June 26, 2007 8:44 p.m. EST
Marta Cyperling - AHN News Writer
Toronto, ON (AHN) - An extreme heat alert has been issued for Toronto and its surrounding GTA cities with temperatures hitting 94 degrees Fahrenheit. Factor in humidity and it felt like 105 degrees Fahrenheit.
Tuesday was the hottest day of the year and kicked air conditioners and the power supply into overdrive. A power blackout did hit the downtown core this evening around 6 p.m. but officials are not saying if it was caused by the increased power demand.
Weather forecasters predict Wednesday temperatures to soar just as high with relief from the weather coming on Thursday with a potentially severe thunderstorm.
Labels: downtown+toronto+hit+with+power+outage
CBC
Tue, 26 Jun 2007 16:32 EDT
Heat contained in the Earth's crust acts like a life-jacket, and without it much of North America would be under water, suggests research at the University of Utah.
The flooding predicted because of global warming is a much more immediate threat, the researchers note. It would take billions of years for North American rock to cool to the point where it will become denser and sink enough to put much of the continent under water.
The research suggests for the first time that about half the elevation of any place in North America is related to temperature differences within the Earth's crust, with most of the rest due to differences in what the rocks are made of.
read moreLabels: elevation+related+to+temperature+differences+withing+earth's+crust
Michael Roston
Published: Wednesday June 27, 2007
The Senate Judiciary Committee has served Vice President Dick Cheney and other officials in the White House and Justice Department with subpoenas over President George W. Bush's warrantless wiretapping programs.
"Over the past 18 months, this Committee has made no fewer than nine formal requests to the Department of Justice and to the White House, seeking information and documents about the authorization of and legal justification for this program," Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement released to RAW STORY. "All requests have been rebuffed. Our attempts to obtain information through testimony of Administration witnesses have been met with a consistent pattern of evasion and misdirection."
The subpoenas were authorized last week by the Judiciary Committee by a 13-3 vote, and target "documents related to authorization and reauthorization of the program or programs; the legal analysis or opinions about the surveillance; orders, decisions, or opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) concerning the surveillance; agreements between the Executive Branch and telecommunications or other companies regarding liability for assisting with or participating in the surveillance; and documents concerning the shutting down of an investigation of the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) relating to the surveillance," according to the release.
In the subpoena letters, Leahy made particular reference to the Bush administration's attempts to roll back existing oversight of the domestic spying program conducted through the National Security Agency.
"This Committee’s inquiry into this warrantless electronic surveillance is essential to the performance of its constitutional legislative and oversight responsibilities," he wrote. "The Administration has asked Congress to make sweeping changes to FISA – a crucial national security authority over which the Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction. It is impossible to make informed legislative decisions without understanding fully the Administration’s interpretation of FISA and the perceived flaws in that legislation that led the Administration to operate a program outside of its provisions for more than five years."
The letters were sent to the Justice Department, the Office of the White House, the Office of the Vice President, and the National Security Council. The recipients of the subpoenas are called on to comply with the subpoenas by July 18.
Labels: Cheney+ others +served +with +subpoenas +by +wiretapping +investigators
Juan Cole
Tue, 26 Jun 2007 17:22 EDT
An example of the racist hate speech disseminated by the American Jewish Committee and carried as an advert in last week's NY Times. All in the interest of brainwashing the US public.
Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul continue to show themselves among the few in Congress with any integrity and backbone. They declined to go along with a resolution charging Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad with incitement to genocide, given his alleged call for Israel to be 'wiped off the face of the map.'
As most of my readers know, Ahmadinejad did not use that phrase in Persian. He quoted an old saying of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for 'this occupation regime over Jerusalem" to "vanish from the page of time.' Calling for a regime to vanish is not the same as calling for people to be killed. Ahmadinejad has not to my knowledge called for anyone to be killed.
Read More...Labels: palesinians+should+decide+on+two+state+solution
