Monday, Feb 09th
Last update06:40:48 AM GMT
When looking for evidence of humanity's hand in climate change, it's easy to spot the belchers of greenhouse gases sitting at eye level: snaking rivers of bumper-to-bumper cars, say, or vapor-shrouded smokestacks at power plants.
Few people tend to look straight up, though, which if you had done it last Friday would've yielded a jittering mess of billowy streaks.
Roche Holding AG (ROG), the Basel, Switzerland-based drugmaker that manufactures the world’s best- selling cancer treatment and reached a five-year high this week, has minted at least 12 Swiss and German billionaires. Seven have never appeared individually on an international wealth ranking.
The dozen billionaires, who are drawn from the Engelhorn family of Germany and Switzerland’s Hoffmann-Oeri clan, have a combined fortune valued at more than $35 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The federal prosecution of five former employees of the private security firm Blackwater has crumbled after the defendants said they were acting at the behest of the CIA by providing five guns as gifts to King Abdullah II of Jordan.
Federal prosecutors indicted former Blackwater president Gary Jackson and four others in 2010 on a long list of felony firearms violations involving dozens of weapons, including 17 M-4 military assault rifles and 17 Romanian-made AK-47s.
state laws protect us and our children. They do, in many cases, but NOT went it comes to health and safety regulations concerning the fracking of natural gas and oil. In Ohio, there are so many holes in the oil and gas regulations that the loopholes are big enough to drive a bus through.
I wondered what would happen if a truck full of liquid waste (brine) from a horizontally hydrofracked well hit a school bus on one of our rural roads – say Ohio Rt.144 in Athens County where a permit for the Atha Injection well is pending. So I started asking questions.
A potentially explosive report has linked the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI to the discovery of a network of gay prelates in the Vatican, some of whom – the report said – were being blackmailed by outsiders.
The pope's spokesman declined to confirm or deny the report, which was carried by the Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica. The paper said the pope had taken the decision on 17 December that he was going to resign – the day he received a dossier compiled by three cardinals delegated to look into the so-called "Vatileaks" affair.
Now there are 135. That's how many medical tests, treatments and other procedures - many used for decades - physicians have now identified as almost always unnecessary and often harmful, and which doctors and patients should therefore avoid or at least seriously question.
The lists of procedures, released on Thursday by the professional societies of 17 medical specialties ranging from neurology and ophthalmology to thoracic surgery, are part of a campaign called Choosing Wisely. Organized by the American Board of Internal Medicine's foundation, it aims to get doctors to stop performing useless procedures and spread the word to patients that some don't help and might hurt.
Security forces in Mexico have participated in the disappearances of hundreds of people from 2006-12, Human Rights Watch said.
Human Rights Watch issued a 176-page report, "Mexico's Disappeared: The Enduring Cost of a Crisis Ignored" Wednesday, documenting nearly 250 enforced disappearances during the administration of former President Felipe Calderon.
Toward the end of his presidency, Calderon promised to act on reports of enforced disappearances by the army, navy, and federal and local police, though he failed to do so, a release from Human Rights Watch said.
The stock markets were down sharply today on the release of the last Federal Reserve Board minutes that suggest they are are losing their consensus on the continued printing of more money to plump up the bond markets. The Fed has been pumping out $85 billion a month in the effort to hold deflation at bay.
The math on what they've been doing is that this is roughly equal to a quarter of the Federal government's budget. Not that the taxpayer is funding this, the Fed just prints it, or rather they move electrons around in some computers to buy bonds from rich people and institutions so that they can show a profit and reinvest.
Almost exactly nine months ago on May 22, 2012, I wrote an editorial in the Fort Collins Coloradoan newspaper, Fort Colllins Should Ban Fracking. And yesterday, on Feb. 19, a sharply divided Fort Collins City Council voted 5-2 to ban fracking in the City of Fort Collins.
Nine months ago the conversation around fracking was relatively new in Colorado and few people and environmental groups were directly addressing it. Now, nine months later, very much has changed—fracking is in the news constantly, many environmental groups are engaged in the fight to stop fracking and the issue is escalating wildly throughout the public across the state.
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