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Thursday, January 8, 2015
First Drip First Drip (1/08/15): Colorado NAACP bombed, GOP fights to narrow insurance coverage law, more
Posted By Emiene Wright on Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 9:17 AM
An improvised explosive device was detonated against the exterior wall of a building housing the Colorado Springs chapter of the NAACP on Tuesday, officials said. The explosion knocked items off the office walls but no one was injured. The FBI and authorities have a suspect in the crime. Jesse Paul of the Denver Post writes: “According to the the FBI, officials are seeking a ‘potential person of interest,’ described as a balding white male, about 40 years old."
Today the House is expected to easily pass a Republican-led measure to increase the number of hours employees have to work to qualify for employer-provided health insurance. The White House, however, threatened Wednesday to veto the bill. Currently the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama's signature health care reform law, requires large employers to provide health insurance for full-time employees, but changed the definition of full-time from the traditional 40 hours a week to 30 hours a week so that more people could be covered.
Oil giant Shell has agreed to pay a Nigerian fishing community about $83.5 million for the worst oil spill ever suffered in Nigeria. Wednesday's agreement ends a three-year legal battle in Britain over two spills in 2008 that destroyed thousands of acres of mangroves and the fish and shellfish that sustained villagers of the Bodo community in Nigeria's southern Niger Delta. The largest ever out-of-court settlement relating to oil spills in Nigeria is tiny compared with the billions in compensation and fines BP had to pay after the Macondo rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. However, the agreement reached between Shell and the Bodo community "is thought to be one of the largest payouts to an entire community following environmental damage," said the claimants' London lawyers, Leigh Day.
Scientists have discovered, in bacteria that live in dirt, a powerful antibiotic that they say can kill an array of germs. They say it works in a way that makes it unlikely that germs would become resistant to it. It may help solve an urgent global problem: the rise in infections that resist treatment with commonly used drugs, and the lack of new antibiotics to replace ones that no longer work. The new drug, teixobactin, was tested in mice and easily cured severe infections, with no side effects, researchers reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
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