Sunday, Dec 07th
Last update12:05:51 AM GMT
It’s been nearly 50 years since four young girls were killed after members of the Ku Klux Klan planted a bomb at their Sunday school in Birmingham, Ala., simply because of the color of their skin.
But five decades later, lawmakers have moved one step closer to posthumously awarding the “four little girls,” as they are known by some, with the Congressional Gold Medal, proving that their memory remains seared into our national consciousness.
“Too-big-to-fail” legislation unveiled in Washington today is needed to rein in the biggest U.S. banks because the Dodd-Frank Act has failed to guard taxpayers against future bailouts, the bill’s sponsors said.
The four largest banks -- JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co -- “are nearly $2 trillion larger than they were” before getting U.S. aid to help them weather the 2008 credit crisis, Senator Sherrod Brown said in a news conference today.
Three years after the Oscar-nominated documentary Gasland secured fracking a place in the global lexicon, director Josh Fox returns with Gasland Part II, which premiered this weekend at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival.
The sequel opens with quick cuts of Republicans and Democrats extolling the virtues of natural gas drilling, setting viewers up for a rollercoaster ride through government and corporate accountability. Like his first film, Fox spotlights the various health problems and water contamination issues facing individuals that live near gas wells.
Part II, which will premiere on HBO this summer, also charts the EPA's progress and interviews members of the the scientific community. Rolling Stone spoke with Fox about gas infrastructure and what it's like to get kicked off Capitol Hill.
A couple serving probation for the 2009 death of their toddler after they turned to prayer instead of a doctor could face new charges now that another son has died.
Herbert and Catherine Schaible belong to a fundamentalist Christian church that believes in faith healing. They lost their 8-month-old son, Brandon, last week after he suffered from diarrhea and breathing problems for at least a week, and stopped eating. Four years ago, another son died from bacterial pneumonia.
Although experts have long thought of midlife as a time of stability and emotional contentment, baby boomers are proving to be an unfortunate exception. Reversing a longtime demographic trend, midlife suicides are on the rise for the generation born between 1946 and 1964.
National figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that the suicide rate for people in this age group rose by almost 30 percent during the decade ending in 2010, even as the rate among people 85 and older – traditionally, the demographic most likely to kill themselves – dropped by 12 percent.
The blast in West, Texas produced a yield equivalent to about a kiloton of TNT. They know this by measuring the size of the mushroom cloud. You see they did so many open air nuke tests in the 40s and 50s that there is actually a formula for this. The amount of anhydrous (dry) ammonia gas in the tanks was enough to yield 1.2 kilotons if it was all consumed in the blast.
This was 1350 times what was allowed by Federal regulations, but since the Reagan Administration it's been up to the states to enforce these sort of work place rules. We don't know yet if the massive amount of ammonia nitrate also stored on the sight played any roll in the blast, it's an oxidizer and won't explode unless mixed with fuel oil.
Former President George W. Bush steered clear of any detailed reflection on his legacy during a recent interview with USA Today, saying that his actions over eight years in the White House largely speak for themselves.
"There's no need to defend myself," Bush said in an interview published over the weekend, in anticipation of an opening ceremony for his presidential library at Southern Methodist University. "I did what I did and ultimately history will judge."
The following was letter was written from the Chemung County Jail in Elmira, New York where Steingraber is serving a fifteen day sentence for blockading a gas compression rig last month owned by the Inergy gas company near her home in the Finger Lakes region of the state:
This morning – I have no idea what time this morning, as there are no clocks in jail, and the florescent lights are on all night long – I heard the familiar chirping of English sparrows and the liquid notes of a cardinal. And there seemed to be another bird too – one who sang a burbling tune. Not a robin–wren? The buzzing, banging, clanking of jail and the growled announcements of guards on their two-way radios – which also go on all night – drowned it out. But the world, I knew, was out there somewhere.
U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel assured Israel on Monday that the Obama administration is committed to preserving and improving the Jewish state's military edge in the Middle East.
Hagel, on his first visit to Israel as Pentagon chief, also declared that it is Israel's right to decide for itself whether to attack Iran to stop it from building a nuclear bomb.
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