Residents of Lanzhou, northwest China, have started panic-buying bottled water after city authorities confirmed the lethal chemical compound benzene was contaminating the city’s drinking water at 20 times the national safety level. Lanzhou warned its 2.4 million residents not to consume any water from the tap on Friday after tests conducted at a local water plant showed that the liquid contained 200 micrograms of benzene per liter rather than 10 micrograms per liter – the nationally recommended limit.
Author: mediahitman
Many Americans expecting to see their tax refunds in their bank accounts soon are waking up to a very different scenario: the government actively intercepting their checks in order to pay back debts they’re not responsible for. According to a new report in the Washington Post, the federal government is seizing nearly $2 billion from hundreds of thousands of taxpayers this year in order to settle debts, some incurred by their parents, some dating back to more than a decade.
Fresh on the heels of a lawsuit brought against Kim Dotcom by the MPAA film industry lobby, the Megaupload founder is now being sued by the music industry in an action his lawyers are calling “meritless.” Despite being forced to shut down in January 2012 after Dotcom was hit with copyright infringement charges, Megaupload is now confronting new lawsuits from the powerful music and film industries.
Three out of four of today’s UK university graduates will be paying back their student loans well into their 50s, owing an average amount of £44,000 ($74,000), a study published Thursday reveals. A report conducted by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) for the education charity the Sutton Trust found that today’s students are leaving university crippled with huge debts averaging £44,000 ($74,000).
Revelations have emerged that documents have been purged from the Bureau of Land Management’s web site, BLM.gov, stating that the agency wants besieged Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s cattle off land his family has worked on over 140 years to make way for solar panel power stations. A BLM document entitled “Cattle Trespass Impacts,” directly states that Bundy’s cattle “impacts” solar development, more specifically the construction of “utility-scale solar power generation facilities” on “public lands.”
After 20 years of battling the US government for use of his family’s land, a Nevada rancher’s “one-man range war” may soon end. The family says heavily-armed federal agents have surrounded the ranch as “trespass cattle” are removed from the disputed land. Cliven Bundy – the “last rancher in Clark County, Nevada” – has since 1993 refused to pay fees to the federal government for the right to raise cattle on land his family has ranched since the 1870s, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
An Israeli company called Stemrad has developed a body belt that protects people from the worst effects of gamma radiation. Called the Stemrad 360 Gamma, the belt could be a lifesaver for the emergency services in a nuclear accident. Oren Milstein, the co-founder of Stemrad, says it’s partially made out of lead and is designed to first and foremost protect the pelvic area, where most of the body’s renewable bone marrow is made, Reuters reports.
Autism is a difficult disorder to miss, as it is characterized by noticeably abnormal or impaired development in social interaction and communication and a markedly restricted array of activities and interests. And while scientific consensus claims autism has been around for millennia at generally the same prevalence, that prevalence is now considered to be one in every 166 children born in the United States. Therefore, with this devastating statistic in mind, one reporter set out to analyze the autism rates among Amish communities. Why? Because perhaps searching for autistic Amish children would reveal clues to the cause of autism ……
by Dan Goodin For a more detailed analysis of this catastrophic bug, see this update, which went live about 18 hours after Ars published this initial post. Researchers have discovered an extremely critical defect in the cryptographic software library an estimated two-thirds of Web servers use to identify themselves to end users and prevent the eavesdropping of passwords, banking credentials, and other sensitive data.
As the US Navy touts the capabilities of its new, high-powered electromagnetic rail gun, the service has announced its goal of testing the weapon at sea in 2016. The rail gun, often likened to something out of “Star Wars,” uses electromagnetic energy to fire 23-pound projectiles up to seven times the speed of sound and over 100 miles.
Researchers working for the United States Navy say they are around a decade away from mastering a procedure that will make high-powered fuel for the military’s fleet of ships out of run-of-the-mill seawater. The US Naval Research Laboratory’s Materials Science and Technology Division have already demonstrated that a new, state-of-the-art conversion method can turn ordinary seawater into a liquid hydrocarbon fuel
When friends and family members gathered recently at the White House for a private celebration of Michelle Obama’s 50th birthday, one of the invited partygoers was a former paid FBI Mafia informant. That same man attended February’s state dinner in honor of French President Francois Hollande. He was seated with his girlfriend at a table adjacent to President Barack Obama, who is likely unaware that, according to federal agents, his guest once interacted with members of four of New York City’s five organized crime families. He even secretly taped some of those wiseguys using a briefcase that FBI technicians outfitted…
American and British intelligence hope to take advantage of social media platforms, like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, in an effort to spread disinformation and propaganda, as well as potentially foment public protests, recent Snowden leaks claim. According to Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first broke the news on the Snowden NSA leaks
By Charlene Sakoda Glen Meadow Middle School seventh grader, Ethan Chaplin, was recently suspended after, he says, he was simply twirling a pencil in math class. News 12 New Jersey reported that the Vernon Township, New Jersey teenager was twirling a pencil with a pen cap on top when another student yelled, “He’s making gun motions, send him to juvie.”
The US Internal Revenue Service paid millions to people who turned in their friends and neighbors for tax evasion in 2013, a report states. But there’s an ongoing argument about the nature of award payouts: the current scheme is extremely slow. The annual report to Congress details a total of 122 awards made to those who exposed tax cheats, according to the AP.
Hundreds of websites of Israeli ministries and organizations came under attack by Anonymous early Monday as part of the hacktivist group’s anti-Israel operation, dubbed #OpIsrael. “On April 7, 2014, we call upon our brothers and sisters to hack, deface, hijack, database leak, admin takeover, and DNS terminate the Israeli Cyberspace by any means necessary” the group said in a statement.
By Jeanne Sahadi The chat-o-sphere has been abuzz lately about a proposal by Slate columnist Reihan Salam: The childless should pay higher taxes so that lower- and middle-income parents can pay less. “The willingness of parents to bear and nurture children saves us from becoming an economically moribund nation of hateful curmudgeons.
In a study of 65 cereals in 10 different grocery stores, Cornell researchers found that cereals marketed to kids are placed half as high on supermarket shelves as adult cereals—the average height for children’s cereal boxes is 23 inches verses 48 inches for adult cereal. A second key finding from the same study is that the average angle of the gaze of cereal spokes-characters on cereal boxes marketed to kids is downward at a 9.6 degree angle whereas spokes-characters on adult cereal look almost straight ahead.