Pension funds for police officers and other public employees have been battered and face a long recovery
The financial crisis has blown a hole in the rosy forecasts of pension funds that cover teachers, police officers and other government employees, casting into doubt as never before whether these public systems will be able to keep their [...]

Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission warned Wednesday of “a looming spectrum crisis” if the government fails to find ways to come up with more bandwidth for mobile devices.

In the coming year’s military spending bill, members of a House panel continue to steer lucrative defense contracts to companies represented by their former staffers, who in turn steer generous campaign donations to those lawmakers, a new analysis has found.

GOOD’s executive compensation infographic shows the compensation levels of the business world’s top execs, with the number of minimum wage earners each super-suit’s take-home pay would support. Wow that is a lot of capitalistic greed!

 
The Maharaja witnessed his first in-flight Mughal-e-Azam at 30,000 feet above sea level on Saturday, as two members of the cabin crew—one male and one female—slugged it out with the pilot and co-pilot.  Endangering the lives of 106 passengers and grossly violating safety norms, the airline staffers came to blows in the cockpit and galley [...]

It’s a rough life as a young child in India
Despite India’s economic prosperity, nearly two million children under the age of five, die every year in the country, the highest number anywhere in the world, a media report said today.
More than half of them die the month after birth and 400,000 in their first 24 [...]

No place to hide
Move over Erin Brockovich. Today’s environmental detectives can use radar, helicopters and even satellite images to help them spot illegal toxic waste dumps and help catch those responsible.  Ironically, the tightening of restrictions on waste disposal and the enforcement of new recycling laws have made illegal dumping more likely, turning it into [...]

 
Unlike most kinds of petty crime, a confidence game, or con, takes an enormous amount of skill and forethought to pull off. When done right, in many cases the grifters who perpetrate them have not actually done anything overtly illegal–they’ve simply used lies and manipulation to get their victim, or “mark,” to willingly hand over [...]

Nearly 1 million homes nationwide are in the process of foreclosure, according to a report Wednesday from the U.S. Department of the Treasury covering banks and loan servicers that make up 64 percent of all outstanding mortgages.  As of June 30, there were 992,554 homes in the process of foreclosure, up 15.3 percent from March [...]

A new study estimates that people with a gun are 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not possessing a gun.
In a first-of its-kind study, epidemiologists at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that, on average, guns did not protect those who possessed them from being shot in [...]

Two Romanians accused of sophisticated phishing attacks targeting major financial institutions have been extradited to the US for trial.
25 year old Petru Bogdan Belbita and 28 year old Cornel Ionut Tonita, both from Romania, were arrested in Canada and Croatia respectively.  They stand accused, along with five other defendants, of duping customers of financial institutions, [...]

 
Job seekers queue up to attend a job fair  in Chicago.
Despite signs that the economy has resumed growing, unemployed Americans now confront a job market that is bleaker than ever in the current recession, and employment prospects are still getting worse.  Job seekers now outnumber openings six to one, the worst ratio since the government [...]

Doesn’t this make you want to go for a swim?
Waterways across the upper Midwest are increasingly plagued with ugly, smelly and potentially deadly blue-green algae, bloomed by drought and fertilizer runoffs from farm fields, that’s killed dozens of dogs and sickened many people.

Each inmate costs US taxpayers more than $22,000 a year
From the death penalty to “three strikes” laws, Americans love tough responses to crime—but not necessarily smart ones. Nils Christie has a better idea: Stop treating lawbreakers like criminals.
“I don’t like the term crime—it’s such a big, fat, imprecise word,” says the renowned University of Oslo [...]

Cash-strapped Europeans are travelling to Britain to go bankrupt – then returning home debt-free. “Bankruptcy tourism” is becoming so popular that a company is now helping insolvent Europeans to travel and live temporarily in the UK.
Lenient laws mean that foreigners can live in Britain, file for bankruptcy and leave with the slate wiped clean after [...]

Every year around this time, “leaf peepers” from all over the world descend on Colorado’s mountain towns to gape at the white-trunked aspen trees as they don their fall colors, setting the hillsides ablaze with bright swaths of yellow and orange foliage. But a mysterious syndrome may leave the Rocky Mountains aspen-free by 2090.

Chongqing in China is growing fast – so is the pollution
Apart from a few lower members of the animal kingdom, no-one other than human beings build cities.  They are totally artificial constructs and in them we live artificial lives. We travel differently, eat different food, receive water and energy through pipes and wires, live in different [...]

Children who are spanked have lower IQs worldwide, including in the United States, according to new groundbreaking research by University of New Hampshire professor Murray Straus. The research results will be presented Friday, Sept. 25, 2009, at the 14th International Conference on Violence, Abuse and Trauma, in San Diego, Calif.
 

scientists have developed a pair of glasses that receive visual data from a camera mounted on a them and send the images to a chip attatched on the side of the eyeball.

Inspired by the success of cochlear implants that can restore hearing to some deaf people, researchers at MIT are working on a retinal implant [...]

Scientists say they have found a link between toxic fumes on planes and brain damage in pilots
Poisons in the air pumped into plane cabins and cockpits have been linked to brain damage.  Cabin crew and pilots have long blamed exposure to jet engine fumes for memory loss, tremors, lethargy and other symptoms of so-called [...]

Right now, the transportation systems that support the economy appear to be highly efficient.  To the casual observer, whenever a company needs to move its goods around the country or around the globe, it can do so fairly cheaply and easily.  
 

Privacy? What Privacy?

Princeton’s Paul Ohm writes about Netflix’s insane new plan to release millions of customers’ personal information — ZIP code, gender, year of birth — as a sequel to its Netflix Challenge. Latanya Sweeney’s famous study on de-anonymizing data has shown that date (not just year) of birth, gender and ZIP are sufficient to [...]

Artist’s concept: In the center of a swirling whirlpool of hot gas is likely a
beast that has never been seen directly: a black hole.
Black holes are invading stars, providing a radical explanation to bright flashes in the universe that are one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy today.

This is Bunburra Rockhole, the meteorite, at the discovery site.
Researchers have discovered an unusual kind of meteorite in the Western Australian desert and have uncovered where in the Solar System it came from, in a very rare finding published in the journal Science.

An image showing microbes living in sandstone in Antarctica.
Researchers from the Open University are laying the groundwork for a new equation that could mathematically quantify a habitat’s potential for hosting life, in a similar way to how the Drake equation estimates the number of intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way.