Wednesday, Oct 22nd
Last update10:50:50 PM GMT
Ashburn, who consistently voted against gay rights measures during his 14 years in statewide office, came out in an interview with KERN radio in Bakersfield, the area he represents.
Ashburn has voted against a number of gay rights measures, including efforts to expand anti-discrimination laws and recognize out-of-state gay marriages.
A coalition of communities in six Midwestern states filed a federal lawsuit Monday seeking to force the manufacturer of a widely-used herbicide to pay for its removal from drinking water.
Atrazine, a weed-killer sprayed primarily on cornfields, can run off into rivers and streams that supply municipal water systems. As the Huffington Post Investigative Fund reported in a series of articles last fall, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency failed to notify the public that atrazine had been found at levels above the federal safety limit in drinking water in at least four states.
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois by 16 cities in Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, and Iowa. The communities allege that Swiss corporation Syngenta AG and its Delaware counterpart Syngenta Crop Protection, Inc. reaped billions of dollars from the sale of atrazine while local taxpayers were left with the financial burden of filtering the chemical from drinking water.
Regular use of aspirin, acetaminophen and other analgesics appears to substantially increase the risk of hearing loss, especially in men younger than 50.
Researchers reported recently in the American Journal of Medicine that use of acetaminophen more than twice a week by such men doubles the risk of hearing loss, use of ibuprofen and related non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) increases the risk by nearly two-thirds, and regular use of aspirin increases it by about a third.
Studies in animals and anecdotal reports in humans have indicated that high doses of the analgesics could interfere with hearing, but there have been few studies looking at regular use and none studying acetaminophen (one brand name is Tylenol), according to the study authors.
After 18 months of screaming headlines and attacks vilifying the anti-poverty group ACORN--attacks reminiscent of a New McCarthyism that threatened the group's very existence--it's clear now that this was a right-wing witch-hunt which, sadly, too many Democrats and the mainstream media failed to fact-check.
In December, the Congressional Research Service cleared ACORN of allegations of improper use of federal funding and voter registration fraud. The latest to weigh-in on the controversy is Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes. After a four-month investigation Hynes declared "no criminality has been found" with regard to the conduct of three ACORN employees in the infamous and--turns out--misnamed "pimp-prostitute" video.
In fact, a law enforcement source told the New York Daily News that the unedited version of the video which caused all the outrage "was not clear." "They edited the tape to meet their agenda," said the official.
Israel has authorised the building of 112 new apartments in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank. The move comes as the US announced that Israel and the Palestinians had agreed to hold indirect talks.
A mysterious problem that causes bee colonies to decline is once again taking its toll on the state's beekeepers. The problem known as colony collapse disorder is characterized by a sudden drop in a bee colony's population and the inexplicable absence of dead bees.
The disorder has no known cure and appears to be cyclical. After several mild years, it has resurfaced with a vengeance, said Eric Mussen, apiculturist with the University of California at Davis. "It never went away, but this year a substantial number of beekeepers got walloped again," said Mussen, the state's leading bee expert. "And worse than they had been hit before."
Although Mussen said it is too early to tell exactly how many bees have been lost, a bee industry official said losses in the state vary from 30% to 80%.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Corrie,
You are coming to our lovely town to sue Israel, claiming that your daughter was "killed by an Israeli bulldozer." But you neglect to mention the circumstances under which she was so killed (nor the fact that she died from her injuries while under Palestinian medical care).
A new online database promises to crack some of the nation's 100,000 missing persons cases and provide answers to desperate families, but only a fraction of law enforcement agencies are using it.
The virus that causes AIDS can hide in the bone marrow, avoiding drugs and later awakening to cause illness, according to new research that could point the way toward better treatments for the disease. Finding that hide-out is a first step, but years of research lie ahead.
Dr. Kathleen Collins of the University of Michigan and her colleagues report in this week's edition of the journal Nature Medicine that the HIV virus can infect long-lived bone marrow cells that eventually convert into blood cells.
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