The honeybees that pollinate one-third of Americans’ daily diet are dying, and in the eyes of some environmentalists, one culprit may be a decades-old Environmental Protection Agency system.
The system, called “conditional registration,” is essentially a way to get pesticides on the market quickly. But to environmentalists and some experts, it has become too loose, letting potentially dangerous pesticides on the market, and letting some stay there too long.
EPA’s system of tracking pesticides harmful to honeybees, critics say
South Africa, the nation that gave up its nukes
It would be a mistake to think that the end of the Cold War also ended the threat posed by nuclear weapons. Nuclear-armed states continue to deploy huge arsenals of nuclear weapons, other states continue with their efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, and there is the alarming possibility that such weapons might fall into the hands of terrorists.
Accordingly, it might be helpful to consider the factors that led South Africa to develop nuclear weapons in the 1970s, and the reasons why it decided to dismantle them in 1989.
Syria: barrel bombs 'kill 87 children' in Aleppo
More than 300 people, 87 of them children, have been killed in a week of air raids on the northern Syrian city of Aleppo and nearby towns by President Bashar al-Assad's forces, a monitoring group said on Monday.
Many were killed by so-called barrel bombs dropped from helicopters, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Syrian authorities say they are battling rebels who have controlled parts of Syria's biggest city and most of the surrounding countryside for the past 18 months.
Why the Pentagon’s many campaigns to clean up its accounts are failing
The U.S. Air Force had great expectations for the Expeditionary Combat Support System when it launched the project in 2005. This accountants’ silver bullet, the Air Force predicted a year later, “will fundamentally revolutionize the way the Air Force provides logistics support.”
The new computer-based logistics technology would replace 420 obsolete, inefficient and largely incompatible “legacy” systems with a single, unified means of tracking the hardware of warfare. And it would be done for a mere $1.5 billion, combining three off-the-shelf products from Oracle Corp and modifying them only enough so that they could work together.
"Let the Crime Spree Begin": How Fraud Flourishes in Medicare's Drug Plan
Today, credit card companies routinely scan their records for fraud, flagging or blocking suspicious charges as they happen. Yet Medicare’s massive drug program has a process so convoluted and poorly managed that fraud flourishes, giving rise to elaborate schemes that quickly siphon away millions of dollars.
Frustrated investigators for law enforcement, insurers and pharmacy chains say they don’t see evidence that Medicare officials are doing much to stop it.
“It’s kind of a black hole,” said Alanna Lavelle, director of investigations for WellPoint Inc., which provides drug coverage to about 1.4 million people in the program, known as Part D.
Female sailors forced to march with buckets of human waste, Navy says
More than a dozen female sailors were forced to march in formation with buckets of human waste in a hazing incident that led to the firing on Friday of a high-ranking officer and the top enlisted sailor of a destroyer, the Navy said.
Cmdr. Kenneth Rice, executive officer of the USS Jason Dunham, and Master Chief Petty Officer Stephen Vandergrifft were found guilty in non-judicial proceedings, the U.S. Fleet Forces Command said in a statement.
Wyoming to fight U.S. over Indian reservation land grant
Wyoming will challenge a U.S. government ruling that more than one million acres of the western state's land still legally belongs to two Native American tribes, Governor Matt Mead said on Friday.
In a letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last week, Mead said he has directed the Wyoming attorney general to take aggressive action to overturn the agency's decision, which he said would adversely affect the state.
Pennsylvania Supreme Court Says It’s Unconstitutional For Gas Companies to Frack Wherever They Want
Some major parts of Pennsylvania’s two-year-old Marcellus Shale drilling law are unconstitutional, the state’s Supreme Court decided Thursday.
As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports, the court voted 4 – 2 that a provision that allowing natural gas companies to drill anywhere, regardless of local zoning laws, was unconstitutional. Seven municipalities had challenged the shale drilling law, known as Act 13, that required “drilling, waste pits and pipelines be allowed in every zoning district, including residential districts, as long as certain buffers are observed.”
Bruce Enberg: Punched or drilled? Use an inspection mirror & a spec sheet for comparison
Numbers on 3rd quarter GDP growth are in, and we could be breaking into a chorus of 'Happy Days are Here Again.' A quarterly growth of 4.1% in GDP is something that we have seen hardly at all since Ronald Reagan set about destroying the economy for the benefit of the 0.001% of Americans.
In the old days of New Deal Keynesian economics a 4% growth rate was the norm. Conservatives would like you to believe that such a number just isn't possible anymore unless you cut the tax rate on the rich to zero. Never mind that the Communist Chinese have been maintaining a pace of 2 to 3 times that for decades by pursuing FDR's or more accurately Alexander Hamilton's polices. You know, the guy on the ten dollar bill.
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