Climate Researchers Feeling Heat From White House
Climate Researchers Feeling Heat From White HouseScientists
doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration
has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global
warming. The result, the researchers say, is a danger that Americans are not
getting the full story on how the climate is
changing.Employees and contractors
working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with a
U.S. Geological Survey scientist working at an NOAA lab, said in interviews that
over the past year administration officials have chastised them for speaking on
policy questions; removed references to global warming from their reports, news
releases and conference Web sites; investigated news leaks; and sometimes urged
them to stop speaking to the media altogether. Their accounts indicate that the
ideological battle over climate-change research, which first came to light at
NASA, is being fought in other federal science agencies as
well.
$29 billion in congressional
pork
Nearly 10,000 projects account
for a record $29 billion in federal pork-barrel spending for the current budget
year, Citizens Against Government Waste said. Spending on local line-items rose
6.2 percent last year, the group
said.
Pork — generally defined as
local projects folded into large spending bills without a hearing — has
long been a favorite target of government watchdogs. A ballooning national debt,
growing war costs and huge reconstruction costs along the storm-ravaged Gulf
Coast have raised pork hunting to new heights.
Resolving
the Wiretap Debate
Congress seems
to lack the backbone to stop President Bush from authorizing wiretaps without
court orders, and censuring him would probably not do much to make him follow
the law. What could make a real difference would be a Supreme Court ruling that
found his domestic surveillance program to be
illegal.
A recently introduced bill
would provide a good way to resolve the matter: putting the National Security
Agency's secret spying program on a fast track to Supreme Court
review.
Under the bill, which was
introduced by Senator Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat, people who suspect
that they are being subjected to warrantless electronic surveillance could
challenge the spying in court. The bill would give people, like academics and
journalists, who communicate regularly with people in places like Afghanistan,
Iraq and Pakistan standing to sue if they are refraining from communicating out
of fear that the government is illegally listening.
Bush
Wants Capacity to Make 125 Nukes a
Year
The Bush administration
Wednesday unveiled a blueprint for rebuilding the nation's decrepit nuclear
weapons complex, including restoration of a large-scale bomb manufacturing
capacity.
The plan calls for the most
sweeping realignment and modernization of the nation's massive system of
laboratories and factories for nuclear bombs since the end of the Cold
War.
Until now, the nation has depended
on carefully maintaining aging bombs produced during the Cold War arms race,
some several decades old. The administration, however, wants the capability to
turn out 125 new nuclear bombs per year by 2022.
77
TV stations aired 'fake news
reports'
A study by a group that
monitors the media reveals that, over a ten month span, 77 television stations
from all across the nation aired video news releases without informing their
viewers even once that the reports were actually sponsored
content.
Posted: Thu - April 6, 2006 at 10:50 AM
|
