Gay lawmaker upset by Obama reverend pick
22nd December 2008
The longest-serving openly gay member of Congress said yesterday it was a mistake for President-elect Barack Obama to invite the Rev. Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. "Mr. Warren compared same-sex couples to incest. I found that deeply offensive and unfair," Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., said in a broadcast interview. Warren is a popular evangelical who stresses the need for action on social issues such as reducing poverty and protecting the environment. But gay rights advocates are angry over Warren's backing of a California ballot initiative banning gay marriage, approved last month.
Two weeks after a Marine Corps plane slammed into a San Diego residential area, killing four people, questions have arisen about the decision to direct the hobbled fighter over homes to an inland airfield when a nearby base offered a route across open water. The cause of the fiery Dec. 8 crash is still being investigated. Marine generals have defended the choice to send the Hornet to Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, taking it over the University City neighborhood. Less than 10 miles away, however, the Naval Air Station North Island in Coronado sits at the tip of a peninsula and the flight path from the south crosses San Diego Bay.
A whistle-blower inside the Justice Department has accused members of the team investigating public corruption in Alaska of official misconduct, according to the judge who presided over Sen. Ted Stevens' trial in Washington, D.C. The whistle-blower's complaint, dated Dec. 2, is now the subject of an internal investigation by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, according to a memorandum and order signed Friday by U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan. Among the allegations was that a government employee accepted "multiple things of value" from sources cooperating in the investigation, Sullivan said. Stevens was found guilty Oct. 27 of seven felony counts of failing to report gifts and services on his annual Senate disclosures.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency routinely allows companies to keep new information about their chemicals secret, including compounds that have been shown to cause cancer and respiratory problems, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has found. The newspaper examined more than 2,000 filings in the EPA's registry of dangerous chemicals for the past three years. In more than half the cases, the EPA agreed to keep the chemical name a secret. In hundreds of other cases, it allowed the company to keep its name and address confidential. This is despite a federal law calling for public notice of any new information through the EPA's program monitoring chemicals that pose substantial risk.
Source: News Day