Greg Gordon

Beleaguered General Motors unveiled a compensation plan with no caps Monday for those harmed by crashes stemming from faulty ignition switches in its Chevy Cobalts and multiple other models, even while announcing the costly recall of another 8.4 million cars, the vast majority with similar defects.

General Motors’ outside compensation guru announced a long-awaited plan for providing financial restitution to those harmed by crashes stemming from faulty ignition switches in Chevy Cobalts and five other models, setting no ceiling on how much money will be awarded.The firm’s 2009 bankruptcy “will not be a bar” to the filing of claims for accidents that occurred before it sought Chapter 11 protection, Kenneth Feinberg told a news conference at the National Press Club.

On the one-year anniversary of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down a core provision of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, Democrats and civil rights groups stepped up their push for a congressional fix.

For one exhausting week, Rep. Raul Labrador of Idaho wore a game face and carried the banner for the conservative insurgents in the House Republican Conference.

_ The scandal over General Motors’ years-long failure to recall Chevy Cobalts and five other models with ignition switch defects, now blamed for at least 13 fatalities, has helped create “a sea change” in the auto industry – at least for now, a leading industry watchdog said Tuesday.

Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi and eight of his Republican colleagues asked the U.S. comptroller general on June 13th for a legal opinion on whether President Barack Obama violated federal law in freeing five Taliban militants to win the release of captured Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

Decades of shortsighted decisions by industry and government have put the Mississippi River’s future at risk, and degradation at its southern Louisiana delta is contributing to “the greatest land loss on the planet,” a five-state environmental coalition warned Wednesday.

With bipartisan support, the House of Representatives on Monday passed a bill authorizing $17.6 billion in fiscal 2014 spending for U.S. space programs, roughly matching President Barack Obama’s budget request and underscoring the nation’s commitment to sending American astronauts into deep space.

It was hailed as a bipartisan breakthrough, a bill to repair the Voting Rights Act of 1965 after the Supreme Court weakened key components of the landmark civil rights legislation last year.

In one of its biggest strikes yet against cyber crooks stealing corporate and personal financial data, the Justice Department announced June 2nd that a multi-national effort has disrupted the computer malware cited as the leading "Trojan" targeting on-line banking transactions in 2013.

While scientists are engaged in an all-out, worldwide scramble to avert the energy and climate change crises, the biggest discoveries could come from a surprising quarter: a modest redwood home on a wooded, five-acre tract in rural Maryland, where a lone inventor toils day and night.

It was just a passing encounter in Colorado three years ago, but it caused an Ethiopian immigrant to do a double take.

The U.S. Justice Department sued Hattiesburg, Miss.-based Dawn Properties Inc. on Friday, charging that the firm and its affiliates violated federal civil rights laws by designing and building at least five residential properties whose barriers make them inaccessible to disabled people.

It shows up almost daily, in a drumbeat of press releases from the Justice Department about prosecutions of scam artists who’ve preyed on the government’s biggest health care program -- the $600 billion bureaucracy called Medicare.

Forget suspicions about surreptitious surveillance of prison inmates and know this much: When the FBI visits you the day after they throw you in the slammer, Big Brother WILL be watching.