Originally published on Mon November 19, 2012 11:51 am
Wal-Mart is throwing its hat in the gourmet food ring just in time for the holidays this year. Wednesday, the megastore company launched a monthly food subscription service that sends customers a sampling of novel food products each month.
Family and friends of Aaron Smadja, one of the three Israelis killed by a rocket fired from Gaza, mourn during his funeral at a cemetery in the southern Israeli town of Kiryat Malachi on Thursday.
In an interview with All Things Considered's Melissa Block, Israel's Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren said that Israel's calling of 30,000 reservists "signals a preparation for possible land action, which we may need to defend our citizens."
Some Democrats complain that Republicans in recent decades have had the edge in House races because GOP state legislatures have been better at the gerrymandering game. Except that may not be true.
Some political experts believe there's an easier explanation, and perhaps a tougher one for Democrats to overcome: Voters supporting Republican House candidates, they say, are spread over more congressional districts than those who support Democrats. It's that simple. It's merely a matter of geography.
Dirty water from the oil wells flows through oil-caked pipes into a settling pit where trucks vacuum off the oil. A net covers the pit to keep out birds and other wildlife. Streams of this wastewater flow through the reservation and join natural creeks and rivers.
More than 40 years ago, the EPA banned oil companies from releasing wastewater into the environment, but made an exception for the arid West. If livestock and wildlife can use the water, companies can release it. Cows like these grazing near a stream of waste on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming are supposedly the reason the EPA lets oil companies release their waste into the environment.
The EPA requires that the wastewater streams show no obvious sheen and no solid deposits. But both were visible near oil fields on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.
White crystal-like deposits line a streambed where this oil field water is flowing. Researchers for the tribes have also found black oozes, purple growths, dead ducklings and lifeless stretches of streams.
In most oil fields, the water that companies pump up with the oil gets reinjected deep underground. But the federal government allows a dozen oil fields on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming to pump streams of this wastewater onto the land.
Wes Martel, vice chairman for the Eastern Shoshone Business Council, stands near a murky gray stream full of oil field wastewater. He's concerned about the effects the wastewater has on wildlife, water quality and, since cows drink it, he wonders: "What's in your steak?"
Internal EPA documents released to NPR show some EPA staffers have been trying to figure out what is in the wastewater released by oil companies. There are lots of chemicals. Some leave solid residues like these white and gray mounds. Danger signs near this outflow pipe warn that poisonous gas fumes from the water can cause respiratory irritation or suffocation.
Dirty water from the oil wells flows through oil-caked pipes into a settling pit where trucks vacuum off the oil. A net covers the pit to keep out birds and other wildlife. Streams of this wastewater flow through the reservation and join natural creeks and rivers.
The air reeks so strongly of rotten eggs that tribal leader Wes Martel hesitates to get out of the car at an oil field on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. He already has a headache from the fumes he smelled at another oil field.
People hold pictures of Savita Halappanavar during a vigil outside Belfast City Hall, Northern Ireland, on Thursday. Halappanavar died Oct. 28 in Galway, Ireland, just days after she was denied an abortion.
The death of an Indian woman is prompting Ireland to examine the conditions under which abortions can be permitted in the country.
Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old dentist, died last month after she began to miscarry her 17-week-old fetus. Doctors denied her an abortion, a procedure that is illegal in the predominantly Catholic country, because the fetus had a heartbeat. The story gained traction this week after Halappanavar's husband took her body back to India for cremation and went public with the events that led to her death.
Originally published on Thu November 15, 2012 4:45 pm
There's nothing quite like a deadline to focus the mind. Even a deadline that's not quite real.
Friday was originally the day that states were supposed to not only tell the federal government whether they planned to run their own health exchanges but also how they planned to do it.
Sandy punched a hole in the barrier island that holds the affluent borough of Mantoloking, N.J., temporarily splitting the community in two. The storm also destroyed several multimillion-dollar homes and erased the island's protective system of dunes.
A portion of Fire Island, N.Y., was breached during Sandy, creating a new inlet. Despite the breach, a fishing shack on nearby Pelican Island (yellow arrow) remained standing.
Storm waves and surge cut across the barrier island at Mantoloking, N.J., eroding a wide beach, destroying houses and roads, and depositing sand onto the island and into the back bay.
New Jersey's most affluent community, Mantoloking, sits on a narrow barrier island 30 miles north of Long Beach. As Sandy approached, most of the residents fled inland. But Edwin C. O'Malley and his father, Edwin J. O'Malley Jr., hunkered down in their 130-year-old house.
They tied a boat to their porch and then watched the storm surge break over the dunes and flood the streets.
"Overnight that night, lying in bed, I could actually hear waves hitting the side of the house — which obviously made it more difficult to get to sleep," the younger O'Malley says.
Voters were frustrated by a 2012 presidential race they called more negative than usual and more devoid of substantive discussion of issues, according to a survey released Thursday by the Pew Research Center.
And voters are pessimistic about the prospect of a more productive Congress, Pew found.
Two-thirds of registered voters surveyed after Election Day said they believe relations between Democrats and Republicans will stay the same or worsen over the coming year.
When Chef Jose Garces, the Philadelphia-based restaurateur and author of The Latin Road Home, thinks back to the Thanksgiving table of his youth, he remembers the turkey, and his father's chicken giblet gravy.
But his parents, who emigrated to Chicago from Ecuador in the 1960s, whipped up Ecuadorean staples as well.
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta speaks during a press conference following meetings as part of AUSMIN at the State Reception Centre in Kings Park in Perth, Australia.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has ordered a review of military ethical standards. The order comes just days after CIA Director David Petraeus stepped down because of an extramarital affair.
The Washington Post reports, however, that Panetta was in the process of ordering this review despite the Petraeus scandal. The Post adds:
