Most gamblers die broke, which is probably their own affair. But according to testimony last week before the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, gambling is also expensive to the nongambling citizen who has never filled an inside straight or placed a bet with a bookie. Appearing as a subcommittee witness, U.S. Internal Revenue Commissioner Mortimer Caplin estimated that $25 billion in income goes unreported every year—and a healthy slice of the money is earned from gambling. Subcommittee Chairman John McClellan concluded ...

Three days before the congressional elections last fall, Hillary Rodham Clinton stood halfway around the world, pledging to young victims of human trafficking at Cambodia's s Siem Reap Center that they would continue to enjoy the support of the U.S. State Department, which then provided some $336,000 to the shelter. The acclaimed center, situated near the magnificent temples of Angkor Wat, was an oasis of peace for some 50 survivors who, before they were rescued or escaped, ...

Two weeks ago, as the prosecution made its final points in his corruption trial, a pale Rod Blagojevich listened nervously as his wife, Patti looked on, sullen and indignant, from the bench, the arms of her brother around her. It was as if they could feel what was coming. On Monday, June 27, the jury returned from 10 days of deliberation and everyone gathered to hear its decision. Blagojevich blew an air kiss to his weeping wife and then clasped his hands as ...

On Nov. 23, 2010, in Cayuga County, New York, Phil Niles pleaded guilty to animal cruelty. He was ordered to pay a fine of $555, and not to have contact with animals for one year. Niles, who had been a longtime employee of Willet Dairy, had been caught hitting a cow on the head with a tool on an undercover video taken by the group Mercy for Animals in 2009. But some are moving to make that very ...

To see the conflict and our part in it as a tragedy without villains, war crimes without criminals, lies without liars, espouses and promulgates a view of process, roles and motives that is not only grossly mistaken but which underwrites deceits that have served a succession of Presidents. —Daniel Ellsberg THE issues were momentous, the situation unprecedented. The most massive leak of secret documents in U.S. history had suddenly exposed the sensitive inner processes whereby the Johnson Administration ...

On Tuesday afternoon, the 12 members of Ohio's Senate Insurance, Commerce and Labor Committee convened in a corner room on the second floor of the state senate building in Columbus. No vote or amendment was on the agenda, just a hearing on what is simply called Senate Bill 5. Outside the door, hundreds of protesters pressed into the halls and stairwells of the capitol as thousands more crowded the surrounding streets. They all wanted to testify. SB5, introduced ...

"Actually, any one who gives the matter unbiased consideration will realize that it is for the benefit of the rich to plug loopholes in tax laws, since this raises more revenues without raising rates." With this neat bit of logic, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. last week opened the great 1937 hunt for rich tax dodgers launched so suddenly by him and Franklin Roosevelt early this month . The hunt meet was not in the customary inquisition chamber, ...

For the first two years of Barack Obama's presidency, Mitch McConnell never got a phone call from the White House. Instead, he sat in his office on the second floor of the Capitol and plotted Obama's political demise. Now, ask the Senate Republican leader when he last spoke to Vice President Joe Biden, and he lets out a laugh, his golden presidential-seal cuff links — a gift from George W. Bush — flashing as his hands go ...

THE ADMINISTRATION The Strauss Affair Along a dim corridor outside the U.S. Senate chamber one evening strode a big, round-shouldered man with a conspicuous smile curling on lips that more often turn soberly downward. New Mexico's Democratic Senator Clinton P. Anderson was obviously happy with his thoughts. Spotting Anderson alone in the corridor, a newsman hurried up, asked a question heard constantly throughout Washington: "Will he make it?" Anderson paused, drew from his inside coat pocket a well-worn tally ...

THE competing power groups that make up the American system have never operated in complete harmony. They have moved ahead according to the clout—electoral, financial and sometimes moral—that they could muster. During the 1960s, the blacks, the poor and the young spoke up and pushed forward. The blue collar workers, who sweated in the mines and factories, built the roads and drove the halftracks, seemed to accept stoically the role of providers and members of the Silent Majority. No longer. ...