It sucks to be Merrick Garland right now. He was nominated to the job of his life — Supreme Court justice — and Republicans won’t even give him a vote. It’s not that they have bad things to say about him; they just don’t want President Barack Obama to fill the empty court seat.
It’s worth noting there are 46 other Merrick Garlands. That is, 46 other judicial nominees are in the same boat. They’re not in line for the Supreme Court, but like Garland, they’re nominees to federal courts who aren’t getting votes (except one, who just got scheduled for a Monday vote). That’s because GOP leaders don’t want to confirm judges until 2017. By then, they hope, a Republican will be in the White House and will put forward nominees they like better.
Not only are they screwing the judicial branch of government by dragging out confirmations — when vacancies pile up on district and circuit courts, people’s cases can get delayed for years and judges burn out — but they’re screwing themselves. Some GOP senators really need judicial nominees confirmed, but are being denied by their own party leaders.
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Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images
Some snails glide at a faster pace than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is confirming federal judges.
What happens to the environment when humans disappear? Thirty years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, booming populations of wolf, elk and other wildlife in the vast contaminated zone in Belarus and Ukraine provide a clue.
On April 26, 1986, a botched test at the nuclear plant in Ukraine, then a Soviet republic, sent clouds of smoldering radioactive material across large swathes of Europe. Over 100,000 people had to abandon the area permanently, leaving native animals the sole occupants of a cross-border “exclusion zone” roughly the size of Luxembourg.
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Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters
A white-tailed eagle lands on a wolf’s carcass in the 30 km (19 miles) exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, in the abandoned village of Dronki, Belarus, on Feb. 15, 2016.
Two men are dead in a shooting at a military base in San Antonio, Texas, authorities said.
The attack at Lackland Air Force Base, a part of Joint Base San Antonio, appears to be a murder-suicide, Bexar County Sheriff’s Office spokesman James Keith told MSNBC. The base said in a statement that there were no indications it was related to terrorism.
The gunfire was reported at about 8:40 a.m. local time, and when police and security officers arrived, they found the victims dead in an office in a building known as Forbes Hall, authorities said. Two Glock firearms were found at the scene.
Around 20 million people in Bangladesh are drinking water with dangerously high levels of arsenic, and very little is being done to amend this situation, according to a Human Rights Watch report published Wednesday.
Development organizations implemented a massive national initiative in Bangladesh between the 1970s and 2000 to drill tube wells. It was a response to the widespread problem of fecal-contaminated water. However, what the development community didn’t realize was they were paving the way for a far worse crisis.
The ground water there contained tasteless and odorless arsenic, which, at high enough levels, can cause cardiovascular disease, cancer, skin legions and can ultimately lead to death and, in children, cognitive impairment. When the crisis was addressed in 2002, the World Health Organization called it “the largest mass poisoning of a population in history.”
People have wept, nearly puked and now they may shit their pants for the sake of virtual reality.
Gaming company Bandai Namco is opening up a virtual reality arcade center in Tokyo from April through October, according to VR Scout. It’s hoping to lure in human guinea pigs to test out the HTC Vive virtual reality system and Bandai Namco games, one of which looks especially terrifying.
In a teaser video for one of the HTC Vive experiences, Fear of Heights Show, users have to rescue a cat on a wooden plank 60 stories above the ground. The promo video itself may be dramatized, but the premise definitely has pants-shitting potential.
The web of hidden money and offshore shell companies documented in the Panama Papers reveals an alternate financial universe that links a single law firm with a globe-spanning rogue’s gallery of politicians, moguls, criminals and shady agents.
While much attention has focused on links to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose name doesn’t appear in the documents, the leaked files — reported by The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists — also expose new details about far-flung capers dating back decades.
The cases have little in common other than the involvement of the law firm, Mossack Fonseca. The connections are sometimes tangential, and the firm insists it did nothing illegal.
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The Panama Papers leak details connections between the 1983 Brink’s-Mat gold heist in London to a shell company set up by Mossack Fonseca. PA Wire / via AP
A federal judge in New Orleans granted final approval Monday to an estimated $20 billion settlement, resolving years of litigation over the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The settlement, first announced in July, includes $5.5 billion in civil Clean Water Act penalties and billions more to cover environmental damage and other claims by the five Gulf states and local governments. The money is to be paid out over a 16-year period.
The judge, Carl Barbier, set the stage for the settlement with an earlier ruling that BP had been “grossly negligent” in the offshore rig explosion that killed 11 workers and caused a 134- million-gallon spill.
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Fire boats battle the blazing remnants of the off shore oil rig Deepwater Horizon, off Louisiana, in this April 21, 2010 handout file photo. U.S. Coast Guard via Reuters
Iceland’s Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson is to step down after leaked documents from a Panamanian law firm showed his wife owned an offshore company with big claims on collapsed Icelandic banks, his party said.
Gunnlaugsson became the first prominent casualty from the revelations in the so-called Panama Papers, which have cast light on the financial arrangements of an array of politicians and public figures across the globe and the companies and financial institutions they use.
Earlier on Tuesday, Gunnlaugsson had asked Iceland’s president to dissolve parliament in the face of a looming no-confidence vote and mass street protests over the revelations.
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Sigtryggur Johannsson/Reuters Iceland’s Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson resigned Tuesday after a massive leak of documents revealed his wife owned an offshore company with big claims on collapsed Icelandic banks.
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One evening in the late summer of 2015, Lisa Schwartz was watching television at her Vermont home when an ad for a sleeping pill called Belsomra appeared on the screen. Schwartz, a longtime professor at Dartmouth Medical College, usually muted commercials, but she watched this one closely: a 90-second spot featuring a young woman and two slightly cute, slightly creepy fuzzy animals in the shape of the words “sleep” and “wake.”
Schwartz had a reason to be curious about this particular ad. Two years earlier, she had been a member of the advisory panel that reviewed Belsomra for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration—and the process had not gone well for the manufacturer, Merck. The company saw its new drug as a major innovation, emphasizing that the medication acted on an entirely different mechanism within the brain than the previous generation of insomnia medicines like Ambien and Lunesta. During the drug’s development, Merck had suggested that it could treat insomnia more effectively and produce fewer side effects than existing medications. In 2012, one Merck scientist described the science underlying Belsomra as a “sea change.”
But when Schwartz and her colleagues scrutinized data from the company’s own large-scale clinical trials, what they found was a lot less impressive. People taking Belsomra fell asleep, on average, only six minutes sooner than people taking a placebo and stayed asleep for a mere 16 minutes longer. Some test subjects experienced worrying side effects, like next-day drowsiness and temporary paralysis upon waking. For a number of people, these effects were so severe that the researchers halted their driving tests, fearing someone would get into an accident. Because of these safety concerns, the FDA ended up approving the drug at a lower starting dosage than the company had requested—a dosage so low that a Merck scientist admitted it was “ineffective.”
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
The interrogation room in which Iceland’s recent history was rewritten is sparse, furnished only with a table, some chairs, and a computer. A camera is fixed to the wall, and the frosted, double-glazed windows have completely blocked out the sound of the gale-force winds in Reykjavik’s Faxafloi Bay.
It was in this room that some of Iceland’s most powerful bankers, executives, and investors had to answer to special investigator Olaf Hauksson. A tall man with a heavy build, Haukkson has spent the past six years investigating the transactions that brought Iceland’s economy to its knees in October 2008.
At the time, the country’s three biggest banks folded within just three days, in part because their senior executives had illegally doctored the stock listings of their own banks. “Market manipulation”, as Hauksson curtly calls it.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
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In the world, human beings are facing various problems. People who are full of greed, anger, and ignorance are seen to be fighting with each other in words and deeds. As the fighting continues, various problems such as civil wars, wars of aggression, and wars of aggression are occurring. As world peace is being destroyed, humans are facing unbearable problems. Innocent children and women are not getting the rights they deserve and deserve. I can't think of one thing every time. What is it? The United Nations. If we look at the responsibilities and duties of the United Nations, I think it is not suitable for solving the problems that are happening in the world today. In fact, the United Nations and the World Security Council, such an organization must rule the world, must be able to give orders, and must have various ways to obey orders. There must be no organization that can influence more than that organization. There should be experts from each country. They can even dominate the superpowers like the US, China, and Britain. Only then will global peace be achieved quickly. Now, if a country with power develops more militarily, economically, or socially than its own country, then powerful countries will jealously seek out enemies and wage war. Or they will attack with fighter jets. In this, innocent people are losing their lives. No one understands the value of a life. You should think about how to achieve global peace by controlling these. If the US continues to be the permanent president of the UN, world peace will never be achieved. If you think carefully, no one sees that they are working for the common good, but for their own benefit, for the benefit of their own country. The permanent president of the UN and the Security Council has rejected this, As a young Rohingya, I have come to realize that only by electing the president and secretary from among the countries in the world through a secret ballot system and governing the world fairly can we achieve global peace. The United Nations and the Security Council are organizations in which any country must govern, give orders, and make them obey their orders. For example, only when a defendant is tried in court can we hold the leaders of the countries in check and control them, can we achieve global peace smoothly. Otherwise, it will not be easy for powerful countries to use various excuses to end this war every year, every year, for the benefit of themselves and their countries. No country's leaders pay any attention to the words of the United Nations and the Security Council. If we look at it in practice, look at the Rohingya issue. Myanmar is a small country. Even that country has been under siege for 8 years. What action can be taken? Why is the UN and the Security Council Powerless? Without such Power, how can the organization bring about global peace? Everyone should think about it. Whether there is a veto or a strong one, all countries in the world can only achieve global peace if they are subject to the UN and the Security Council. Seek peace in the quiet embrace of nature. Peace is an indispensable need of the human race. It is not as if one person can kill another person, and it is as if one country can attack another country, but instead of trying to build peace, we must try to destroy the peace now, and the world is getting hotter and is on the verge of collapse. I especially appeal to all the world experts to urgently try to bring about peace in all parts of the world. Mr, Noor Muhamed Arkhan Rohingya Youth Myanmar
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
