Thursday, Dec 18th
Last update08:26:17 AM GMT
When Congress considered whether to regulate more closely the handling of wastes from oil and gas drilling in the 1980s, it turned to the Environmental Protection Agency to research the matter. E.P.A. researchers concluded that some of the drillers’ waste was hazardous and should be tightly controlled.
But that is not what Congress heard. Some of the recommendations concerning oil and gas waste were eliminated in the final report handed to lawmakers in 1987.
In May, President Barack Obama signed a new law that promised — for the first time in history — to pay family members and others who care for severely wounded soldiers at home. To qualify, soldiers had to be injured after Sept. 11, 2001.
But the VA missed a Jan. 30 deadline to get the program up and running. That's angering many families of wounded veterans and many members of Congress, who are accusing the Obama administration of dragging its feet.
In an alternative universe concocted by Fox News, Andrew Breitbart, and TCOT (top conservatives on twitter), the Madison capitol has become the island in Lord of the Flies, except the savages in this case are union "thugs." The mob has taken over, thick with radicals, and Republicans are likely to be attacked as a matter of course.
The cost of our success is the exhaustion of natural resources, leading to energy crises, climate change, pollution and the destruction of our habitat. If you exhaust natural resources there will be nothing left for your children. If we continue in the same direction, humankind is headed for some frightful ordeals, if not extinction.
The Ohio Senate approved a bill on Wednesday that would weaken the powers of public workers unions to negotiate their contracts. The vote came as union supporters protested the measure for a second day on the grounds of the state capitol in Columbus.
The GOP-sponsored bill passed the Senate by a vote of just 17-16, with six Republicans voting against it. As the roll call finished, dozens of union supporters in the Senate gallery chanted "Shame! Shame! Shame!" Screeches and shouts echoed down the corridors of the Statehouse, where hundreds of opponents of the bill had gathered for the day's events.
Federal health officials Wednesday announced a crackdown on the sale of prescription cold, cough and allergy products that had never been proven to be safe and effective.
About 500 products that had never been formally evaluated by federal regulators will be removed from the market, the Food and Drug Administration announced. The move is the latest in a series of actions by the agency to stop the sale of a variety of products that were being sold without government authorization.
It was a conspiracy – 9/11. That is indisputable. There is no “lone gunman” to confuse matters. To say anything meaningful about 9/11, you have to be a conspiracy theorist. It is only a question of whose theory of the conspiracy you are prepared to believe. It is incredible that anyone still believes anything the Bush administration said about that tragic day.
Charlie Savage is a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard with a Master's degree in law from Yale. As a Boston Globe reporter, he documented the Bush-Cheney-Yoo-Bybee-et.al. destruction of U.S. civil liberties and the constitutional separation of powers as they occurred during the reign of the 43rd president of the United States. Savage draws on this disillusioning experience to give us another important book, Takeover (2007). Savage documents completely how American civil liberty was destroyed by Dick Cheney and the traitors he was able to place in key positions in the Bush regime.
UK researchers have demonstrated the highest-resolution optical microscope ever - aided by tiny glass beads. The microscope imaged objects down to just 50 billionths of a metre to yield a never-before-seen, direct glimpse into the "nanoscopic" world.
The team says the method could even be used to view individual viruses. Their technique, reported in Nature Communications, makes use of "evanescent waves", emitted very near an object and usually lost altogether.
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