American International Group Incis preparing to pay its departing general counsel several million dollars in severance after she resigned over federal pay curbs, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
The insurer determined that Anastasia Kelly was entitled to the money under the company's severance plan, whose terms say certain executives can resign and collect severance if their pay is reduced significantly, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
An attempt to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day would be all-consuming for the administrator of the Transportation Security Administration — if there were one.
The post remains vacant because Sen. Jim DeMint, r-S.C., has held up President Barack Obama's nominee in opposition to the prospect of TSA workers joining a labor union.
Say that again? Speak up, I say. Photo via Moon Battery
Of all the consequences that rising levels of carbon dioxide emissions have wrought, this has to be one of the stranger ones: the world's oceans are getting louder. Yes, seas around the globe are becoming physically noisier. Here's how.
Photo: Cburnett (Wikipedia)
Threatened by habitat destruction and a lucrative black market trade in skins, bones and other body parts, a little bit of justice for tigers everywhere was meted out last week when villagers who killed and ate China's last Indochinese tiger were sentenced up to 12 years in prison and fined.
Photo via HummingLion Designs
As global temperatures rise, species across the world will have to, quite literally, run to stay alive. According to the latest research, 28.8% of the biomes of the earth will need to migrate at a rate greater than 1 kilometer per year to escape the heat, which is intensifying in a gradient band around the earth. Some organisms most sensitive to temperature changes will not be capable of outrunning the wave of climate change, destined to be made unfit for their new climate zone--leading to mass extinctions on a scale not seen since the last ice age.
This year provided plenty of cosmic eye-openers for astronomers and casual stargazers alike. Neighborhood planets such as Mercury and Jupiter received makeovers in both a scientific and literal sense. The discovery of water on the moon and Mars provided clues to the past, not to mention hints for the future of space exploration. A class of newly-detected "Super-Earth" planets around alien stars may ultimately prove more habitable than Earth. And a growing fleet of existing, new and revived space telescopes promises another stellar year ahead.
Low interest rates mean people are paying a high price for a safe place to put their money.
Many of the most widely recommended stocks had terrible returns over this past decade.
The missionary's detention could cause a diplomatic headache for the U.S. and the volatile nation.
Emotions and ideals collide in 300 posts linked to the Detroit bomb suspect.
The "ryukin" goldfish's beating hearts are visible through their translucent skin and scales.
As their business model unravels, the big networks could ditch free broadcast signals entirely.
Sanitize with lemons, dry shoes using newspaper, or give your cat a dab of olive oil.
A simple trick can help you figure out which breads are lower in calories per slice.
One city's famous tourist spot has lost its main attraction, and nobody knows why.
Kieron Williamson's exhibition sold out in minutes and hundreds wait to buy his work.
See if there's any truth to the rumors that artificial sweeteners are bad for you.
Outback Steakhouse agreed to pay $19 million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging sex discrimination against thousands of women at hundreds of its U.S. restaurants.
Not everyone should expect a salary bump next year, but things are looking up for 10 fields.
Authorities say they confiscated a teddy bear at a Southern California toy store that was stuffed with marijuana.
Acres of vacant land are eyed for urban agriculture under an ambitious plan that aims to turn the struggling Rust Belt city into a green mecca.
Reporting from Detroit – On the city’s east side, where auto workers once assembled cars by the millions, nature is taking back the land.
Cottonwood trees grow through the collapsed roofs of homes stripped clean for scrap metal. Wild grasses carpet the rusty shells of empty factories, now home to pheasants and wild turkeys.
This green veil is proof of how far this city has fallen from its industrial heyday and, to a small group of investors, a clear sign. Detroit, they say, needs to get back to what it was before Henry Ford moved to town: farmland. [...]
It is the size and scope of Hantz Farms that makes the project unique. Although company officials declined to pinpoint how many acres they might use, they have been quoted as saying that they plan to farm up to 5,000 acres within the Motor City’s limits in the coming years, raising organic lettuces, trees for biofuel and a variety of other things.
Van Wedeen, a Harvard radiology professor, is awestruck: “We’ve never really seen the brain – it’s been hiding in plain sight.” Conventional scanning has offered us a crude glimpse, but scientists such as Wedeen aim to produce the first ever three-dimensional map of all its neurons. They call this circuit diagram the “connectome”, and it could help us better understand everything from imagination and language to the miswirings that cause mental illness. But with 100 billion neurons hooked together by more connections than there are stars in the MilkyWay, the brain is a challenge that represents petabyte-level data.
Whether ice, wet floors or banana skins are to blame, falling over is no laughing matter.
A Greensboro woman is working to get her dog into the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest living dog.Contract disputes statewide in 2009 are projected to be up 9 percent from the year before. Statewide home foreclosure filings increased 17 percent, to 48,127 filings. Cases involving charges like assault by family members were up 18 percent statewide. While serious crime remains low, misdemeanor charges in New York City were up 7 percent and lesser violations were up 18 percent in 2009.
Judges and lawyers say the tales behind any number of cases, including low-level offenses like turnstile jumping and petty theft, are often a barometer of bad times. And they said that the data showed that courts nationally would be working through the recession’s consequences for years, much as they did with the flood of cases stemming from the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, even after the epidemic had slowed.
Every repugican in the House and nearly every repugican Senator voted against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (also known as the stimulus).
Although the Congressional Budget Office has credited the stimulus with creating up to 1.6 million jobs, the same lying politicians who opposed the stimulus have attempted to justify their opposition to the policy by smearing it as a failure.
But as ThinkProgress has documented, the same lying politicians are returning to their districts to take credit for the economic success of the stimulus.
Images via NoTakeOut
If you are resolving to cut back on take-out foods, but really aren't sure how taking over at the stovetop will go, there's a cool website that will help out. NoTakeOut plans your meal from each ingredient and tool needed down to every last step of preparation so you can take the kitchen by storm. And while the website doesn't purport to be a "green" option, it has a whole lot of potential for being just that.
Layoffs are a fact of life in this economy, but there are humane ways to do it. Then there’s the Arrow Trucking Arrow Trucking method.
The Tulsa, Okla., trucking company stopped payment on the gas cards of its drivers, leaving some of them stranded Tuesday around the United States, miles from home. No explanation on the website. No one at the company answering phones.
The 200 or so employees at Arrow Trucking’s headquarters were told to pack up their belongings and go home Tuesday morning, according to the Tulsa World.
The only acknowledgment was a brief recorded message on the company’s main phone number, asking drivers of its Freightliner and Kenworth trucks to turn their rigs in to the nearest dealer and to call a special hotline to arrange for a bus ticket home. Drivers of the company’s Navistar trucks were told to call back for more information.
Akmal Shaikh. Photograph: Reprieve/PA
China was this morning condemned for its human rights record after a British man who, his supporters say, had mental health problems, was executed for smuggling drugs.
Akmal Shaikh, 53, was put to death at 10.30am local time (2.30am British time) after frantic last-minute pleas for clemency by the Foreign Office failed.
