The Homeland Security Department is proposing to discontinue the color-coded terror alert system that became a symbol of the country's post-9/11 jitters and the butt of late-night talk show jokes.
The 8-year-old system, with its rainbow of five colors - from green, signifying a low threat, to red, meaning severe - became a fixture in airports, government buildings and on newscasts. Over the past four years, millions of travelers have begun and ended their trips to the sound of airport recordings warning that the threat level is orange.
Color-coded terror alerts may end
UN AIDS chief: Spread of HIV in E. Europe is scary
A near tripling of new HIV infections in Eastern Europe and Central Asia over the past nine years is frightening, the U.N.'s top AIDS official said Wednesday.
The United Nations estimates that 1.4 million people were living with HIV in the region in 2009 - almost three times the number in 2000 - and that, combined, the Russian Federation and Ukraine account for nearly 90 percent of newly reported infections in the region.
Analysis of the Occult Symbols Found on the Bank of America Murals
Prominently displayed in the lobby of the Bank of America’s Corporate Center are “creepy” frescoes, filled with occult symbols. Even more unsettling is the fact that those images seem to predict events of a radical world change in the not-so-distant future. Are those murals predicting the coming of an occult New World Order? We will look at the occult meaning of the symbols found on the Bank of America frescoes.
Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction
Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.
Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.
Radiation Worries for Children in Dentists’ Chairs
Because children and adolescents are particularly vulnerable to radiation, doctors three years ago mounted a national campaign to protect them by reducing diagnostic radiation to only those levels seen as absolutely necessary.
It is a message that has resonated in many clinics and hospitals. Yet there is one busy place where it has not: the dental office.
UK imposes new permanent immigration quota
Britain will impose a tough annual limit on the number of non-Europeans allowed to work in the U.K. and slash visas for overseas students as it seeks to dramatically reduce immigration, the government said Tuesday.
Home Secretary Theresa May told the House of Commons that the number of non-EU nationals permitted to work in the U.K. from April 2011 will be capped at about 22,000 - a reduction of about one-fifth from 2009.
TSA could have chosen a less intrusive screening machine
After 23-year-old Nigerian terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a flight from the Netherlands to Detroit last Christmas with enough explosives to bring down the plane, officials at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport decided to build a better mousetrap.
So they installed more than a dozen full-body scanners capable of detecting metallic and non-metallic materials, including explosives, gels, powders and liquids. In the 11 months that the devices have operated, Schiphol largely has avoided the privacy and safety uproar that surrounds passenger screening at U.S. airports on the eve of the holiday travel season.
Johnson & Johnson Recalls Children's Allergy, Pain Medications
Johnson & Johnson, the world’s biggest health-products maker, recalled about 4 million packages of Children’s Benadryl allergy tablets and about 800,000 bottles of junior-strength Motrin caplets, citing manufacturing lapses.
“When the manufacturing process was developed, it was not done as thoroughly as it should have been,” Bonnie Jacobs, a J&J spokeswoman, said in a telephone interview today. “There is no indication that the product does not meet quality standards.”
Negotiator for Taliban was an impostor
A man purporting to be one of the Taliban's most senior commanders convinced both Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the NATO officials who flew him to Afghanistan's capital for meetings, but two senior Afghan officials now believe the man was a lowly shopkeeper from the Pakistani city of Quetta.
His daring ruse has flummoxed those attempting to start a peace process with a determined Taliban adversary. "He was a very clever man," one of the officials said.
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