Mar
15
2013
The Obama administration is leaning toward revising its landmark proposal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants, according to several individuals briefed on the matter, a move that would delay tougher restrictions and could anger many environmentalists.
The discussions center on the first-ever greenhouse gas regulations for power plants, which were proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency nearly a year ago. Rewriting the proposal would significantly delay any action, and might allow the agency …
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Mar
15
2013
Barack Obama will use a visit to a Chicago-area lab on Friday to call on Congress to set aside $2bn over the next decade to fund research into a next generation of electric cars.
The White House said the Energy Security Trust, which Obama first proposed in his state of the union address, would use royalties from offshore oil and gas drilling in public waters and would not add to the deficit.
But the proposal – which …
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Mar
15
2013
Jamie Dimon’s email response was direct and to the point. “I approve,” he wrote to an oversight body within his enormous bank, JPMorgan Chase, thereby giving his blessing to an increase in the amount of risk the institution could shoulder. He also approved a change in the way a key trading unit was assessing threats of trouble in its then-burgeoning portfolio.
That email — released late Thursday as part of a 300-page Senate report probing how …
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Mar
15
2013
Survivors of military sexual assault testifying before the Senate armed services committee on Wednesday told the panel that the military criminal justice system is “broken” and that the “epidemic” of sexual violence is a direct result of a misogynistic culture and a system that allows assault to be “swept under the rug.”
Despite the approximately 19,000 incidents of violent sexual crime which occur each year, this was the first Senate hearing into sexual abuse in …
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Mar
15
2013
In a river that flows through Shanghai, Chinese officials have pulled 6,000 dead pigs from the water, CNN reported. The situation is undeniably grotesque: “Sanitation workers, clad in masks and plastic suits, have been fishing the bruised pig bodies surfacing in the Huangpu River. The pink, decomposing blobs have wreaked foul odors and alarmed residents.”
According to CNN, the corpses began turning up in the river after a government crackdown on the selling of meat from …
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Mar
15
2013
Wayne LaPierre, the head of the biggest gun lobby group in the US, defended his call to put armed guards in every school on Friday and declared that the answer to violent crime was to put guns in the hands of more people.
Speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) just outside Washington DC, LaPierre mocked those who call him “crazy” and delivered a powerful call for the widespread use of guns for Americans to …
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Mar
15
2013
Thousands of anti-government protesters burned tires and threw firebombs and stones at riot police in Bahrain on the second anniversary of the intervention by a Saudi-led force which helped crush a pro-democracy uprising in the Gulf island.
The clashes on Thursday were the worst in several weeks and served a reminder that elements of the opposition have yet to buy into slow-moving talks with government officials.
Police fired stun grenades at the demonstrators during the clashes in …
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Mar
15
2013
March 15 (Bloomberg) — When emergency manager Kevyn Orr arrives in near-bankrupt Detroit, almost half of Michigan’s black population will live under the rule of state overseers with little say in the governments nearest them.
In cities run by governors’ appointees after decades of decline, Michiganders whose ancestors fled the segregated South for factory jobs and the right to vote weigh the abstract value of autonomy versus the palpable comfort of a stable community.
Joe Harris, 69, …
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Mar
15
2013
Taking a deeper look at current and past films and how they relate to the world today.
Jonathan Kim is an independent film critic who writes and produces film reviews for Uprising and other outlets. He is a former co-producer at Brave New Films.
Read his reviews online at ReThinkReviews.net. Watch his videos at www.youtube.com/user/jsjkim, …
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Mar
14
2013
In an unprecedented move, education officials will hand over personal student data to a new private company to create a national database for businesses that contract with public schools.
Working with the city, state education officials are already uploading private information about students — their names, addresses, test scores, learning disabilities, attendance and disciplinary records — into a $100 million database called inBloom.
Parents are furious that New York is joining eight other states in adopting …
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