Tuesday, Dec 09th
Last update07:17:16 AM GMT
As the budget standoff between the Republican controlled House of Representatives and the Democrats reaches a fever pitch, much of the media attention — and frustration — has been focused on reaching a solution to avert a government shutdown.
But, under the radar, newly-elected Republicans across the country are proposing disastrous environmental legislation to achieve radical-right aims, such as opening state parks for fracking and exposing their citizens to industrial waste.
With the stress of ongoing combat in three nations now roiling the military, Capitol Hill lawmakers are concerned that America's armed forces might be facing yet another strain — getting high.
Two longtime senators on Wednesday made their case that synthetic marijuana is taking an especially heavy toll on troops — and they urged the military to play a bigger role in getting the problem under control.
In a letter last week to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said the drugs "pose a risk to the operational readiness of our armed forces."
The US supreme court has stayed the first scheduled execution of a Texas death-row inmate using pentobarbital. Cleve Foster was to have been executed on Tuesday evening for the 2002 murder of a Sudanese woman in Fort Worth – the first Texas execution since the state switched to pentobarbital in its lethal three-drug mixture.
On Tuesday morning, the court agreed to reconsider its earlier order denying Foster's appeal that had raised claims of innocence and poor legal help during his trial and the early stages of his appeals.
An Israel Defense Forces soldier from a unit made up exclusively of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men was convicted on Wednesday in the Central Military Court of illegal use of a weapon and disgraceful conduct.
The soldier, a member of the Nahal Haredi Brigade unit, was found guilty as a result of photos taken on his cellular phone, in which a Palestinian prisoner was shown tied up. The pictures were discovered when a military criminal investigation team conducted a search for drug use in the unit.
The Center for Public Integrity is reporting that an unnamed former ABC News journalist was an FBI informant during and after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, passing along tips and revealing a source. We know who it is.
According to an FBI memo obtained by the Center, a nameless ABC News journalist contacted the FBI on the evening of the bombing to pass along information he had heard from a source: That the "bombing was sponsored by the Iraqi Special Services" and that two more attacks in Los Angeles and Houston were imminent.
A former Afghan lawmaker told an audience of Tacoma, Washington, peace activists Tuesday that photos of Joint Base Lewis-McChord soldiers grinning over the corpse of a boy they allegedly murdered revealed a disregard for civilian lives among U.S. forces fighting in her country.
"They are making fun with the dead bodies of my people," said Malalai Joya, 32, a human rights activist who visited the University of Washington Tacoma on her U.S. speaking tour. About 80 people attended her talk, which was hosted by the group Peace Action of Washington and was her seventh in the Puget Sound area this week.
The Federal government is trying to establish bartering private currency of any type as an illegal enterprise in a false interpretation of the court's recent conviction of Liberty Dollar's owner Bernard Von NotHaus.
In a case where the government used conspiracy and counterfeit charges against NotHaus to establish that he intended to mint and illegally replace US currency with a private one using silver coins, the US Attorney is now parlaying the conviction to say that this ruling sets a precedent against any private barter transactions which use any form of currency besides established Federal Reserve Notes.
The government set its first radiation safety standards for fish Tuesday after Japan's tsunami-ravaged nuclear plant reported radioactive contamination in nearby seawater measuring at several million times the legal limit.
The new levels coupled with reports that radiation was building up in fish led the government to create an acceptable radiation standard for fish for the first time. Some fish caught Friday off Japan's coastal waters would have exceeded the new provisional limit.
The private rocket company SpaceX says its next rocket will be the most powerful in the world. The new rocket, called the Falcon Heavy, is designed to carry up to about twice as much weight as a NASA space shuttle can take to orbit. It's expected to be at the launchpad at the end of next year for its first flight, with the launch likely coming in 2013.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk described his company's new rocket during a press conference in Washington, D.C. He says it will be able to take about 117,000 pounds to orbit.
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