ILS), which would charge $30 per application on top of the consulate’s $140 fee for processing, which was supposed to take about two weeks, or one week with rush service (for an extra payment, of course).
The chief of the General Services Administration is resigning and two of her top deputies have been fired amid reports of excessive spending at a training conference that featured a mindreader, a clown and a comedian.Read the rest here.
GSA Administrator Martha Johnson submitted her resignation to the White House on Monday. Public Buildings Service chief Robert A. Peck and Johnson’s top adviser, Stephen Leeds, were forced out Monday, White House officials said. Another GSA manager who organized the four-day conference has been placed on adminstrative leave pending further action.
