Federal Government

In May of 2010 an American soldier named Bradley Manning was arrested in Iraq and accused of leaking hundreds of classified documents and secret diplomatic cables to the publisher of Wikileaks, Julian Asange. Manning was held, in solitary confinement, at a military prison in Quantico, Virginia for nine months.  His clothes and glasses were taken away, and he was subject to what a United Nations observer called cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.

Sixty-five years ago, ‘The Marshall Plan’ for reviving Europe’s economy after World War II, changed the course of history. As Secretary of State after the war, General George Marshall conceived the plan in the wake of the devastation of World War Two. The plan resides here in Virginia and is still studied by leaders and scholars from all over the world.

A bipartisan group of Virginia lawmakers is fighting to win federal recognition of six tribes in the commonwealth.

The tribes have treaties dating back to the 1600s. But there 's a catch: the agreements are with the King of England. Even now, the UK recognizes and honors these American tribes, while the US government doesn't. That's partly because in 1924, a law was passed that declared Virginia contained no Native Americans and wiped the commonwealth's record books of their history.

Sequestration cuts are starting to affect some Meals on Wheels programs throughout the Commonwealth. 

The Local Area on Aging in Roanoke is losing $96,000 from its Meals on Wheels program this federal fiscal year. 

That’s a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses the program is taking around the Commonwealth. 

Virginia Republican Congressman Bob Goodlatte could play an outsized role in this year’s immigration debate.

At 844 pages, the bipartisan immigration reform bill in the Senate is one of those whoppers that’s easy to decry on the campaign trail. You won’t be seeing anything like that coming out of the House if Chairman Goodlatte has anything to say about it. He wants his Judiciary Committee to examine immigration one subsection at a time. He says speed isn’t his concern.