A federal appeals court Wednesday upheld the government's new requirement that most Americans buy health insurance, in the first decision by a U.S. appeals court on the centerpiece of the Obama-sponsored health-care overhaul.
The ruling by the Cincinnati-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit gives the administration a significant victory. Yet the 2-1 panel decision marks what is likely to be the first in a series of appeals court rulings in upcoming months. Ultimate resolution of the politically charged dispute is likely to come from the U.S. Supreme Court sometime next year.



Osama bin Laden was out of touch with the younger generation of al Qaida commanders, and they often didn't follow his advice during the years he was in hiding in northern Pakistan, U.S. and Pakistani officials now say.
Admittedly, Salk's vaccine logged early success; some 60-70 percent of those vaccinated did not develop the disease. But it also saw some early problems. About 200 people who had been vaccinated got the disease, and 11 of them died, forcing a halt to all testing. Once it was determined that a faulty, poorly manufactured batch of the vaccine was the cause of those cases, stricter production standards were implemented and full-scale vaccinations nationwide resumed once more. Four million vaccines were given by 1955; by 1959, 90 countries were using it.
Remember when Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano claimed back in 2010 that the US Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) naked body scanners had been proven safe by research conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) (http://epic.org/privacy/backscatter...)? A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request recently brought to light internal emails that were sent by NIST to DHS that basically decry Napolitano's false assertion that NIST had verified the safety of the naked body scanners.
When commercial nuclear power was getting its start in the 1960s and 1970s, industry and regulators stated unequivocally that reactors were designed only to operate for 40 years. Now they tell another story - insisting that the units were built with no inherent life span, and can run for up to a century, an Associated Press investigation shows.
Score another one for James Bopp, the veteran conservative lawyer who has helped kill off much of the country's campaign finance regulatory system. On Monday, the US Supreme Court struck down an innovative Arizona public financing law that would have provided extra public money to candidates who were being outspent by privately funded candidates and independent expenditure groups.
After a day in which every single news media outlet in the world seemed to weigh in, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday rescinded a Government Press Office decision to sanction any foreign journalist who participates in the Gaza Strip flotilla.





























