If April seemed a bit on the cold side to you, you're not alone. The month was the 23rd coldest on record in the United States. Here's what winter looked like in 180 different US cities.
When, in 2006, the website The Smoking Gun released a secret CIA memo documenting prisoner organizing strategies at Guantanamo Bay, the FBI took notice. Now the site has posted details of the ensuing 44-month-long investigation, offering a timely glimpse into the black box of a Department of Justice leak prosecution.
As Scandal Week comes to a close, it's worth reviewing the policy proposals that have followed in the revelations' wake. There aren't many.
Advocates of action on climate change hold a trump card. When the Supreme Court in 2007 determined that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, the EPA got a mandate to regulate it. But, what the court giveth, the court can rescind in a tightly contested vote.
The link between drug smuggling and terror usually spurs images of Afghan poppy fields under the wary eye of men in fatigues. Sometimes, though, it's garbage bags filled with money from selling illegal cigarettes in Brooklyn.
Acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller is testifying in front of a House committee this morning. It's one of the Congress' first opportunities to grill the agency on its use of politically loaded differentiation in assessing applicants' non-profit status.
Outgoing members of Congress are rarely hard-pressed for jobs. Tea Party star Allen West just accepted the one that was perhaps the most predictable.
Authorities in Texas provided an update on their investigation into the fertilizer plant explosion in West Texas. The short story is that the cause of the fire is undetermined. The long story is that the investigation has been as massive as was the explosion.
Reports on Thursday of a Saudi Arabian sheikh dooming Twitter users to eternal damnation may seem like inexplicable hyperbole to Americans. But it's likely an escalation of attempts by Saudi authorities to crackdown on a key tool for dissent.
Hey, great news, everyone. It's finally starting to warm up, which means it's almost time to open up those swimming pools. And we'd recommend you get to the pool quickly, before all of the other swimmers contaminate it with fecal bacteria.
It is true that there is not unanimity in the scientific community over the role of humans in climate change. But with nearly every scientific paper for 20 years agreeing that warming is linked to human behavior, we're as close to unanimity as we'll get.
On Thursday, the House of Representatives will hold its 37th vote on curtailing the Affordable Care Act. A little clarification about what that means is in order.
To be clear: There are not three scandals plaguing the Obama White House. By embracing the leaked talking points, Obama's opponents may have taken Benghazi off the table completely.
In an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Rep. Devin Nunes dropped a bombshell: the Department of Justice had bugged the House cloakroom as part of its AP investigation. It's an explosive allegation — and almost certainly an incorrect one.
The 41-floor New Yorker Hotel on Eighth Avenue in New York City has 912 rooms. That's only one room short of what it would take to house the 913 New Yorkers still living in hotels in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.
The White House took a step Wednesday to try and limit any political fall-out of the seizure of phone records from the AP. By making overtures to renew a media shield law, the administration gets to have its beloved subpoena power and condemn it, too.
There are few industries more exposed to financial risk from climate change than insurance. Unsurprisingly, the industry at large is trying to figure out how to limit its losses from extreme weather events. Individual insurers are a little slower to act.
It seems as if the battle over the IRS' improper focus on Tea Party groups has splintered into an attack on Obamacare. But it's simply the latest justification being used to attack the president's health-care legislation. Here's how the two are linked.
For the third time, it's official: Anthony Weiner is running for Mayor of New York. It will be official for the fourth time, if the rumors are true, when he "officially" announces it next week. Here's what comes next.
The attorney general probably wishes that this afternoon wasn't the afternoon one on which he'd agreed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee. It is, and right in the middle of several brewing controversies, but it's unlikely that the hearing will be job-threatening.
On Tuesday, Minnesota became the 12th state in the nation to legalize gay marriage. Watch it join the marriage equality wave on our updated map GIF.
Somewhat after the fact, the Department of the Treasury's Inspector General for Tax Administration released its report detailing the "inappropriate criteria" used by the IRS to filter applications for non-profit status. Or, in English: here's why the IRS apologized to the Tea Party last Friday. But it owes an apology to a lot of other groups, too.
On Sunday, the low temperature was 22 degrees in Aberdeen, South Dakota — that's ten degrees below freezing. The next day, according to the National Weather Service, the high hit 92.
If anyone can tie the IRS, Benghazi, and Obamacare into one grand conspiracy, it's Michele Bachmann. And she did.
Attorney General Eric Holder and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney tried, in near-simultaneo
A new email released by CNN's Jake Tapper raises significant questions about the motivations of the source for ABC's story last Friday revealing draft talking points in response to the attack in Benghazi.
According to new data, everything that you do on every website besides Netflix and YouTube combined generates about the same amount of peak web traffic as those two sites alone. Netflix itself is bigger in every metric than HBO.
If you're looking for a way to simultaneously criticize the president and renewable energy, it doesn't get much easier than the phrase, "Obama is allowing wind companies to kill eagles." Which is true. But a more nuanced assessment is probably in order.
By our count, nearly half of the standing committees of the House of Representatives are looking at some aspect of the Obama administration that offers at least some whiff of political opportunity. You can't tell the players without our handy scorecard.
In case you weren't sure what climate change looks like, here's a preview: It looks like tens of millions people displaced from their homes due to climate- and weather-related events each year.
The Associated Press received a letter from the Department of Justice informing the news agency that the government had acquired two months of telephone records for a more than 20 lines associated with the agency. On Monday the reasoning behind the AP intrusion began to unfold in scathing emails and more DoJ secrecy.
Everything about the brouhaha surrounding the IRS' enhanced investigation of Tea Party groups could have been handled better. But the main reason the IRS got in trouble is because it never addressed the fundamental problem in the first place. These are the options now.
The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization wants to be clear about its report today. "We are not saying that people should be eating bugs." Just that global changes may necessitate it.
Could what happened in Benghazi lead to an impeachment of the president? Yes, because impeachment and allegations of misbehavior have become the Godwin's Law of national politics.
The organization's goal is to evaporate the container described by the Second Amendment, making obtaining a firearm trivial enough that even trying to place restrictions on gun manufacturing becomes useless.
Jason Richwine, co-author of a controversial report from the Heritage Foundation that criticized the potential cost of immigration reform, has resigned from the organization.
It has happened. For the first time, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels passed a daily average of 400 parts per million. There is now more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than at any point since 2.9 million years before humans existed.
Goldman Sachs was not happy to learn that Bloomberg News reporters had access to information about the working hours and news habits of its staff via the terminals it leases from Bloomberg. And given the money at stake, Bloomberg was probably even less happy.
Law enforcement officials in Texas have launched a criminal investigation into the explosion at the fertilizer plant in West. Hours before, police arrested one of the first responders to that incident for possession of bomb-making materials, although no link was drawn between the two.
A representative of the Internal Revenue Service has issued a verbal apology to a number of Tea Party groups that were asked an unusually complex set of questions to justify their non-profit status.
According to ABC News, the government talking points on the situation in Benghazi went through eleven versions prior to their final release. We've created an interactive tool allowing you to walk through each individual change.
About twice a year, Yale University's Project on Climate Change Communication releases a survey assessing how Americans feel about the environmental threat. On Thursday, it released the latest version. We've extracted the four most important graphs.
As reported by Betabeat.com, the State Department has asked Defense Distributed to remove its plans for the 'Liberator," the group's first fully 3D-printable gun.
Public Policy Polling, the masters of getting press attention for inconsequential polls, have gotten our attention. For its national poll of Americans' musical tastes, we figured we'd give you a quiz to see how you compare — with pop-up visuals.
Since their release on the web on Monday, the Defense Distributed plans for a 3D-printable pistol have been downloaded 100,000 times. The number of weapons successfully printed from those designs, however, appears to be exactly 100,000 fewer. Although it's not for a lack of trying.
Republican members of a key committee announced that they were not going to attend a hearing meant to advance Gina McCarthy to head the EPA. Which problem is trickier to solve: Senate chicanery or environmental pollution?
The Census Bureau has verified that turnout among black voters for the first time topped that among whites in 2012. That shift may have affected the results in some states — and could affect perceptions of the Voting Rights Act.
A preliminary tally indicates that almost a third of all of the managed bee colonies in the United States — 31.1 percent — didn't survive the winter. That makes it the fourth-worst winter since 2006.
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