Quickly, Before We Leave….
by agincourt
12 Dec 2008 at 3:04pm
Every administration, on its way out the door, leaves with a flurry of actions that it couldn’t do before, or wouldn’t do because of the likely backlash. Remember Bill Clinton’s pardon of the financier Marc Rich? Jimmy Carter’s White House…

Star Wars
by agincourt
11 Dec 2008 at 9:16am
Barack Obama does not need any headaches from Michael Griffin. He has enough because of the economy and Rod Blagojevich. But Griffin, the head of NASA, has made it apparent that (1) he’d like to stay on the job, and…

Zeitgeist
by agincourt
10 Dec 2008 at 1:10pm
It’s only December 10, but not too soon for some of the year-end lists that that many of us will pore over as we hope for a better year next year. Today Google is out with its “Year-End Google Zeitgeist”…

Leap Second
by agincourt
8 Dec 2008 at 3:05pm
…and you only thought this year was dragging on forever? Turns out it really is, by a little bit. The U.S. Naval Observatory has let it be known that one extra second will be added to 2008, right at the…

Clean Body, Clean Mind?
by Ashley Phillips
5 Dec 2008 at 7:39am
Columnist Lee Dye reports: Maybe what the world really needs is a hot, sudsy bath. Researchers in Great Britain have found that even just washing your hands may make you less harsh in your judgment of others. Their study, published…

“Interstellar Interloper”
by agincourt
3 Dec 2008 at 10:16am
David G. Schleicher of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona has been watching a comet called 96P/Machholz 1, and he thinks he’s on to something. Its chemistry is odd. It has only about one percent as much of the compound cyanogen…

Millions and Millions
by agincourt
2 Dec 2008 at 10:55am
This is one of those cases in which a picture is worth a thousand words — or perhaps 186, which is what I’ve written below. The picture is of Omega Centauri, a globular cluster (or perhaps dwarf galaxy) in the…

Warm Words
by agincourt
1 Dec 2008 at 12:05pm
There’s a climate conference beginning today in Poland — not that the world takes much note. The theme so far for the 10,000 delegates from 190 countries: Don’t let the economy distract you. “All of us are today concerned with…

What Do We Tell the Children?
by agincourt
26 Nov 2008 at 2:18pm
“We?re okay, our family’s okay, I always reassure them, but the way we stay okay is to be really careful about how we spend our money.” Jeanette Stoneman, mother of five from Hamden, Conn., said this is how she talks…

New! Shiny! Useless?
by agincourt
25 Nov 2008 at 7:39am
A reader who called him/herself Worz13 left a provocative comment in response to my little experience with the BlackBerry Storm: “As this is a science and society blog, can anyone actually explain why people have always got to have the…

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AP - Mayor Michael Bloomberg has decided to try to reverse the term-limits law he had long supported so he can seek a third term next year and help the city emerge from financial turmoil, a person close to the mayor told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

AP - The federal government is chipping in nearly $30 million for 15 passenger rail projects across the country as Americans continue to drive less and take the train more, U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said Tuesday.

AP - First the bursting of the dot-com bubble in the 1990s, then the accounting scandals earlier this decade, forced ballparks and arenas around the country to change their names. Enron Field became Minute Maid Park, and names like PSINet Stadium and CMGI Field vanished.

AP - The federal government is proposing to add 47 species of plants and animals and one insect to the endangered species list all found only on the island of Kauai.

AP - The glittering, steel and glass domed rail hub had seemed for years to be the only thing that was going right at ground zero.

AP - East L.A. birthplace of the lowrider, Los Lobos and Oscar de la Hoya is to Mexican-Americans what Harlem is to the black community. Now it wants to become its own city. Commonly mistaken for a part of Los Angeles, East L.A. is actually an unincorporated section of Los Angeles County, with more than 130,000 people 96 percent of them Latino packed into 7.4 square miles.

AP - Disagreements between Somali pirates holding a ship laden with tanks and heavy weapons escalated into a shootout and three pirates are believed dead, a U.S. defense official said Tuesday. The pirates denied the report.

AP - Pakistan named a new head of its main intelligence service, a change sure to be scrutinized by American officials who have questioned the powerful spy agency’s loyalties in the war on terror.

AP - A European tour group kidnapped in the Sahara Desert was abruptly freed after a phone call to one of the captors, and all 19 hostages piled into a single car, some clinging to the roof as they drove 200 miles to safety.

AP - Afghanistan’s president said Tuesday he has repeatedly asked Saudi Arabia’s king to facilitate peace talks with the Taliban.

AP - Thousands of pilgrims panicked by false rumors of a bomb stampeded at a Hindu temple in western India on Tuesday, killing at least 168 people in the crush to escape.

AFP - Shares in London closed higher on Tuesday, getting a boost from a rebound on Wall Street as investors hoped another vote on the US financial bailout package will see the plan passed.

AP - A parked car bomb targeted a restaurant in a mostly Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad on Tuesday, killing three people and injuring at least six others.

AP - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is calling the U.S. financial crisis a failure of free-market capitalism.

AFP - Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe and opposition MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai met Tuesday but failed to agree on a share-out of ministries in a power-sharing government, the opposition said.

Reuters - Chinese President Hu Jintao lectured a dairy executive on food safety on Tuesday in a show of government resolve in the toxic milk scandal, even as another Western food brand, Lipton, was affected.

AP - A 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck near New Zealand’s remote and largely uninhabited Kermadec Islands early Tuesday, New Zealand’s GNS Science geological agency said.

AP - The man who told a jury that O.J. Simpson asked him to bring guns and “look menacing” during a hotel room confrontation with two sports memorabilia dealers acknowledged Monday he didn’t tell police that last October.

AP - Convicted political fixer Antoin “Tony” Rezko has been quietly visiting Chicago’s federal courthouse, setting off speculation that he may be spilling secrets to prosecutors in return for a lenient sentence.

AP - Prosecutors filed six murder charges Monday against a 28-year-old man accused of a shooting rampage north of Seattle.

AP - Gov. Ed Rendell on Monday halted the early release of state prison inmates, days after a recently paroled felon shot and killed a Philadelphia police officer.

AP - The night five people were abducted from a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant 25 years ago, a van sped out its parking lot, being driven by a white man and carrying three people wearing KFC uniforms, a witness testified Monday.

AP - Several news organizations sued the state of Minnesota on Monday to block a new law restricting access to polling places, saying it would interfere with exit polls.

AP - A federal court Monday overturned the Bush administration’s decision to remove gray wolves in the western Great Lakes region from the endangered species list.

AP - A former teacher who fled to Mexico with a 13-year-old student so she could have sex with him was sentenced Monday to six years in federal prison. Kelsey Peterson, 26, had pleaded guilty in July to a charge of transporting a minor across state lines to have sex and avoided a similar charge that would have carried a mandatory 10-year minimum sentence.

AP - The South Dakota Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments over whether yelling profanities at a passing police officer is protected speech under the U.S. Constitution.

AP - Motorists are rising before dawn so they can be at the filling station when the delivery truck arrives. Some are skipping work or telecommuting. Others are taking the extreme step for Atlanta of switching to public transportation.

AP - Some key Nebraska lawmakers are discussing an age limit and other possible changes to the state’s new safe-haven law that has led parents to abandon children as old as 17.

AP - A remote control car bomb packed with ball bearings ripped through a military bus on Monday, killing four soldiers and a civilian in a city rocked by sectarian fighting, Lebanese officials said.

AP - Egyptian and Sudanese troops rescued an abducted 19-member European tour group in an assault on the kidnappers in the remote Sahara borderland, officials said. The tourists and their Egyptian guides returned safely to Cairo on Monday.

AP - U.S. warships and helicopters on Monday surrounded a hijacked cargo ship loaded with Sudan-bound tanks and other arms to keep the weapons from falling “into the wrong hands,” an American Navy spokesman said.

AP - A spike in violence along Pakistan’s border has driven tens of thousands of people to seek refuge in eastern Afghanistan, the U.N. reported Monday and new military data showed suicide attacks throughout the country killed nearly 1,200 people in the last 15 months.

AP - Congressional leaders and the White House agreed Sunday to a $700 billion rescue of the ailing financial industry after lawmakers insisted on sharing spending controls with the Bush administration. The biggest U.S. bailout in history won the tentative support of both presidential candidates and goes to the House for a vote Monday.

AP - Sold to American taxpayers for up to $700 billion: an unprecedented plan to buy distressed banks’ least desirable mortgage assets.

AP - Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain on Sunday gingerly embraced a newly negotiated congressional deal for a $700 billion bailout of the hobbled financial industry.

AP - Fishermen moved boats to shelter from a rare burst of tropical weather along Maine’s rugged eastern coast Sunday as a weakening Hurricane Kyle spun past on its way to Canada, delivering a glancing blow equivalent to a classic nor’easter that made locals yawn.

AP - U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker on Sunday accused Iran of trying to interfere with a new security pact between Iraq and the United States, and said Americans need to view Iraq with “a sense of strategic patience” because the stakes in the region are so high.

AP - Two Taliban assassins on a motorbike shot and killed a senior policewoman as she left for work in Afghanistan’s largest southern city Sunday and gravely wounded her son.

AP - Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds did a little rushing into it after all. The couple married this weekend, according to publicist Meredith O’Sullivan. She did not provide details.

AP - CC Sabathia and Ryan Braun put the Milwaukee Brewers in the playoffs for the first time since 1982 with big help from the New York Mets. Making his third consecutive start on three days’ rest, Sabathia pitched a four-hitter and Braun hit a tiebreaking homer in the eighth inning to lead the Brewers over the Chicago Cubs 3-1 Sunday.

AP - No meltdowns for the Chicago Bears this time. Instead, they came up with a big stand.

AP - As a heavily armed U.S. destroyer patrolled nearby and planes flew overhead Sunday, a Somali pirate spokesman told The Associated Press his group was demanding a $20 million ransom to release a cargo ship loaded with Russian tanks.

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AP - Nervously eyeing the markets’ next trading session, congressional Democrats and Republican senators pushed for an agreement Saturday on a multibillion-dollar bailout for the financial sector. House Republicans, however, said they would not be stampeded into accepting an unwise rescue.

AP - Paul Newman never much cared for what he once called the “rubbish” of Hollywood, choosing to live in a quiet community on the opposite corner of the U.S. map, staying with his wife of many years and long after he became bored with acting pursuing his dual passions of philanthropy and race cars.

AP - Troops would get a pay raise in a defense bill that Congress sent President Bush on Saturday. Even before passage, lawmakers had backed away from an election-season showdown with the administration over Iraq.

AP - A rare tropical storm warning and hurricane watch were posted for parts of the Maine coast on Saturday as Hurricane Kyle roared north toward the region with a threat of conditions similar to one of New England’s nor’easter storms.

AP - The list of products caught in China’s tainted milk scandal grew Friday to include baby cereal in Hong Kong and snack foods in Japan, while Taiwan reported three children and a mother with kidney stones in the island’s first cases possibly linked to the crisis.

AP - They were Premier Zhou Enlai’s favorite late-night snack. He loved White Rabbit candy so much he gave a bag to President Nixon during his historic visit to China. But the iconic brand, beloved by generations of Chinese, took a hit after it was linked to the tainted milk scandal.

AP - A Russian warship on Friday rushed to intercept a Ukrainian vessel carrying 33 battle tanks and a hoard of ammunition that was seized by pirates off the Horn of Africa a bold hijacking that again heightened fears about surging piracy and high-seas terrorism.

AP - A former Iranian president warned the West on Friday that its support for Israel would backfire, as hundreds of thousands of people staged rallies in support of Muslim claims to the holy city of Jerusalem.

AP - Pakistan sought to reassure Washington on Friday that it remained an ally in fighting terrorism, but it also warned the U.S. to stay out of Pakistani territory while hunting down militants along the volatile border with Afghanistan.

AFP - Australian, New Zealand and South African expats in Britain were raising a glass this weekend at the Toast festival, their big annual bash celebrating all things Antipodean.

AP - As of Friday, Sept. 26, 2008, at least 4,173 members of the U.S. military have died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

AP - The U.N. World Food Program’s director flew to a Haitian city still encased in mud Friday to draw global attention to the ongoing disaster that has enormously complicated the country’s struggle to feed itself.