Pacific Gas & Electric Co.has been ordered to pay a $1.6 billion penalty – the largest ever levied against a public utility – for a 2010 explosion in a gas pipeline it operated that killed eight people and destroyed dozens of homes in a San Francisco suburb.
The five-member California Public Utilities Commission voted 4-0 Thursday, with the commission president, Michael Picker, abstaining, to impose the penalty. Picker, however, called for a larger review of problems at PG&E, a move that The Associated Press says "suggests the energy behemoth could be broken up."
PG&E Hit With $1.6 Billion Penalty For 2010 Calif. Pipeline Explosion
How Wall Street captured Washington’s effort to rein in banks
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Keith Higgins was certain: Banks weren’t to blame.
Higgins, a top attorney at prominent law firm Ropes & Gray LLP, was chairman of an American Bar Association committee on securities regulation. As such, he lobbied strenuously against a rule U.S. regulators were drafting that would require banks to disclose a lot more about asset-backed securities like those that had just torpedoed the economy.
Pakistan judge: Charge CIA lawyer, officer for drone strike
A Pakistani judge on Tuesday ordered that criminal charges be filed against a former CIA lawyer who oversaw its drone program and the one-time chief agency operative in Islamabad over a 2009 strike that killed two people.
Former acting general counsel John A. Rizzo and ex-station chief Jonathan Bank must face charges including murder, conspiracy, terrorism and waging war against Pakistan, Justice Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui of the Islamabad High Court ruled. A court clerk and a lawyer involved the case, Mirza Shahzad Akbar, confirmed details of the judge's ruling.
100,000 'dreamers' could lose 3-year work permits
Reynoso is one of more than 100,000 so-called "dreamers" who received three-year work permits under Obama's executive actions on immigration before U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen issued a preliminary injunction temporarily halting the programs in February.
Now Reynoso and the other dreamers are caught a bitter legal dispute over whether the Justice Department intentionally misled the judge by failing to disclose that the government had already started issuing three-year permits to some dreamers.
More than 1 million Californians don’t have reliable access to clean water
Californians who grumble about not being able to water their lawns everyday during the fourth year of a historic drought should swing by this small town in southern Kern County.
Drought or no drought, residents of this rural community can’t drink water from the tap and can’t even use it for cooking because high levels of arsenic — known to cause — become even more concentrated when water is boiled.
“They worry about little things,” said Salvador Partida, president of the Committee for a Better Arvin, of the rest of the state. “We’re worried about not being able to drink the water.”
American Research University Intentionally Infected Orphans, Soldiers and Inmates With STDs, Lawsuit Alleges
Johns Hopkins University intentionally infected Guatemalan orphans, soldiers and inmates with sexually transmitted diseases, 774 people claim, seeking $1 billion for the "crime against humanity."
Johns Hopkins researchers chose Guatemala as the site for its penicillin-based human experiments in the 1940s and 1950s because U.S. relations with the country were amicable and the militaries of both counties could "ensure secrecy and access to vulnerable, captive populations ... many drawn for socio-economically disadvantaged indigenous groups," the April 1 complaint states.
U.S. Senator Menendez Indicted by U.S. in Corruption Case
U.S. Senator Robert Menendez was indicted after a corruption investigation into whether he took gifts from a campaign donor, imperiling the political career of one of the most influential Democratic and Latino voices on foreign policy.
Menendez was charged in connection with gifts from Salomon Melgen, a Florida eye doctor and longtime friend who sought his help in a dispute with federal agencies. Menendez is the 12th U.S. senator in history to be charged while serving in office, and the prospect of a lengthy case could put pressure on him to resign. Melgen was also indicted today.
US makes climate pledge to UN
The US has pledged to tackle climate change by cutting its carbon emissions 26-28% by 2025.
It made the formal offer to the UN as a step towards a global deal in Paris in December. The EU has already promised to cut its emissions by a roughly similar proportion.
Tuesday was the deadline for wealthy nations to make their offers – but some, such as Canada, have failed to submit in time.
The announcement was made on Twitter with the words: "America is taking steps to #ActOnClimate, and the world is joining us" - accompanied by a picture of the President in China.
Body Count Report Reveals At Least 1.3 Million Lives Lost to US-Led War on Terror
How do you calculate the human costs of the U.S.-led War on Terror?
On the 12th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, groups of physicians attempted to arrive at a partial answer to this question by counting the dead.
In their joint report— Body Count: Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the 'War on Terror—Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival, and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War concluded that this number is staggering, with at least 1.3 million lives lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan alone since the onset of the war following September 11, 2001.
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