Friday, Jan 02nd
Last update10:06:58 AM GMT
At least 10 people died and dozens were injured in the high-speed train derailment in Eckwersheim, France, that occurred during a test run on Saturday.
As convoys of heavy trucks carry fracking equipment into new oil fields in neighborhoods and wildlands around the world, an alliance of human rights organizations is making plans to put the entire practice of hydraulic fracturing on trial. The court is the Permanent People's Tribunal, a descendant of the Vietnam War-era International War Crimes Tribunal. The Peoples' Tribunal is a branch of no government on Earth. It has no power of enforcement. It has no army, no prison, no sheriff.
So what's the point?
The point is that it matters to tell the truth in a public place. It matters to affirm universal standards of right and wrong, to clearly say, "There are things that ethical people do not do to one another and to the Earth."
France outlaws most gun ownership and it’s almost impossible to legally acquire a high-powered rifle such as an AK-47, so where did the weapons in the Nov. 13 terror attack—not to mention the bloody January assault by Islamic terrorists on the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo magazine and the 2012 shootings by a militant in Toulouse—come from?
The answer: Eastern Europe, most likely, where the trafficking of deadly small arms is big, shady business. And where local authorities find it difficult to intervene.
They might not look like much, but these blurry flickers of light - right there in the middle - are the oldest stars ever to be observed by the human eye.
Discovered by a team of astronomers at the Australian National University (ANU), these ancient stars were born when our Universe was a youthful 300 million years old.
"These pristine stars are among the oldest surviving stars in the Universe, and certainly the oldest stars we have ever seen," said Louise Howes, lead author of the study published in the latest issue of Nature.
A Utah judge has reversed his decision to move a baby from its lesbian foster parents and place it with a heterosexual couple.
Judge Scott Johansen had said it was for the eight-month-old girl's "well-being" that she be with heterosexual parents.
Officials from the Utah Division of Child and Family Services had said they would fight Mr Johansen's ruling. His prior decision spurred criticism across the country.
The child could have been taken from its parents, April Hoagland and Beckie Pierce, within a week.
Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The CIA’s famous Presidential Daily Brief, presented to George W. Bush on August 6, 2001, has always been Exhibit A in the case that his administration shrugged off warnings of an Al Qaeda attack. But months earlier, starting in the spring of 2001, the CIA repeatedly and urgently began to warn the White House that an attack was coming.
By May of 2001, says Cofer Black, then chief of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, “it was very evident that we were going to be struck, we were gonna be struck hard and lots of Americans were going to die.” “There were real plots being manifested,” Cofer’s former boss, George Tenet, told me in his first interview in eight years. “The world felt like it was on the edge of eruption. In this time period of June and July, the threat continues to rise.
Five years after becoming the first American to be charged for espionage in nearly four decades, Thomas Drake is still trying to rebuild his life.
In 2010, Drake, a senior executive with the National Security Agency from 2001 to 2008, was indicted by the Obama administration for leaking classified information under the Espionage Act after speaking out on secret mass surveillance programs, multibillion-dollar fraud and intelligence failures from 9/11.
A federal judge won't give a new trial to four former security contractors convicted in a mass shooting of Iraqi civilians in 2007.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth denied the request in an order dated Tuesday, saying the "weight of evidence is heavily against the men."
The guards — State Department contractors for the Blackwater Worldwide security firm — were convicted last year in federal court and given long prison sentences in April.
Oklahoma may be only No. 12 in college football this year, but the Sooner State is now No. 1 in earthquakes.
A spokesperson for the Oklahoma Corporation Commission — a regulatory body tasked with ensuring the safety of oil and gas exploration in the state — told the Enid Rotary Club that Oklahoma now experiences more earthquakes than anywhere else on planet Earth.
"We have had 15 [earthquakes] in Medford since 5 o'clock Saturday morning," spokesman Matt Skinner said Monday, according to the Enid News. “We’ve got an earthquake issue.”
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