Saturday, Feb 28th
Last update10:05:53 AM GMT
NASA's Cassini spacecraft has captured images of a monster hurricane at Saturn's north pole – a storm so vast and powerful it makes tropical cyclones on Earth look tame by comparison.
The storm's eye alone spans some 1,250 miles – about the distance from North Carolina's Outer Banks to central Kansas. Wind speeds at the inner eye wall have been clocked at 330 miles an hour. The storm extends for another 600 to 700 miles beyond the eye.
Former fashion jewelry saleswoman Rebecca Gonzales and former Chief Executive Officer Ron Johnson have one thing in common: J.C. Penney Co. (JCP) no longer employs either.
The similarity ends there. Johnson, 54, got a compensation package worth 1,795 times the average wage and benefits of a U.S. department store worker when he was hired in November 2011, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Gonzales’s hourly wage was $8.30 that year.
A hidden epidemic is poisoning America. The toxins are in the air we breathe and the water we drink, in the walls of our homes and the furniture within them. We can’t escape it in our cars. It’s in cities and suburbs. It afflicts rich and poor, young and old. And there’s a reason why you’ve never read about it in the newspaper or seen a report on the nightly news: it has no name -- and no antidote.
The culprit behind this silent killer is lead. And vinyl. And formaldehyde. And asbestos. And Bisphenol A. And polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). And thousands more innovations brought to us by the industries that once promised “better living through chemistry,” but instead produced a toxic stew that has made every American a guinea pig and has turned the United States into one grand unnatural experiment.
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached 399.72 parts per million (ppm) and is likely to pass the symbolically important 400ppm level for the first time in the next few days.
Readings at the US government's Earth Systems Research laboratory in Hawaii, are not expected to reach their 2013 peak until mid May, but were recorded at a daily average of 399.72ppm on 25 April. The weekly average stood at 398.5 on Monday.
Retired Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, who served the Bush Administration as a senior official in the State Department with access to classified documents and the most senior White House officials, was willing to testify, and formally declared under penalty of perjury, that many of the prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay were taken into custody "without regard for whether they were truly enemy combatants, or in fact whether many of them were enemies at all."
His declaration, filed in the spring of 2010 in a D.C. federal court, asserted that "of the initial 742 detainees that had arrived at Guantánamo, the majority of them had never seen a U.S. soldier in the process of their initial detention and their captivity had not been subjected to any meaningful review."
With nearly every one of the 166 Guantánamo prisoners now under lockdown — back in solitary existence after years of communal living — the military has reverted to a battle rhythm reminiscent of the Bush administration.
Pre-cleared captives awaiting political change are confined for long stretches to 8-by-12 cells, each man praying behind his own steel door, deciding for himself whether to eat a solitary meal.
The administration of President Benjamin Harrison praised the military tactics used by the 7th Cavalry and awarded 20 of the soldiers Medals of Honor.
The New York Times told a different story, writing contemporaneously that the Native Americans had been "robbed when at peace, starved and angered into war, and then hunted down by the government."
At Wounded Knee, as many as 300 unarmed men, women and children were killed. And official reports from some in government criticizing the massacre were simply buried.
In a groundbreaking ruling, the Jerusalem District Court upheld an earlier decision of the magistrate’s court that women who wear prayer shawls (“tallitot” in Hebrew) at the Western Wall Plaza are not contravening “local custom” or causing a public disturbance, and therefore should not be arrested.
The issue of equal prayer rights at the site has risen to the forefront of public debate in recent months due to the frequent arrests of women participating in the prayer services that the Women of the Wall activist group holds there.
Sea surface temperatures on the continental shelf off the U.S. Northeast and Canada have reached their highest levels in 150 years, researchers say.
Scientists with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration said the record-high sea surface temperatures of 57.2 degrees F in 2012 are the latest in a trend of above average temperature recorded during the spring and summer seasons.
The readings are part of a pattern of elevated temperatures occurring in the Northwest Atlantic but not seen elsewhere in the ocean basin over the past century, researchers at NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center said.
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