After months of anticipation, the Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee [LINK], a panel of experts tasked with evaluating both the ends and the means of the U.S. space program, came back with its recommendation last week: “The committee finds that no plan compatible with the FY 2010 budget profile permits human exploration to continue in any meaningful way.”
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Floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, anthrax attacks: if the United
States were a 233-year-old on Medicare, the past few decades would have
seen her take repeated visits to the emergency room. As a potential
swine flu pandemic threatens to send the nation back to the hospital
this fall, our understaffed and under-equipped emergency rooms are
forcing crisis planners to make some difficult choices about rationing
care.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s ascension to the Supreme Court this August
gave Latino and low-income communities across America cause for
celebration. As the former mayor of San Antonio, Henry Cisneros,
explained in FLYP's Bienvenidos to the New America,
Sotomayor's rise from her childhood in a Bronx housing project to one
of the country's highest posts is another step in the ongoing evolution
of the representation—and perception—of the Hispanic population in the
U.S.
The unemployment numbers released today show that the end of summer has not brought us the end of the recession. Headline numbers show the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate to be 9.7 percent, or 14.9 million people. That’s 5.4 million more people than a year ago—and still growing.
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Saturday, August 29, marks the four-year anniversary of the morning
when Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the coast of Louisiana. Within
hours, the storm had breached nearly every levee around New Orleans,
causing unprecedented devastation—an estimated $89.6 billion in
property damage—and an untold number of deaths throughout the region.
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According to a recent report from the Associated Press, Mexican
authorities are initiating a widespread campaign to destroy almost
80,000 illegal weapons—seized primarily in raids against drug
cartels—that have been held for a decade or more in government
warehouses. Even after the housecleaning, more than 35,000 weapons,
which the government requires for evidence in criminal investigations,
will still remain in storage. Given that Mexico has some of the world's
strictest gun laws, this astounding quantity of weapons immediately
raises a question: where all the guns are coming from?
Nearly two months after the California Supreme Court decision to uphold a state ban on gay marriage, the relationship between the gay community and opponents of same-sex marriage continues to sour. An especially tense relationship for gays and lesbians has developed with the Mormons’ Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS), which was among the most active and potent supporters of the legislation in California, known as Proposition 8.
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You would think that the brilliant minds behind man’s first visit to the moon would be meticulous in their attention to detail, but new footage of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s famous moonwalk proves that even the best and brightest can let some things fall through the cracks.
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Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have been
monitoring seismic activity near the San Andreas fault, and found that
underground stress is building at an alarming rate. According to a
report first published by Science and reported by MSNBC,
more than 2,000 tremors have been recorded between July 2001 and
February 2009. The tremors have lasted from a few minutes to half an
hour and could signal an upcoming quake of magnitude-6.0 or higher.
Since Sunday night, bloody clashes between the Muslim Uyghurs and Han
Chinese have been breaking out in the Xinjiang province in China. As FLYP reported last August,
the region has experienced continual ethnic violence between the 8.4
million Uyghurs and the Han, who make up a 91-percent majority in the
country.
