Challenging statements from NASA that man is causing climate change, the former NASA executives demanded in a letter to Administrator Charles Bolden that he and the agency “refrain from including unproven remarks” supporting global warming in the media.

Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats have drafted proposals that, if law, would require all those over 25 to pay a proportion of their income to cushion Germany against a looming population crisis.

The German Chancellor’s ruling party is seeking extra sources of revenue to pay for soaring pensions and bills for social care costs as Germany’s « baby boomer » generation ages amid a decline in the birth rate.

Because of a slump in Germany’s population, as more ageing Germans retire there are fewer young workers to replace them as taxpayers to fund generous welfare and pension arrangements.

The number of bears along the western shore of Hudson Bay, believed to be among the most threatened bear subpopulations, stands at 1,013 and could be even higher, according to the results of an aerial survey released Wednesday by the Government of Nunavut. That’s 66 per cent higher than estimates by other researchers who forecasted the numbers would fall to as low as 610 because of warming temperatures that melt ice faster and ruin bears’ ability to hunt. The Hudson Bay region, which straddles Nunavut and Manitoba, is critical because it’s considered a bellwether for how polar bears are doing elsewhere in the Arctic.

The study shows that “the bear population is not in crisis as people believed,” said Drikus Gissing, Nunavut’s director of wildlife management. “There is no doom and gloom.”

The Oakland-based company has held rights for the 1,000-megawatt Blythe Solar Power Project in the Southern California desert, which last April won $2.1 billion of conditional loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy. It is unclear how the bankruptcy will affect that project.

Agents belonging to the PA’s Preventive Security Service in Ramallah arrested Tarek Khamis, who works for the Palestinian Zaman Press news agency, for criticizing the PA’s current clampdown on Palestinian journalists in the West Bank, a Palestinian journalist told The Jerusalem Post.

He said that Khamis was taken into custody after he wrote a comment that referred specifically to the recent arrest of female journalist and blogger Esmat Abdel Khalik.

She was arrested last week after she posted derogatory remarks about PA President Mahmoud Abbas on her Facebook page.

On Friday, the agency told a federal judge it withdrew an administrative order that alleged Range Resources Corp. had polluted water wells in a rural Texas county west of Fort Worth. Under an agreement filed in U.S. court in Dallas, the EPA will also drop the lawsuit it filed in January 2011 against Range, and Range will end its appeal of the administrative order.

In addition to dropping the case in Texas, the EPA has agreed to substantial retesting of water in Wyoming after its methods were questioned. And in Pennsylvania, it has angered state officials by conducting its own analysis of well water—only to confirm the state’s finding that water once tainted by gas was safe.

The Abacus poll finds the Wildrose has skipped ahead of the PC Party, now leading by 13 percentage points. Compared to a similar Abacus poll in early March, the Wildrose is up 12 percentage points while the Tory party is down six percent.

Provincewide, Wildrose has the support of 41% of decided voters, followed by the PCs at 28%, the Liberals at 16% and the NDP 12%.

The lack of any statistically significant warming for over a decade has made it more difficult for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its supporters to demonize the atmospheric gas CO2 which is released when fossil fuels are burned. The direct warming due to doubling CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be calculated to cause a warming of about one degree Celsius. The IPCC computer models predict a much larger warming, three degrees Celsius or even more. Many lines of observational evidence suggest that this « positive feedback » also has been greatly exaggerated.

They say homework pushes the responsibility for learning on parents and causes rows between themselves and their children. And they conclude children would be better off reading a book.

« If the child hasn’t succeeded in doing the exercise at school, I don’t see how they’re going to succeed at home, » said Jean-Jacques Hazan, the president of the FCPE, the main French parents’ association, which represents parents and pupils in most of France’s educational establishments.

« In fact, we’re asking parents to do the work that should be done in lessons. »

Catherine Chabrun, president of the teachers’ organisation Co-operative Institute of Modern Schools (ICEM), says homework also reinforces inequalities.

It’s easy to sell your house if, for some reason, you need cash to meet your financial obligations. But most assets owned by Quebec cannot readily be sold. There is simply no market for many of them. And in cases in which it would be feasible and make sense — selling Hydro- Quebec for example, or the liquor monopoly — there is no political support to do it.

Practically speaking, the debt will have to be paid back with taxes, from a dwindling proportion of working taxpayers.

The film employment tax credit, a program designed to encourage film and television production in Saskatchewan, is being eliminated, along with $4 million in annual funding to more than a dozen regional economic development bodies across the province. The provincial drug plan cap that limits per-prescription costs for seniors and children to a maximum of $15 is being bumped to $20.

« Around the world, we are seeing the chaos caused by governments that did not live within their means. Here in Canada other provinces like Ontario face severe choices in the years ahead. Saskatchewan’s economy and our finances are in much better shape, » Finance Minister Ken Krawetz said.

« This budget is keeping the Saskatchewan advantage by keeping the promises we made in the election campaign, keeping our economy strong and growing and keeping our spending sustainable and our budget balanced. »

Creative destruction continues in the digital age. After 244 years — it began publication five years before the 1773 Boston Tea Party — the Encyclopedia Britannica will henceforth be available only in digital form as it tries to catch up to reference websites such as Google and Wikipedia.

Data from 14 advanced countries between 1920 and 2000 suggest these are not general relationships. Credit booms heighten the probability of a banking crisis, but we find no evidence that a rise in top income shares leads to credit booms. Instead, low interest rates and economic expansions are the only two robust determinants of credit booms in our data set.

It is the strongest indication yet from an industry closest to China’s phenomenal industrial growth over the last decade, that the boom times, if not over, are being tempered.

« The (Chinese) economy is shifting, it’s changing. Steel growth rates will flatten and they have flattened, » Ian Ashby, president of BHP’s iron ore division, said ahead of the Global Iron Ore & Steel Forecast Conference in Perth.

The news knocked the Australian dollar down 1pc and weighed on stocks in Asia and Europe. Markets are very sensitive to any hint of softening demand in China, given it is Australia’s single biggest export market.

They are either grossly ignorant or they are lying through their teeth.

A recent study by a British healthcare regulator finds that half of all elderly people in Britain’s nursing homes are being denied basic health services.

Some older people were forced to wait months for a doctor or nurse to treat simple health problems. No doubt they were waiting for the Bureau of Bedsore Management to review the proper procedures before issuing a bandage-changing permit.

As media from television to billboards bounce back from the recession, newsprint is being left behind. Zenith Optimedia this week predicted that internet advertising would pass newspaper advertising next year around the world – but in the US, where internet penetration is high and newspaper audiences are shrinking, digital will overtake newspapers’ and magazines’ combined ad sales this year, eMarketer estimates.

Ironically, Bush instituted more regulations, 10,674, but they cost just $8.1 billion annually, said the Heritage report, titled “Red Tape Rising: Obama and Regulation at the Three Year Mark.” It will be released Tuesday.

That saved taxpayers exactly $7,591.

Hoping for much better results, a disappointed Sen. Tom Carper says that when he saw the number he wondered if Medicare had left out some zeros.

The Delaware Democrat was expecting the system would finally allow Medicare to stanch a $60-billion-a-year fraud hemorrhage. Now lawmakers are worried about its future performance.

Medicare officials say it’s unfair to grade the new technology on a single statistic.

The latest curb on Obama’s enthusiasm comes after six weeks of generally good economic and electoral news — several key polls show his job approval falling back underwater. Dissatisfaction with his handling of the economy is up, rising to a new high, thanks in great measure to a nasty spike in gas prices and months of accumulated attacks by the GOP presidential field.

It’s a consistent pattern. Obama is a president who can’t seem to stay above 50 percent — after three-plus years at the helm, after navigating a score of world-shaking crises, his week-to-week popularity remains fluid in the capricious churn of the economic news cycle.

“The majority of those contacts were made via automated forms or online form letters,” agency spokesman John Enright said Monday.

Form letters such as those generated by activist website Leadnow.ca – which encourages Canadians to submit them – do not spell out an allegation about specific robo-calls but merely raise concern about the subject.

Separately Monday, the Conservatives tried to turn the tables on opposition attacks over fraudulent robo-calls in Guelph by hammering the Liberals over automated calls made by Grit candidate Frank Valeriote during the 2011 campaign.

Le résultat n’a surpris personne: les milieux économiques et le Parlement s’étaient prononcés contre. L’argumentaire des initiants reposait sur la dégradation des conditions de travail. «Mais le calendrier économique n’était pas favorable et les adversaires ont joué sur la peur», réagit Josiane Aubert, vice-présidente de Travail suisse, le groupe à l’origine du référendum.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the prize would spur industry to offer the costly bulbs, known as LEDs, at prices “affordable for American families.” There was also a “Buy America” component. Portions of the bulb would have to be made in the United States.

Now the winning bulb is on the market.

The price is $50.

A Limbaugh spokesman said that California mattress company Sleep Train asked to restart a “voiced endorsement” from Limbaugh that it had publicly cut off last week. Sleep Train’s departure from the program had been billed by some observers as particularly significant because the mattress retailer had been with Limbaugh show for 25 years.

Limbaugh spokesman Brian Glicklich on Thursday forwarded a copy of an email that he said had been sent to Sleep Train Chief Executive Dale Carlsen. In it, Glicklich wrote that Limbaugh had personally received the company’s requests to resume advertising on his show.

An analysis of these ridings shows turnout averaged 61.6 per cent, slightly higher than the 60.9 per cent average turnout in ridings where no allegations of impropriety have been reported. If we only focus on the ridings in which allegations of misleading robo-calls have been made, the turnout averaged 62 per cent.

Compared to 2008, turnout increased by 4.7 per cent in these ridings. It increased by only 3.9 per cent in ridings that have not been implicated in the scandal. Turnout in neighbouring untainted ridings does not seem to have been significantly different. If these allegations of voter suppression tactics are indeed true, they do not appear to have been very successful.