Tuesday, Feb 24th
Last update10:00:19 AM GMT
Last month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a “progress report” on its ongoing study of hydraulic fracturing and the impacts of fracking on drinking water. The progress report contains a lot of interesting information, but one particular map caught my eye.
The map shows that fracking has occurred in more states than previously known, including places like Arizona, Nevada and Maryland. All in all, we now know that fracking has occurred in at least 32 states since 2005.
Fifteen years before the clergy sex abuse scandal came to light, Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and a top advisor discussed ways to conceal the molestation of children from law enforcement, according to internal Catholic church records released Monday.
The archdiocese's failure to purge pedophile clergy and reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement has previously been known. But the memos written in 1986 and 1987 by Mahony and Msgr. Thomas J. Curry, then the archdiocese's chief advisor on sex abuse cases, offer the strongest evidence yet of a concerted effort by officials in the nation's largest Catholic diocese to shield abusers from police.
A study last year found unusually high levels of the isotope carbon-14 in ancient rings of Japanese cedar trees and a corresponding spike in beryllium-10 in Antarctic ice.
The readings were traced back to a point in AD 774 or 775, suggesting that during that period the Earth was hit by an intense burst of radiation, but researchers were initially unable to determine its cause.
Now a separate team of astronomers have suggested it could have been due to the collision of two compact stellar remnants such as black holes, neutron stars or white dwarfs.
Offering new revelations about the CIA's role in shutting down military intelligence penetration of al-Qaeda, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer joins a growing list of government officials accusing former CIA director George Tenet of misleading federal investigators and sharing some degree of blame for the 9/11 attacks.
A decorated ex-clandestine operative for the Pentagon offers new revelations about the role the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) played in the shut-down of the military's notorious Able Danger program, alleged to have identified five of the 9/11 hijackers inside America more than a year before the attacks.
It's a chicken-and-egg sort of a situation, wondering how much language determines thought, and the amount that's the other way around. Maybe there's no way to know which came first, or whether it's at all relevant -- or if "both" is the correct answer.
Somehow, I find it easy to get distracted by such chicken-and-egg considerations, especially whenever the feathers really get flying at the Congressional chicken coop, and when every besotted member of that prideful roost feels the urgent, imperious need to crow, squawk, cry, or flail around in the dirt and mud.
Almost a third of all detainees recently transferred to Afghan control have been tortured and Afghanistan's spy agency is operating secret facilities to avoid international scrutiny, a United Nations report released on Sunday said.
The findings could complicate the already thorny issue of how to manage the security transition ahead of the withdrawal of NATO-led troops from Afghanistan by the end of next year. Hundreds of detainees are being transferred from NATO to Afghan control as part of that transition.
In testimony before a Senate subcommittee, Ken Cook spoke passionately about 10 Americans who were found to have more than 200 synthetic chemicals in their blood.
The list included flame retardants, lead, stain removers, and pesticides the federal government had banned three decades ago. "Their chemical exposures did not come from the air they breathed, the water they drank, or the food they ate," said Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, a national advocacy group.
Barack Hussein Obama officially began his second term as the nation’s 44th president Sunday, taking the oath of office in a low-key ceremony at the White House.
It was a crisp and flawless 30-seconds of history in the Blue Room between Obama and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. The two flubbed the 35-word oath four years ago, but not Sunday. With Michelle Obama and daughters Malia and Sasha standing behind him, Obama quickly repeated the oath from Roberts, who this time carried a note card.
Mark Rosenberg and his colleagues were forced to stop their work at the point of a gun — or at least at the insistence of National Rifle Association.
In 1996, Rosenberg was director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC). It was then that Congress, at the behest of the National Rifle Association, stopped federally funded gun-related research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which includes NCIPC.
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