|
|
|
What We've Found
Julia Harte with your morning fix.
Four female employees of the Pennsylvania-based Danella Construction Corp. won a $200,000 settlement from the company after alleging that the corporation did not provide workers with on-site portable toilets, forcing them to wear adult diapers to work or drive to find a restroom.
The president of the South African athletic governing body was suspended for lying to cover up the fact that Caster Semenya, the South African sprinter who set a record at the 800-meter event of the 2009 Olympics, had been tested to verify her gender.
To raise awareness and money for the underfunded U.S. Speedskating Team, which just lost its biggest sponsor, Stephen Colbert offered to become the team's new primary sponsor and has already posted a fundraising link for the team on his Web site.
The Iraqi oil ministry struck its third major deal with a consortium of oil companies including Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell. If approved by the cabinet, Exxon and Royal will begin production soon in the Qurna oil field, where oil will be extracted starting at a rate of 280,000 barrels per day.
Following last week's deadly Taliban attack against United Nations workers, the UN pulled some 600 personnel from Afghanistan: a discouraging sign for the national forces still trying to defeat the militant group.
Northeast High School in Philadelphia took several students out of class yesterday and confined them in the school auditorium for failing to follow the school's dress code, on the first day the school had enforced the nine-year-old policy. Some students were sent to the auditorium simply for wearing brown shoes instead of black ones.
Julia Harte with your morning fix.
The Bedford County courthouse granted probation to two women convicted of theft, on the condition that they sit outside the courthouse for four-and-a-half hours yesterday, holding signs that read: "I stole from a 9-year-old on her birthday! Don't steal or this could happen to you!"
The U.S. Supreme Court was preparing to hear a case over whether prosecutors may be sued for framing defendants before trial proceedings have begun.
The U.S. government has agreed to pay $1.26 million to five immigrant men who were rounded up, kept in conditions they allege to be inhumane and deported following the 9-11 attacks.
An opinion is expected soon in the first court case appealing the practice of "extraordinary rendition" -- in which terrorism suspects are seized in one country but questioned in another. The case concerns a Muslim cleric whom 26 Americans are charged with abducting from the streets of Milan six years ago.
Anti-government protesters in Iran, who were demonstrating against government-sanctioned rallies to commemorate the takeover of the U.S. Embassy that resulted in the hostage crisis 30 years ago, were brutally beaten and sprayed with tear gas by state police.
A fire tore through the first car of an R-5 train already crowded by passengers displaced from their regular routes by the ongoing SEPTA strike. No passengers were reported injured.
[...] http://citypaper.net/blogs/clog/2009/11/04/what-weve-found-court-ordered-humiliation-scotus-consider...Clef Club : One good thing about music: It inspired Sonata. ⢠Repertory Film : Your weekly guide to local film events, festivals and under-the-radar screenings. ⢠Thee Oh Sees : Sun., Oct. 11, 9 p.m., $5, with Golden Triangle, Love City, Reading Rainbow and Weatherbox, Danger Danger Gallery, 5013 Baltimore … Place your free classified ad now. ⢠Billboards · Wednesday, November 4 2009, 11:00 AM | Sunny, and 50° F | Tomorrow: High: 55 F Low: 41 F Partly sunny and cooler … [...]
Julia Harte with your morning fix.
Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, was again among the highest-paid university presidents in the country with an annual salary of well over $1 million, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education's salary survey released today.
Afghan president Hamid Karzai automatically won a second term today after his only remaining challenger from the fraud-ridden election in August dropped out of the runoff election planned for Nov. 7, saying he believed the runoff would be as corrupt as the original.
Bagram Air Field, the largest U.S. army base in Afghanistan, already houses about 24,000 military personnel and contractors but is still expanding with rapid construction projects costing millions of dollars, even as President Obama debates whether to send more troops into the country.
The Iraqi oil ministry signed an agreement with a consortium of companies headed by the Italian firm ENI to develop the Zubair oil field in southern Iraq, marking the oil ministry's second major contract since the U.S. invasion. The group will extract 200,000 barrels of oil a day from the field, possibly eventually rising to 1.1 million barrels.
New York Waste Management has been paying townships and property owners in Philadelphia's northern suburbs millions of dollars annually to dump about 2,500 tons of trash from New York City in their landfills every day.
Julia Harte with your morning fix.
A Daily News report found that of the $157 million Philadelphia has so far received in federal stimulus money, the city has spent less than $1 million and saved a paltry 52 jobs.
The lending branch of General Motors was begging the Treasury Department for a third infusion of taxpayer money, which would make it the only U.S. company to receive three rounds of aid and possibly make the government majority stakeholder in the company.
A $500,000 shower was among the ostentatious expenses racked up by French President Sarkozy during his European Union presidency -- one of the costliest in history -- and funded by EU taxpayers.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was found to be paying Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghan president Hamid Karzai and suspected opium lord, to organize a paramilitary force in Kandahar that follows C.I.A. orders.
The former presenter of "Afghan Star" -- that country's version of American Idol -- sought asylum in the United States after a documentary he produced about the show earned him death threats from extremists. He now works at Voice of America radio, and says "in America, I was born again."
The Philadelphia-based Rhythm and Blues Foundation, which has provided cash assistance to R&B artists in need for twenty years, is now out of money itself because donations have dried up over the last year.
Julia Harte with your morning fix.
H1N1 vaccine was administered to 1,600 students throughout the Philadelphia School District yesterday, part of a city effort to avoid emergency rooms becoming flooded with people demanding the vaccine.
Drug makers have been rushing to market with medicines used to treat heart illness and cancer before adequately testing them first, according to a report out yesterday from Congress.
Israeli authorities and soldiers dangerously restrict access to water in the Palestinian territories, according to a new report from Amnesty International, leaving some Palestinians with only 5 gallons of water per day.
The Senegalese people were outraged to learn that their government gave an official from the International Monetary Fund a gift of $200,000 at his farewell dinner. Prime Minister Souleymane Ndene Ndiaye said it was a traditional African goodbye present.
The Church of Scientology in France was fined $600,000 for fraud after investigators accused the church officials of manipulating members into investing large amounts of money into questionable ventures and using "commercial harassment" to attract new members.
The third-place winner at Saturday's National Sudoku Championship at the Convention Center, the country's largest puzzle competition, may have cheated. Officials say that the suspect completed preliminary puzzles in record time, but appeared to have trouble on the simple opening calculations of the final-round puzzle, and may have used a fake name.
[...] more from the original source: What We've Found: Vaccine for schoolchildren, inadequately tested … By admin | category: school children | tags: archive, palestine, senegalese, sudoku, [...]
Julia Harte with your morning fix.
The Upper Darby township was preparing to release its first "bait" cars -- cars equipped with GPS tracking devices and hidden cameras -- to trace car theft in the area.
Kids in southern China were being ordered to salute passing cars, according to the latest in a long stream of Chinese bureaucratic edicts denounced by critics and local media as arbitrary and senseless.
Solar-powered and hybrid vehicles were racing 1,800 miles across the entire continent of Australia in the Green Power Challenge, one of the world's first competitions for cars fueled by renewable sources.
In a region where women are 14 times as likely to die from childbirth as British women, one village in Malawi appeared to have eliminated the problem by maintaining a "bicycle ambulance" that ferries women entering labor 18 miles to the nearest hospital.
The president of Philadelphia's Transit Worker's Union vowed that a strike could be called by the end of the week -- perhaps affecting the first local World Series game -- if negotiations don't result in wage and pension increases for SEPTA employees.
Julia Harte with your morning fix.
The ex-CEO of the Philadelphia Academy Charter School was preparing to be sentenced for stealing half a million dollars from the school, down to change he pocketed from vending machines, to pay for improvements to his home.
U.S. teaching schools are ineffective cash cows for universities, said Education Secretary Arne Duncan in a speech at Columbia University, where he urged stricter teacher-training programs that encourage "the lowest-performers to shape up or shut down."
The United States was indicating that it would be open to sharing power with the Afghan government that results from the Nov. 7 runoff election, if doing so would improve the legitimacy of the new administration.
The former leader of a U.S. navy dog-sniffing bomb unit in Bahrain was censured for hazing sailors he thought were gay, forcing them to simulate sex acts and locking them in dog kennels with dog feces all over the ground.
The Republican candidate in Philadelphia's upcoming District Attorney election was denounced by leaders in the Black political community after he denied the existence of any racial profiling in death penalty cases in the city.
The founder of Human Rights Watch accused the organization's current leadership of being "biased against Israel," arguing that the group had strayed from its original mandate to only examine authoritarian societies and was unfairly focused on Israeli human rights infractions.
That hazing incident is amazingly outrageous. I don't think homosexuality is rigt, but neither is that kind of abuse. Unfortunately, many people want to take away religious values from society, when those values indeed are what can protect ALL people, from such outrageous behavior.
Julia Harte with your mid-morning fix.
Over the protests of Temple University students, notorious anti-Islamic and anti-immigration Dutch politician Geert Wilders is speaking on campus tonight.
A senior cleric banned women from wearing full-face veils at Al-Azhar in Egypt, one of the most acclaimed schools of Sunni Islamic teaching, on the grounds that the garments have nothing to do with Islam and demonstrate "radicalism."
An armed group of Shiite students and faculty were terrorizing one of Iraq's most prestigious universities, causing Prime Minister al-Maliki, an alum, to temporarily close the institution.
The case of the Chinese Uighurs, a group of Guantanamo detainees who are still in custody even though they are no longer classified as "enemy combatants," will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.
A Defense Department scientist is one of several federal figures facing espionage charges after he passed along classified U.S. satellite information to an FBI official pretending to be an Israeli intelligence officer.
A former Philadelphia International Airport worker pleaded guilty to stealing four laptops and a videogame from the luggage of airline passengers.
Nozette is not accused of "treason", he's accused of espionage. There's a difference.
Duly noted. Thanks for the catch, Mithras!
Julia Harte with your morning fix.
Fifteen thousand people met outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art and walked along the Schuylkill to raise money and awareness for victims of HIV/AIDS, which afflicts Philadelphians at a rate five times the national average.
7 million Brits were diagnosed with "pre-diabetes" -- a condition of extra-high blood sugar levels, which makes someone twelve times more likely to get diabetes than a regular individual -- by the charity Diabetes UK.
Medical marijuana users and suppliers who conform to their state's law on the treatment will no longer be arrested by federal agents, Obama mandated in new policy guidelines that were sent to the Department of Justice.
New York City prosecutors were indicting the DNA profiles of miscreants in lieu of a real person, in rape cases where the actual criminal could not be identified but traces of DNA were left on the victim. So far, 18 DNA profile-indictments have led to the arrests of actual people.
A Philadelphia police officer was preparing to defend himself against charges of sexual assault after another officer caught him engaging in sexual acts with a prison inmate.
A sex abuse case against a Delaware Catholic diocese that was scheduled to be heard today was delayed by the diocese's last-minute decision to file for bankruptcy protection. The diocese bishop claimed that the move was necessary to ensure the diocese would be able to compensate all its claimants.
Julia Harte with your morning fix.
Six workers at a nonprofit agency in Philadelphia that distributes state funds to low-income mothers and their children stole $375,000 from the program by creating checks in the names of fake recipients of the aid and redeeming them for groceries.
As World Food Day dawned this morning, the United Nations World Food Program announced a funding shortage was forcing it to cut back food aid to thousands of Bhutanese refugees living in Nepal, with bigger cuts possibly ahead.
The United States promised Pakistan $7.5 billion in aid over the next five years, after assuring the Pakistani government that the aid was meant as a goodwill gesture in the fight against the Taliban and not an effort to gain influence over Pakistani politics.
Obama was encouraging Congress to award senior citizens one-time payments of $250 to make up for the fact that social security benefits will not increase this year for the first time in thirty years.
Enforcement of the Clean Water Act will be improved, executives with the Environmental Protection Agency promised yesterday, declaring that "if states are falling down on the job, weâre going to reverse the permits they've issued, and if they're not enforcing the law, we'll step in and do it ourselves."
The nine million gallons of wastewater produced each day by Pennsylvania oil and gas wells is going to be more like 19 million gallons by 2011, according to the state's Department of Environmental Protection, which is more than state waterways can possibly handle.
- ActiVman
- adventures
- Arts
- Ask A Man-About-Town
- Award Tour
- Awards
- Bad Idea Factory
- Beer
- Below the Curve
- Bikes
- Booze
- Brian Hickey
- BRT
- Budget
- Budget Fuss
- Business
- Casinos
- City Council
- City Hall
- CouncilMANIC
- CP Abroad
- CP in the Community
- Criminal Justice System
- Day Tripper
- Death and Taxes
- Delaware River
- Design
- DROP
- Drugs
- Dubious Distinction
- Elections
- End of Days
- Environment
- Fashion
- Film Fest
- Financial Meltdown
- FrackTrack
- Free Library
- Gambling
- Gay Stuff
- Get Lit
- Greenstorming
- guns
- Hall Monitor
- Health
- Health Care
- Hello, Kitty
- Holidays
- Ice Cubes
- Iggles
- Immigration
- In Memoriam
- Labor
- Lawsuits
- Letters
- LGBTQ
- Maps
- Marcellus Shale
- Media
- MMA
- Mummers
- Music
- MUST READ
- Mysterious Mysteries
- Nation
- News
- Non Sequitur
- Opinion
- PA politics 2010
- Parking Wars
- Parks and Recreation
- People Send Us This Stuff
- Philadelphia Police
- Philadelphia Union
- Philaphemera
- Philly From Scratch
- philly madness
- Photos
- Poverty
- PPA
- President Obama
- Print Edition
- Prisons
- Protest
- Readers Write
- Real Estate
- Rock Bottom
- Schools
- Science
- Screwing Philly
- SEPTA
- snow
- So Lush
- Soccer
- Sporting Life
- Sports Complex
- State Politicians
- State Politics
- Street Art
- Strike
- Stuff We Like
- Taxes
- Taxi Drivers
- Tech Fetish
- television
- The Budget Crisis
- The City Paper
- The CLOG
- The Human Condition
- The Mayor
- The Phightin Phils
- The World
- Things that make you go hm
- Tinfoil Hats Off
- Under the Table
- Under the Tables
- Urban Development
- Urban Planning
- urban wildlife
- Video Poker
- We Call Shenanigans
- Weather
- Web Junk
- Weekend Omnibus
- White House
- What We've Found
- Women's Issues
- Flyered Up!
- How 'Bout That Weather?
- it's always sunny in philadelphia
- Stu!
- Shopping
- get out
- 10-track mind
- ArtsFlash
- Bloggity
- Bruce Being Bruce
- Colleges
- Comedy
- Gigantic Surprises
- Hello Canary
- Hello Puppy
- errata
- get lost
- Inside The Fishbowl
- Library Closings
- Local Support
- Movies
- Murder
- Night Moves
- Recycling
- radio
- Scientology
- Sex
- Sixers
- Skeeze Police
- State Politicians Screwing Philly
- That's a cool stencil!
- Theater
- Things We See
- This Week
- This Week in Oates
- University City
- WIN
- What we don't heart
- trailer!
- what we heart
- Feeling Guilty
- Askadelphia.
- Broke in Philly
- Contest
- Dance
- Dear Paper Doll
- Do A Good Thing
- Education
- Film Fest Schism
- G20-20 Vision
- Goodbye
- Gossip
- Great American Heroes
- PATCO
- Pearl Jam Week
- Puppy
- Stars of the Photostream
- sustainability
- Lower Merion Webcam-Gate
- The Cycle
- Equality Forum
- Bureaucrat of the Week
- Animals
- ElectionEar
- Photostream
