Wednesday, Dec 17th
Last update09:36:22 AM GMT
The attorneys general of all 50 U.S. states announced Wednesday that they are joining to probe mortgage loan servicers who are accused of submitting false affidavits, but they stopped short of calling for a national moratorium.
The multistate investigation will initially focus on whether Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase, Ally Financial and other large mortgage companies made misleading or fraudulent statements to evict struggling borrowers from their homes.
Osteoporosis drugs used by millions of women to prevent bones from breaking may increase the chances for an unusual type of thigh fracture, U.S. health officials warned on Wednesday. The drugs known as bisphosphonates include Merck & Co Inc's Fosamax, Roche Holding AG's Boniva, Novartis AG's Reclast and Warner Chilcott Plc's Actonel.
The action could drive patients to Amgen Inc's just-launched rival medicine, Prolia, a different type of osteoporosis drug that is the company's most important future growth driver.
NPR has reminded its employees that they are not allowed to participate in the upcoming rallies led by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert."NPR journalists may not participate in marches and rallies involving causes or issues that NPR covers, nor should they sign petitions or otherwise lend their name to such causes, or contribute money to them," Senior Vice President for News, Ellen Weiss, wrote in a memo Wednesday morning.
"This restriction applies to the upcoming John [sic] Stewart and Stephen Colbert rallies." NPR CEO Vivian Schiller forwarded the memo, sent initially to news staff, to the entire organization, telling employees that the note applied to "digital, programming/AIR, legal and communications" employees in addition to the news staff.
Agribusiness lobbyists took an active role in writing a U.K. government report on genetically modified (GM) foods, two former members of the Food Standards Agency's (FSA's) steering group have revealed.
Dr. Helen Wallace of Genewatch U.K. and Professor Brian Wynne both resigned recently in protest of what Wynne calls a "dogmatically entrenched" pro-GM attitude at the FSA, whose head recently accused GM critics of being "anti-science."
More troops are dying by their own hand than in combat, according to an Army report titled "Health Promotion, Risk Reduction, Suicide Prevention." Not only that, but 36 percent of the suicides were troops who were never deployed.
The earliest plants to have colonised land have been found in Argentina. The discovery puts back by 10 million years the colonisation of land by plants, and suggests that a diversity of land plants had evolved by 472 million years ago.
The newly found plants are liverworts, very simple plants that lack stems or roots, scientists report in the journal the New Phytologist. That confirms liverworts are likely to be the ancestors of all land plants.
At least 10 Palestinian children have been shot and wounded by Israeli troops in the past three months while collecting rubble in or near the "buffer zone" created by Israel along the Gaza border, in a low-intensity offensive on the fringes of the blockaded Palestinian territory.
Israeli soldiers are routinely shooting at Gazans well beyond the unmarked boundary of the official 300 metre-wide no-go area, rights groups say.
In groves of several villages near Havat Gilad, an outpost of militant settlers southwest of Nablus, Palestinians out to harvest their olives have discovered tracts of trees picked clean, their fruit taken by vandals. In other locations, villagers have reported dozens of trees cut down, and hundreds more grazed by settlers' goats and stripped of leaves and fruit.
Following repeated assaults on harvesters in recent years, and after an Israeli Supreme Court ruling required the army to ensure that "every last olive" is picked, military authorities in the West Bank have developed an elaborate plan to protect Palestinians working in groves near Jewish settlements and outposts.
More than half of Chicago's Roman Catholic parishes have had a priest accused of sexually abusing a child working there at some point, according to a study released today that was quickly questioned by the Chicago Archdiocese.
In some cases, multiple priests accused of misconduct worked at the same church, according to the study, conducted by reform groups Voice of the Faithful, African American Advocates for Victims of Clergy Sexual Abuse and the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.
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