U.S. troops reported suspicions that they had been exposed to chemical warfare toxins in Iraq, yet the Pentagon failed to adequately treat them or track possible exposures, defense officials have revealed.
Contact with the toxins occurred beginning in 2003 when troops found degraded chemical weapons from the 1980s hidden in underground caches or in makeshift bombs. The information about the large number of potential exposures emerged following an internal review of Pentagon records ordered by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel after an investigation by the New York Times initially found that 17 service members were injured by sarin or a sulfur mustard agent.
Pentagon shrugged off troops' chemical exposure in Iraq
Alex Baer: It May Even Rain Later On This Year
As predictions go, here's an easy one: I predict things will get factually bumpy where politicians are concerned. I also predict you'll detect today's Mystery Guest on Spot the Weasel, the game show that offers fabulous conundrums the longer you play!
Are you ready? From the time tunnel of 2009, Clue Number One: "Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term." In case there was any confusion about the issue, there was additional clarification right away: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."
Prosecutors plan to throw out 28 drug indictments
Federal prosecutors plan to dismiss charges against 28 defendants in drug cases because an FBI agent may have been involved in tampering with evidence including firearms and narcotics.
The FBI is in the process of investigating the alleged misconduct, according to court papers in the matter.
At a court hearing Thursday for four of the defendants, a federal judge said he will review the government's plan to dismiss the cases without prejudice, which leaves the door open for the government to refile charges at a later date.
Alex Baer: Popping My Cork in Celebration
Funny-peculiar (not funny-ha-ha) how often we humans get what we most fear.
Well, it's official, not that there was much doubt: A majority of the nation's voters are freewheeling into full-blown psychosis, handing off a fixing of the Senate to those who broke it in the first place, to those who moved heaven and earth to sit on their hands and do precisely nothing for years on end, save work on their skills with barricades, stalls, quashes, and stone-walling.
The pieces of our political system, the Senate-sized ones, be assured, will be pummeled and smashed into finer and finer bits -- the political version of road-gang prisoners making small rocks out of the big ones.
US election: Big win for conservative big money
Establishment Republican money finally got what it paid for — an electoral wave.
After two cycles during which conservative megadonors’ record spending was plagued by flawed candidates and internecine squabbling, their side’s big money operatives got to do some gloating on election night.
Conservatives tweaked their playbook to spend bigger and earlier to crush tea party insurgents and define Democratic candidates. And Republicans won most of the Senate races in which they prosecuted that plan — including Iowa, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia.
The Climate-Change Solution No One Will Talk About
The equation seems fairly simple: The more the world's population rises, the greater the strain on dwindling resources and the greater the impact on the environment.
The solution? Well, that's a little trickier to talk about.
Public-health discussions will regularly include mentions of voluntary family planning as a way to reduce unwanted pregnancies and births. But, said Jason Bremner of the Population Reference Bureau, those policies can also pay dividends for the environment.
"And yet the climate-change benefits of family planning have been largely absent from any climate-change or family-planning policy discussions," he said.
Jehovah's Witnesses ordered to pay $13.5m to victim of sexual abuse
A Californian judge has ordered the Jehovah’s Witnesses to pay $13.5m to a man who was sexually abused in the 1980s by a church leader, the attorney for the victim said on Friday.
Church elders had assigned a man to work with Jose Lopez on Bible studies, even though they knew he had admitted to molesting another boy in 1982, because they felt he was “repentant”, Lopez’s attorney, Irwin Zalkin, said.
Suicide surpassed war as the military's leading cause of death
War was the leading cause of death in the military nearly every year between 2004 and 2011 until suicides became the top means of dying for troops in 2012 and 2013, according to a bar chart published this week in a monthly Pentagon medical statistical analysis journal.
For those last two years, suicide outranked war, cancer, heart disease, homicide, transportation accidents and other causes as the leading killer, accounting for about three in 10 military deaths each of those two years.
Ozone hole remains size of North America, Nasa data shows
The Antarctic ozone hole, which was expected to reduce in size swiftly when manmade chlorine emissions were outlawed 27 years ago, is stubbornly remaining the size of North America, new data from Nasa suggests.
The hole in the thin layer of gas, which helps shield life on Earth from potentially harmful ultraviolet solar radiation that can cause skin cancers, grows and contracts throughout the year but reached its maximum extent on 9 September when monitors at the south pole showed it to cover 24.1m square km (9.3m sq miles). This is about 9% below the record maximum in 2000 but almost the same as in 2010, 2012 and 2013.
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