Katharina Fabricius plunged from a dive boat into the Pacific Ocean of tomorrow. She kicked through blue water until she spotted a ceramic tile attached to the bottom of a reef.
A year earlier, the ecologist from the Australian Institute of Marine Science had placed this small square near a fissure in the sea floor where gas bubbles up from the earth. She hoped the next generation of baby corals would settle on it and take root.
Pacific Ocean takes perilous turn
Judge urged to accept Halliburton's guilty plea
Halliburton Energy Services and Justice Department prosecutors have urged a federal judge to approve a plea deal that calls for the Houston-based company to pay a $200,000 fine for destroying evidence after BP's 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
In a court filing Thursday, Halliburton and prosecutors said the company's agreement to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge imposes "fair, just, and appropriate corporate punishment" and reflects its "full, truthful and ongoing cooperation" with the government's spill probe.
U.S. District Judge Jane Triche Milazzo will decide whether to accept the deal at a hearing in New Orleans scheduled for Sept. 19.
Nevada Dumps 1,500 Mental Patients Via One-Way Greyhound Ticket to California
A new lawsuit filed by the city of San Francisco on behalf of the state of California alleges that over the past five years, the state of Nevada has dumped 1,500 mental patients onto other states by putting them them on Greyhound busses and sending them over state lines with no prior arrangements with families or other mental hospitals once they arrive.
According to the federal class action lawsuit that the city of San Francisco is spearheading, nearly all of the patients bussed to California need continuous medical care—none of which Nevada state arranged, and all of which cost the city of San Francisco at least $500,000.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel apologizes for two decades of police torture
A secret unit operating under the direction of former Chicago police commander Jon Burge carried out systemic torture of suspects in criminal cases, mainly African-Americans on Chicago's South Side, to produce false confessions between 1972 and 1991.
While the abuse has been widely documented, Mr. Burge was never criminally prosecuted, despite ongoing accounts of almost 200 men sent to prison based on forced confessions on his watch. Meanwhile, the statute of limitations has run out, preventing Burge from ever facing a criminal trial. He is currently serving a 4-1/2-year prison term for perjury and obstruction of justice charges from a 2010 civil case related to the torture cases.
Politico: The Koch brothers' secret bank
An Arlington, Va.-based conservative group, whose existence until now was unknown to almost everyone in politics, raised and spent $250 million in 2012 to shape political and policy debate nationwide.
The group, Freedom Partners, and its president, Marc Short, serve as an outlet for the ideas and funds of the mysterious Koch brothers, cutting checks as large as $63 million to groups promoting conservative causes, according to an IRS document to be filed shortly.
Voyager enters realm between the stars, report says
We've made it to the stars, at last.
For the first time, a human-made object has left the sun's realm behind and ventured into the vast space between the stars, scientists announced Thursday. The record-setting spacecraft is NASA's scrappy Voyager 1, which launched in 1977 and edged into interstellar space on Aug. 25, 2012, according to recent data.
"We are in a new region of space where nothing has been before," says Voyager project scientist Ed Stone of Caltech.
Putin in editorial: American exceptionalism is ‘dangerous’
Russian President Vladimir Putin is no fan of the idea of American exceptionalism. He suggests that God isn’t either.
“It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation,” Putin wrote in an opinion piece posted Wednesday on the website of The New York Times.
Bob Alexander: Socio-Political Earthquakes
The greatest series of earthquakes in U.S. history began when an 8.6 magnitude quake rocked the Mississippi River Valley near New Madrid, Missouri on December 16th 1811. The earthquake raised and lowered parts of the Mississippi Valley by as much as 15 feet and changed the course of the Mississippi River. At one point, the Mississippi momentarily reversed its direction, and created Reelfoot Lake in northwest Tennessee. Now that was an earthquake.
I’ve experienced a couple of geological earthquakes that were unnerving at the moment, but in my lifetime there have been three socio-political earthquakes whose aftershocks have reverberated for decades:
The JFK Assassination, the Supreme Court’s decision to nullify a national election by installing George W. Bush as president, and the attacks of September 11th 2001.
NSA shares raw intelligence including Americans' data with Israel
The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.
Details of the intelligence-sharing agreement are laid out in a memorandum of understanding between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart that shows the US government handed over intercepted communications likely to contain phone calls and emails of American citizens. The agreement places no legally binding limits on the use of the data by the Israelis.
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