Government

"When she became First Lady as a result of JFK’s assassination on November 22, 1963, Bird began a taped diary. A few years after her death in 2007, the LBJ Library made the 850 entries public. This book is heavily dependent on that diary, interpreted and expanded by an experienced author with a research team. Consequently, it is 95 percent about her 62 months as First Lady, with minimal material on her earlier and later life." "Life with Lyndon was a political as well as a personal partnership, though Bird was always the junior partner. She had family money; he had family connections. Together they elected him to Congress in 1936 and the Senate in 1948. She used her inheritance to buy an Austin radio station in 1943 and a TV station in 1952. The fact that her husband was in the Senate didn’t hurt when it came to getting licenses and advertising revenue. He made the couple powerful; she made them rich."   more »

"The Fraud Section leads the Health Care Fraud Strike Force. Since its inception in March 2007, the Health Care Fraud Strike Force, which maintains 15 strike forces operating in 24 federal districts, has charged more than 4,600 defendants who have collectively billed federal health care programs and private insurers for approximately $23 billion. In addition, the HHS Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, working in conjunction with the HHS-OIG, are taking steps to increase accountability and decrease the presence of fraudulent providers." "On May 17, the Attorney General established the COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force to marshal the resources of the Department of Justice in partnership with agencies across government to enhance efforts to combat and prevent pandemic-related fraud. The Task Force bolsters efforts to investigate and prosecute the most culpable domestic and international criminal actors and assists agencies tasked with administering relief programs to prevent fraud by, among other methods, augmenting and incorporating existing coordination mechanisms, identifying resources and techniques to uncover fraudulent actors and their schemes, and sharing and harnessing information and insights gained from prior enforcement efforts. For more information on the department’s response to the pandemic, please visit https://www.justice.gov/coronavirus." more »

Since 1917, when Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first woman to serve in Congress, a total of 395 women have served as U.S. Representatives, Delegates, or Senators. This Web site, based on the publication Women in Congress, contains biographical profiles of former women Members of Congress, links to information about current women Members, essays on the institutional and national events that shaped successive generations of Congresswomen, and images of each woman Member, including rare photos. more »

The National Institutes of Health has begun a clinical trial to assess the antibody response to an extra dose of an authorized or approved COVID-19 vaccine in people with autoimmune disease who did not respond to an original COVID-19 vaccine regimen. The trial also will investigate whether pausing immunosuppressive therapy for autoimmune disease improves the antibody response to an extra dose of a COVID-19 vaccine in this population. The Phase 2 trial is sponsored and funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of NIH, and is being conducted by the NIAID-funded Autoimmunity Centers of Excellence. more »