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A chemical used in rocket fuel and fireworks is also found in an array of food products, particularly those popular with babies and children, according to findings released Wednesday by Consumer Reports.

The tests by the advocacy group come decades after the chemical, called perchlorate, was first identified as a contaminant in food and water. The Environmental Working Group in 2003 found perchlorate in nearly 20% of supermarket lettuce tested. 

Linked to potential brain damage in fetuses and newborns and thyroid troubles in adults, perchlorate was detected in measurable levels of 67% of 196 samples of 63 grocery and 10 fast-food products, the most recent tests by Consumer Reports found. The levels detected ranged from just over two parts per billion (ppb) to 79 ppb.

A 13,600-year-old mastodon skull was uncovered in an Iowa creek, state officials announced this week.

Iowa's Office of the State Archaeologist said in a social media post that archaeologists found the well-preserved skull on the side of a creek bed in Wayne County Wednesday at an excavation site they had been mining over the last 12 days.

Throughout the almost two-week dig, several mastodon bones were recovered, but the skull was something unique, as it was the "first-ever well-preserved mastodon (primarily the skull) that has been excavated in Iowa," the post read.

More than 100 people were treated for heat-related illness at a Colorado airshow on Saturday, with attendees describing a lack of shade and free water on festival grounds as temperatures soared to 96F (36C) highs.

The Colorado Springs fire department said those who fell ill at the Pike’s Peak regional airshow suffered conditions such as dehydration, heat exhaustion and heat stroke, according to KRDO.

Five people were taken to hospital. Another hundred reportedly sought help in a triage tent where several were given IV fluids on site.

The airshow ran out of free water, authorities said, but noted that attendees could fill their bottles with water at the medical tent and that vendors also had water for sale.

KOLKATA, Aug 18 (Reuters) - Some Indian junior doctors remained off the job on Sunday as they demanded swift justice for a colleague who was raped and murdered, despite the end of a strike called by a big doctors' association, while some other people held street protests.

Doctors across the country have held protests,candlelight marches and refused to see non-emergency patients in the past week after the killing of the 31-year-old postgraduate student of chest medicine in the early hours of Aug. 9 in the eastern city of Kolkata.

In solidarity with the doctors, thousands of people marched in the streets of Kolkata on Sunday evening chanting "we want justice", as authorities in West Bengal state struggle to contain demonstrations against the horrific crime.

A federal judge in Alabama on Tuesday refused to block the Biden administration from enforcing new anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ students in four Republican-led states, breaking with six other judges who have said the rules are invalid.

U.S. District Judge Annemarie Axon in Birmingham in a 122-page ruling, opens new tab rejected various arguments that the four states led by Alabama made in challenging U.S. Department of Education regulations that say a federal law barring sex discrimination in education extends to gender identity.

The regulations also bar harassment against LGBTQ students, such as refusing to use a transgender student's preferred pronouns, and changes the procedures schools must use in investigating accusations of student misconduct.

Axon, an appointee of Republican former President Donald Trump, said the claims by the states and several conservative groups were conclusory and not backed by court precedent.

"Although Plaintiffs may dislike the Department’s rules, they have failed to show a substantial likelihood of success in proving the Department’s rulemaking was unreasonable or not reasonably explained," Axon wrote.

A federal judge in Florida has temporarily blocked a U.S. Federal Trade Commission rule that would ban agreements commonly signed by workers not to join their employers' rivals or launch competing businesses, becoming the second judge to rule that the ban is likely invalid.

During a hearing on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Timothy Corrigan in Ocala, Florida, blocked the FTC from applying the rule to real estate developer Properties of the Villages, pending the outcome of the company's lawsuit claiming the commission lacked the power to adopt the ban earlier this year.

Corrigan at the hearing said the rule implicated a question of "extraordinary economic and political significance" that Congress did not empower the FTC to address, according to a court transcript.

Corrigan cited the "major questions doctrine," a legal theory embraced in recent years by conservative lawyers and judges - including the U.S. Supreme Court - in challenges to many Democratic and progressive policies. The doctrine says that federal agencies can only issue rules with broad societal impacts with Congress' explicit permission.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Tel Aviv on Sunday on a Middle East tour aimed at intensifying diplomatic pressure to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza this week to end the bloodshed between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas.

On his 10th trip to the region since the war began in October, Blinken will meet on Monday with senior Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a senior State Department official said.

After Israel, Blinken will continue onto Egypt.

The talks to strike a deal for a truce and return of hostages held in Gaza were now at an "inflection point", a senior Biden administration official told reporters en route to Tel Aviv, adding Blinken was going to stress to all parties the importance of getting this deal over the finish line.

"We think this is a critical time," the official said.

The mediating countries - Qatar, the United States and Egypt - have so far failed to narrow enough differences to reach an agreement in months of on-off negotiations, and violence continued unabated in Gaza on Sunday.

A white woman who fatally shot her Black neighbor through a locked door amid a neighborhood feud in Florida has been convicted by a jury of manslaughter.

The jury took less than three hours Friday to find 60-year-old Susan Lorincz guilty in the death of Ajike "AJ" Shantrell Owens, a 35-year-old single mother who was shot once in the right side of her chest with a .380-caliber handgun while standing outside Lorincz's front door in June 2023. Owens' death drew national attention and put a new spotlight on race, gun violence and Florida's controversial "stand your ground" law.

The defense team offered no comment after the verdict, citing respect for the victim's family. In a news conference outside the courthouse, Anthony Thomas, an attorney representing Owens' family, called on Circuit Judge Robert Hodges to impose the maximum sentence of 30 years in prison.

Re-posting because post was removed because title didn't match article - but title was changed on the site!

First week of school teacher assigns report with leading questions about Christianity. Non-Christians push back. Turns out, the teacher was Erich Richter, a football coach at SHS who has his emergency certification in English that expired on June 30, 2024. Prior to teaching, Richter ran for Tulsa County sheriff but was disqualified due to embezzling funds from Taco Bueno

Hurricane Debby left behind not only a trail of deadly destruction in the Southeast last week but also more than 100 pounds of narcotics, discovered along Florida’s shores, authorities said.

On August 4, 25 packages of cocaine were found on a beach in Islamorada, a village in the Florida Keys about 80 miles from Key West, according to a social media post from the US Customs and Border Patrol in Miami.

A good Samaritan alerted authorities after coming across the packages, which weighed about 70 pounds and contained cocaine with an estimated street value of more than $1 million, the agency said.

Samuel Briggs, the acting chief patrol agent of the US Border Patrol’s Miami sector, shared a photo on X, showing the large quantity of seized drugs.

As students return to college campuses across the United States, administrators are bracing for a resurgence in activism against the war in Gaza.

Changes to realtor commissions taking effect this weekend could give home sellers a lot more negotiating power — and for buyers, potentially some more paperwork.

Starting Saturday, realtors will be barred from offering compensation on multiple listing services (MLS), making it harder for buyers’ agents and sellers’ agents to negotiate fees on their own, as they’ve done for decades.

Until now, home sellers traditionally had to pay commissions, commonly in the range of 5% to 6%, to their agents, who then split that fee with the buyer’s agent upon making a sale. The new rules, which follow a historic $418 million settlement with the National Association of Realtors in March, leave more room for sellers to negotiate those fees down and make it more appealing for buyers to forgo agents entirely.

“It’s the biggest change probably in the history of real estate,” said Mike McCann, a realtor in Philadelphia. “It has created a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety” within the industry, he said.

With the MLS no longer serving as a forum for negotiation, it remains to be seen how agents, buyers and sellers will choose to cover commission costs. While sellers could pass on any savings on the commission to the buyer in the form of a lower home price, it’s also possible that sellers could increasingly choose to ask the buyer to cover some or even all of the costs.

Private and public investment in clean energy rose to a total of $147B in the first half of this year — a record-setting figure.

Exactly two years ago today, President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, establishing a wide array of clean energy programs meant to supercharge spending on climate solutions.

Investment in clean energy projects — from solar manufacturing facilities to home batteries to hydrogen hubs — has taken off ever since, rising to record heights in the first half of this year.

Across the first six months of 2024, U.S. cleantech investment hit $147 billion, per new data from the Clean Investment Monitor, a joint project from Rhodium Group and the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. That’s a more than 30 percent jump from the first half of 2023. The report measures actual investment — not announcements or plans — from both public and private sources.

The largest solar grazing project in the U.S. will reduce mowing costs and emissions — and make for some happy sheep.

JR Howard of Texas Solar Sheep can’t buy sheep fast enough. He supplies them to solar farms, where their grazing keeps grass short for less than the cost of mowing it. Demand for his animals has skyrocketed over the past few years as more and more large solar installations are being built. Now Howard is scrambling to fulfill his biggest order yet: for 6,000 sheep, which will be put to work grazing eight Texas solar fields run by Enel North America.

Howard’s booming business is a form of agrivoltaics, which combines solar panels with agriculture or other land uses that benefit farmers and ecosystems.

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Agrivoltaics projects involving sheep have been shown to improve the quality of the soil, since their manure is a natural fertilizer. At a solar installation in Minnesota, where Enel first started grazing sheep in 2017, the company saw a 200 percent improvement in organic matter. Using sheep instead of mowers also cuts down on fossil fuel use, while allowing native plants to mature and bloom. Solar projects that prioritize native plant growth have been found to increase the biodiversity of plants and insects, like native bees, and to reduce soil erosion.

• Kratom, sometimes referred to as “gas station heroin,” is an herb with opioid- and stimulant-like effects.
• It can be fatal in very high doses but is not subject to much federal regulation.
• So states and cities have been banning kratom sales or enacting rules and restrictions.

The Affordable Care Act is back under attack. Not as in the repeal-and-replace debates of yore, but in a fresher take from Republican lawmakers who say key parts of the ACA cost taxpayers too much and provide incentive for fraud.

Several House Republican leaders have called on two watchdog agencies to investigate, while Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) fired off more than half a dozen questions in a recent letter to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

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While potential fraud in government programs has always been a rallying cry for conservatives, the recent criticisms are a renewed line of attack on the ACA because repealing it is unlikely, given that more than 21 million people enrolled in marketplace plans for this year.