Stockholm - A Swedish man who was arrested after trying to split atoms in his kitchen said Wednesday he was only doing it as a hobby.
Richard Handl told The Associated Press that he had the radioactive elements radium, americium and uranium in his apartment in southern Sweden when police showed up and arrested him on charges of unauthorized possession of nuclear material.
The 31-year-old Handl said he had tried for months to set up a nuclear reactor at home and kept a blog about his experiments, describing how he created a small meltdown on his stove.
Society's Child
An engineer working on an airplane engine in New Zealand was sucked into the machine and killed.
Air New Zealand confirmed the man's death, saying he was working on the Lockheed C-130 Hercules engine early Monday. He was identified by local television reports as Miles Hunter, 51. The engine was not attached to a plane, but was on a stand when the incident occurred.
Rob Fyfe, chief executive of Air New Zealand, told TVNZ News that officials were at a "complete loss" as to how the incident occurred.
© Unknown
Michigan has removed about 30,000 college students from its food stamp program - close to double the initial estimate - saving about $75 million a year, says Human Services Director Maura Corrigan.
Federal rules don't allow most college students to collect food stamps, but Michigan had created its own rules that made nearly all students eligible, said Brian Rooney, Corrigan's deputy director. As a result, the number of Michigan college students on this form of welfare made the state a national leader. For example, Michigan had 10 times the number of students on food stamps as either Illinois or California, Rooney said.
Cutting off the students is part of what Corrigan says is an effort to change the culture of the state's welfare department and slash tens of millions of dollars of waste, fraud and abuse.
"Maybe (students) could go get a part-time job - that's what I did," said Corrigan, a former justice of the Michigan Supreme Court who attended Detroit's Marygrove College and University of Detroit Mercy School of Law.
Comment: Considering the state of the US economy, and that of Detroit in particular, this is a rather rich statement.
"We want to encourage people to be self-sufficient, not to be dependent on the government," she said in an interview with The Detroit News.
But critics say state funding has shrunk and tuition has skyrocketed since Corrigan attended college in the late '60s and early '70s. They cite Michigan's still-battered economy and say the suffering the cuts will create won't be apparent until after cash-strapped students return to campuses this fall.
© WTSP 10
Police investigated 26-year-old Ann Marie Kane after Department of Children and Families officials reported three adult-sized bite marks on her son.
According to an arrest report, Kane admitted biting the boy in the past because he was biting his siblings.
DCF has investigated Kane several times in the past. They removed the children from her care during the most recent investigation.
She was being held in the Polk County Jail on Saturday.
© Getty Images/OJO Images
According to the New York Times, the lawsuit alleges the family kept the woman a prisoner in their Queens home for 12 years under threat of death.
The woman says the family allowed her outside occasionally but used threats to keep her from reporting them.
© CNSNews.com/Penny Starr
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan addresses a summit designed to prevent and punish sexual and gender-based violence in U.S. schools.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan addresses a summit designed to prevent and punish sexual and gender-based violence in U.S. schools.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan says he will announce a new waiver system Monday to give schools a break.
The plan to offer waivers to all 50 states, as long as they meet other school reform requirements, comes at the request of President Barack Obama, Duncan said. More details on the waivers will come in September, he said.
The goal of the No Child Left Behind law is to have every student proficient in math and reading by 2014. States have been required to bring more students up to the math and reading standards each year, based on tests that usually take place each spring. The step-by-step ramping up of the 9-year-old law has caused heartburn in states and most school districts, because more and more schools are labeled as failures as too few of their students meet testing goals.
© Reuters/Bobby Yip
Five-tael (6.65 ounces or 190 grams) gold bars are seen at a jewellery store in Hong Kong in this April 21, 2011 illustration photo.
Five-tael (6.65 ounces or 190 grams) gold bars are seen at a jewellery store in Hong Kong in this April 21, 2011 illustration photo.
Wall Street plunged nearly 4 percent and other riskier assets collapsed as skittish investors sought a refuge from other safe havens such as U.S. Treasuries in the first session since S&P's downgrade, sending gold's option volatility to its highest level since May 2010 on bets the metal could rally further.
Gold is poised for its biggest one-day gain in nine months as investors bet that nothing short of further government intervention would stave off deepening woes. The Federal Open Market Committee's meeting on Tuesday may hint whether the U.S. central bank will ease monetary policy further.
© Bloomberg
Even Germany's most ardent pro-Europeans seem to have given up trying to find a solution - they are building an alibi for EMU break-up instead.
Even Germany's most ardent pro-Europeans seem to have given up trying to find a solution - they are building an alibi for EMU break-up instead.
This time we face the risk of double-dip recession without shock absorbers. Interest rates are already at or near zero in much of the OECD club. Fiscal deficits are stretched to the limits of safety.
Far from loosening, the US is on track to tighten by 2pc of GDP next year, and Europe by 1pc to 2pc, into the slowdown.
China has already pushed credit to 200pc of GDP. It cannot repeat the trick.
The Anglo-Saxons can print more money, but the gains in asset prices for the rich are offset by losses from fuel and food inflation for the poor. This is a destructive trade-off.
© Rocky Kistner/NRDC
Don't tell that to Cherri Foytlin, the oil worker's wife and mother of six who walked from the Gulf to Washington for the one-year memorial of the BP blowout last April. The media has been largely silent since then, so Cherri and others decided they needed to remind people that "the oil is not gone."
Yesterday [Aug. 4th], protesters staged a protest at BP's gleaming downtown New Orleans offices, where they dumped a batch of black gooey tar balls freshly hauled in from the beaches of Mississippi. After sitting in front of the BP's office building doorway for three hours as police tried to convince them to move, Cherri and two other protesters were arrested and booked for trespass later in the evening. But they had made their point.
The Transporation Security Administration has received a lot of negative attention lately surrounding security procedures, including full body scans and pat downs.
Now a state representative is speaking out strongly against those measures here in Arizona, but she came a long way to a make a point.
A coffee shop in Tempe hosted an event ot talk about TSA procedures on Saturday. It's a topic that has people fired up, especially after the now infamous breast grabbing incident from a Colorado woman at Sky Harbor airport.
"To be considered a terrorist is really an insult and it's really humiliating..it's a humiliation..it was a horrifying thing," said Alaska State Rep. Sharon Cissna.
Cissna has gone so far as to travel free from the TSA's grasp. All the way from the frosty north country to Texas to highlight her own uncomfortable experience at a Seattle airport.
She's stopping along the way in small settings, but she's received a big response.
