This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric.
More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.
The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.
Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.

Community business leaders have jumped into the budget debate, some questioning city spending on what they see as "Ferrari"-level benefits for employees and high salaries in middle management. Broadmoor luxury resort chief executive Steve Bartolin wrote an open letter asking why the city spends $89,000 per employee, when his enterprise has a similar number of workers and spends only $24,000 on each.

Blogging In The Age Of Obama

I admit it can be a bit annoying at times, not as bad but in some ways similar to blogging during primary season. There are people who think they are noble truthtellers for explaining how Obama is the awesomest ever, and people who think they are noble truthtellers for pointing out how foolish we all were for voting for him instead of... well, not quite sure who we were supposed to vote for. I'm not writing this in a Broderesque "nuts to the left of me, nuts to the right, must mean I'm just right" way. People can legitimately believe Obama is awesome, and they can legitimately believe he's awful, having different priorities, interpretations, and understanding of things which can't necessarily be known. In other words, people can disagree about stuff! This does not bother me. What's annoying is getting from both sides an accusation of being some kind of a sellout or dupe. By both sides I don't mean all people, I mean in the sense of coming from some people from both directions.

Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote that the Justice Department is reviewing Hatch's request and other materials to determine whether to open an investigation into whether the BCS violates antitrust laws. ...

"Importantly, and in addition, the administration also is exploring other options that might be available to address concerns with the college football postseason," Weich wrote ...

"The administration shares your belief that the current lack of a college football national championship playoff with respect to the highest division of college football ... raises important questions affecting millions of fans, colleges and universities, players and other interested parties," Weich wrote.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who originally supported the plan, reversed his position this week and called Holder to lobby for moving the trial outside lower Manhattan. The city has claimed it will cost them hundreds of millions of dollars to provide security for a court case that is expected to last at least a year.

In addition, six senators on Tuesday wrote to Holder and urged him to abandon the idea.

The letter read, in part, "You will be providing them one of the most visible platforms in the world to exalt their past acts and to rally others in support of further terrorism."

President Barack Obama, acting on a pledge to support nuclear power, will propose tripling loan guarantees for new reactors to more than $54 billion, two people familiar with the plan said.

The additional loan guarantees in Obama’s budget, which will be released on Feb. 1, are part of an effort to bolster nuclear-power production after Obama called for doing so in his State of the Union address Jan. 27. Today, the Energy Department plans to announce creation of a panel to find a solution to storing the waste generated by nuclear plants.

"Talking about climate change is not intellectual luxury; it is an actual fact," bin Laden said. "All the industrial countries, particularly the great ones, are responsible for global warming. The majority of them, however, signed the Kyoto Protocol and agreed to end the emission of harmful gases. Bush Junior, however, and the Congress before him, rejected this pact to appease the giant corporations."

Bin Laden cited leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky, who he said "was correct when he indicated a resemblance between the American policies and those of the mafia gangs. Those are the real terrorists."

Andrew Wakefield, who in 1998 claimed an unfounded link between the vaccination and autism, “showed a callous disregard” for the suffering of children, subjecting them to unnecessary, invasive tests, a hearing found. ...He received £50,000 to carry out the research on behalf of solicitors acting for parents who believed that their children had been harmed by MMR, but could not account for how at least half this money had been spent.

He also did not declare any conflict of interest to The Lancet medical journal, which published the research.