Monday, Nov 03rd
Last update09:24:44 AM GMT
How clean is your air? Most U.S. cities with the dirtiest air are getting cleaner but half of Americans still live in in areas where it's often difficult to breathe, the American Lung Association reports today.
Los Angeles remains the smoggiest metro area, although it's improved significantly in the last decade, and Bakersfield, Calif., has the worst particle pollution such as soot and ash, both on a daily and annual level, according to the ALA's 12th annual "State of the Air" report.
A lesbian cadet who resigned from West Point last year has been rejected for readmission to the academy even as the military moves toward repealing its "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
Officials at the U.S. Military Academy said they had no choice but to reject Katherine Miller's application, because the repeal of the policy barring gays from serving openly in the military is not in effect yet. The policy's repeal did not occur immediately after President Barack Obama signed the legislation in December as training and certification are required before the ban is lifted.
Gen David Petraeus, the US head of international forces in Afghanistan, will be nominated as CIA director when its chief moves to head the Pentagon, unnamed US officials have said.
CIA director Leon Panetta will be nominated to take over as US defence secretary when Robert Gates retires in 2011, the sources said. The changes will be officially announced on Thursday.
Mr Obama said he was bemused over the conspiracy theories over his birthplace, and said that the obsession over the "sideshow" issues was a distraction in a "serious time". "We're not going to solve our problems if we get distracted by carnival acts and sideshow barkers,
We do not have time for this kind of silliness, we've got big stuff to do, I've got big stuff to do," he said. Earlier, Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said: "The president feels this (controversy) is bad for the country, that it is not healthy for the political debate."
The nuclear power accidents at Fukushima this spring and at Chernobyl 25 years ago Tuesday show that radiation releases can endanger people and contaminate land many miles beyond evacuation zones.
The advocacy group Physicians for Nuclear Responsibility, which opposes nuclear power, said Tuesday that the U.S. 10-mile evacuation plan was inadequate and should be extended to 50 miles. One-third of the U.S. population lives within 50 miles of nuclear power plants.
Afghans make up the largest group by nationality held at the Guantanamo Bay detention center, an estimated 220 men and boys in all. Yet they were frequently found to have had nothing to do with international terrorism, according to more than 750 secret intelligence assessments that were written at Guantanamo between 2002 and 2009. The assessments were obtained by WikiLeaks and passed to McClatchy.
In at least 44 cases, U.S. military intelligence officials concluded that detainees had no connection to militant activity at all, a McClatchy examination of the assessments, which cover both former and current detainees, found. The number might be even higher, but couldn't be determined from the information in some assessments, which often were just a few paragraphs long for Afghans who were released in 2002 and 2003.
In the mountains of Northern California, a field of radio dishes that look like giant dinner plates waited for years for the first call from intelligent life among the stars. But they're not listening anymore.
Cash-strapped governments, it seems, can no longer pay the interstellar phone bill. Astronomers at the SETI Institute said a steep drop in state and federal funds has forced the shutdown of the Allen Telescope Array, a powerful tool in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, an effort scientists refer to as SETI.
An investigation into possible manipulation of gasoline prices has uncovered "disturbing'' revelations, Attorney General Eric Holder said today. "There are a couple things that … are disturbing,'' Holder said, declining to elaborate.
He indicated the information would be reviewed by a fraud task force formed last week. For the week that ended Monday, the nationwide average cost of a gallon of gasoline rose 3.5 cents, to $3.879, the Energy Department reported.
U.S. military intelligence assessing the threat of nearly 800 men held at Guantanamo in many cases used information from a small group of captives whose accounts now appear to be questionable, according to a McClatchy analysis of a trove of secret documents from the facility.
The allegations and observations of just eight detainees were used to help build cases against some 255 men at Guantanamo — roughly a third of all who passed through the prison. Yet the testimony of some of the eight was later questioned by Guantanamo analysts themselves, and the others were subjected to interrogation tactics that defense attorneys say amounted to torture and compromised the veracity of their information.
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