A wind-whipped Colorado wildfire burned between 80 and 100 homes in a wooded subdivision just outside of the state's second largest city on Wednesday, as another blaze shut a top tourist attraction and forced the evacuation of more than 900 inmates from a prison in a neighboring county.
A fast-moving blaze was raging uncontrolled about 15 miles northeast of Colorado Springs, and could soon threaten even more homes if winds increase as expected on Wednesday afternoon, El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa told reporters.
Colorado wildfire destroys between 80 and 100 homes
Southern Baptists encourage boys to leave Boy Scouts
The Southern Baptist Convention approved a resolution Wednesday that encourages Baptists to leave the Boy Scouts of America.
The resolution submitted to the convention did not sever the denomination's ties to the Boy Scouts, the Los Angeles Times reported. But it called for the ouster of scout leaders who supported an end to the organization's ban on gay scouts and support for scouts who decide to leave, along with encouragement for former scouts to join Baptist youth groups.
House committee approves ban on abortions after 20 weeks
The bill would narrow the window currently set out by federal law and the Supreme Court, which bans most abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy. Some Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed similar laws in recent months.
Google details how it hands over data to federal officials
Google on Wednesday pushed harder to downplay its role in a secret national surveillance program, detailing for the first time how it typically hands over data to federal officials.
Surprisingly, the global innovator uses decidedly simple and low-tech methods, including the delivery of information by hand or by transferring files from one computer to another.
Business donations to judges’ campaigns often equal friendly rulings
State supreme court justices are favoring the corporate interests that finance their election campaigns, a comprehensive new study concludes.
With more judicial elections now awash in dollars, the study of several thousand court decisions found a relationship between business-affiliated contributions and how justices voted. The more business money a supreme court justice has received, the more likely she or he is to support business litigants, according to the yearlong study by the American Constitution Society, a liberal advocacy group.
U.S. ambassador accused of meeting with hookers in public park outed as Howard Gutman: report
Gutman, in statement Tuesday, called the allegations “baseless.”
“I am angered and saddened by the baseless allegations that have appeared in the press and to watch the four years I have proudly served in Belgium smeared is devastating,' he told the Daily Mail in a statement.
“I live on a beautiful park in Brussels that you walk through to get to many locations and at no point have I ever engaged in any improper activity,” he added, referencing specific accusations that he “routinely ditched” his security detail to see hookers in a public park.
Bomb hoaxes hit Princeton, Ga. Capitol, Va. airport
Princeton University reopened Tuesday evening after a bomb hoax closed the Ivy League school for eight hours. It was the second time in two weeks that a New Jersey school was evacuated because of a threatening prank.
Other threats during the day prompted evacuations of the Richmond, Va., airport and the Georgia State Capitol. No explosives were found at any location.
Russia passes law banning gay 'propaganda'
Russia's parliament has unanimously passed a federal law banning gay "propaganda" amid a Kremlin push to enshrine deeply conservative values that critics say has already led to a sharp increase in anti-gay violence.
The law passed 436-0 on Tuesday, with just one deputy abstaining from voting on the bill, which bans the spreading of "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations" among minors.
Levees, removable walls proposed to protect NYC
Removable floodwalls would be erected in lower Manhattan, and levees, gates and other defenses would be built elsewhere around the city under a nearly $20 billion plan Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed Tuesday to protect New York from storms and the effects of global warming.
The plan — which would also include the building of marshes and the flood-proofing of homes and hospitals — is one of the biggest, most sweeping projects ever proposed for defending a major U.S. city from the rising seas and severe weather that climate change is expected to bring.
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