The U.S. government disclosed Friday it is investigating whether a Transocean worker's handling of a key a piece of evidence in the Gulf oil spill probe affected the integrity of the examination of the device.
Michael Bromwich, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, said in a letter to U.S. Rep. Ed Markey that his investigators have questioned workers from various government agencies and a Norwegian firm the government hired to test the failed blowout preventer.
Gulf Oil Spill Blowout Preventer Testing Could Be Compromised
Afghans Plan to Stop Recruiting Children as Police
Afghanistan is expected to sign a formal agreement with the United Nations on Sunday to stop the recruitment of children into its police forces and ban the common practice of boys being used as sex slaves by military commanders, according to Afghan and United Nations officials.
The effort by Afghanistan’s international backers to rapidly expand the country’s police and military forces has had the unintended consequence of drawing many under-age boys into service, the officials conceded.
Comcast takes control of NBC Universal
The nation's largest cable TV company, Comcast took control of NBC Universal after the government shackled its behavior in the coming years to protect online video services such as Netflix and Hulu. The deal closed shortly before midnight ET on Friday.
The takeover gave the cable-hookup company 51% control of NBC Universal, which owns the nation's fourth-ranked broadcaster, NBC; the Universal Pictures movie studio and related theme parks; and a bevy of cable channels including Bravo, E! and USA.
Time to end foreign aid to Israel: ‘We just can’t do it anymore,’ Sen. Paul warns
Israel has been, by far, the largest recipient of US foreign aid anywhere in the world. Since the inception of Israel's close diplomatic relationship with the US all the way through 2008, Americans gave Israel over $103 billion, according to the American Educational Trust.
"What I'm concerned about," Paul said, is that "if we do nothing -- if we coast along as we've been coasting -- entitlements and interest will consume the whole debt within a decade; will consume the whole budget. There will be nothing left for anything else. My fear is we could have a precipitous calamity where nobody gets any checks from government, so security fails, Medicare fails, unless we start making the difficult decisions now.
The Drug Store in Your Tap Water
Water taken near a Nebraska feedlot had four times the trenbolone levels as other water samples and male fathead minnows nearby had low testosterone levels and small heads.
Nor do you have to see a doctor to imbibe a witch's brew of prescriptions like pain pills, antibiotics and psychiatric, cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy and heart meds in your drinking water, says the AP. Free of charge.
WikiLeaks probe: Army commanders were told not to send Manning to Iraq
Investigators have concluded that Army commanders ignored advice not to send to Iraq an Army private who's now accused of downloading hundreds of thousands of sensitive reports and diplomatic cables that ended up on the WikiLeaks website in the largest single security breach in American history, McClatchy has learned.
Pfc. Bradley Manning's direct supervisor warned that Manning had thrown chairs at colleagues and shouted at higher ranking soldiers in the year he was stationed at Fort Drum, N.Y., and advised that Manning shouldn't be sent to Iraq, where his job would entail accessing classified documents through the Defense Department's computer system.
Did the PA know about the Gaza war in advance?
Did the Palestinian Authority (PA)'s leadership have foreknowledge of the Gaza war? That question is raised - though never satisfactorily answered - by several exchanges revealed in The Palestine Papers.
In defending their handling of the Gaza war, Mahmoud Abbas, the PA president, has long held that the PA warned Hamas - both in Gaza and through its Syrian-based leadership - that Israel was planning an attack on Gaza.
What are Comcast's plans for NBC News operations?
Comcast isn't simply becoming the nation's most powerful media and entertainment giant, with assets in broadcast and cable TV, movies, the Internet and theme parks.
The company is becoming television's dominant newscaster, with enormous influence on civic life.
Comcast will control the No. 1 evening newscast (The NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams), morning newscast (The Today Show), and Sunday talk show (Meet the Press). On cable, CNBC is the leading source of business news, while MSNBC focuses on politics.
Research: Early modern humans left Africa earlier than thought
The discovery of an ancient stone tool kit in the United Arab Emirates, reported in today's edition of the journal Science, now is raising the possibility that today's modern humans first started leaving Africa earlier than paleontologists previously thought.
The question of when modern humans first started leaving the African continent has been debated since the 1980s. African fossils of modern-looking humans date to about 200,000 years ago, but gene studies of non-Africans suggest that people only left the mother continent by 60,000 years ago.
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