In a huge step for mankind ...

Carbon dioxide will soon be declared a dangerous pollutant - a move that could help propel slow-moving climate-change legislation on Capitol Hill, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency said Monday.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told reporters that a formal "endangerment finding," which would trigger federal regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, probably would "happen in the next months."

Jackson announced her timeline even as top senators said they were delaying plans to introduce legislation that would set new limits on carbon dioxide emissions. Senators had been scheduled to unveil legislation next Tuesday, but the date has now been pushed back to later in September.

The EPA can formalize the finding anytime, now that it has closed a 60-day public comment period that netted more than 300,000 responses.

A formal endangerment finding would obligate the agency to regulate greenhouse gas pollution under the Clean Air Act - even if Congress doesn't pass a final climate-change bill.

President Obama and Jackson have said they would prefer that Congress - rather than the EPA - take the lead in implementing new greenhouse gas limits. Businesses and energy industry leaders also have largely favored congressional action over EPA-imposed limits, because they believe lawmakers are better positioned to combine economic safeguards with any new carbon cap.

"Legislation is so important, because it will combine the most efficient, most economy-wide, least costly (and) least disruptive way to deal with carbon dioxide pollution," Jackson said. "We get further faster without top-down regulation."

But Jackson insisted the EPA would continue on a path that began when the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that greenhouse gases qualified as pollutants and could be regulated if the government determined they threatened the public.

"Two years is a long time for this country to wait for us to respond to the Supreme Court's ruling," Jackson said.

Read the entire The SanFrancisco Chronicle article here.

Purdue University on where Co2 is coming from:

"... study reported administrative costs had grown faster than academic expenses."

You don't say.

Don't suppose the layoffs have anything to do with this: As economy suffers, bureaucratic ranks growing at UNC. Or, this: Audit: Mary Easley's N.C. State salary 'excessive'.

Makes you wonder, if the economy hadn't tanked, would the 16-school university system have continued to bloat their upper ranks?

Some minor details to keep in mind: The 900 administrators getting the ax aren't all from one school and some of the positions that will be cut may not be filled at present.

UNC System schools will eliminate about 900 administrative positions as the system works to trim its budget.

The cuts were announced Monday following a meeting between system President Erskine Bowles and university chancellors.

The decision comes after a Bain and Co. study reported administrative costs had grown faster than academic expenses.

More from The Charlotte Business Journal.

If this is the first you're hearing about it, you're not invited to attend. Sorry. But, you can follow the senator's tweets. Hooray!

I like how McCain calls the invitation-only meeting a "town hall." The only other people invited to attend are employees of Carolinas Medical Center. What, are they scared of citizens of the Q.C.? The largest and most diverse -- and largely Democratic -- population in the state?

And, really, this is less about health care than it is about North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr getting some face time with two-time presidential loser, Sen. John McCain.

Here's hoping a few brave doctors share some of their patient's insurance horror stories with the crowd.

Hospital staff and invited guests are expected to make up the crowd this morning when Republican U.S. Sens. Richard Burr, John McCain and Mitch McConnell host a health care forum at Carolinas Medical Center.

The three senators will tour the Levine Children's Hospital near uptown Charlotte at 8:30a.m. and meet with employees, doctors and patients until 10. The event is nominally open but will take place in an auditorium that can seat only about 250 people.

“We have tremendous interest from our employees,” said hospital spokeswoman Gail Rosenburg. “We are such dominant players in this whole issue of reform that we're pleased to be able to have this event for our employees.”

More from Charlotte.com.

There's a new book out: Money-Driven Medicine, by Maggie Mahar. In it she looks behind the curtain and explains to her readers that insurance isn't about them, it's about money and power -- for those who already have money and power, of course.

"We're now treating medicine as if it were an industrial product."

In related news, Obama's Organizing for America group will be in town on Thursday.

What is it with people enslaving children these days? It seems a story like this breaks every few months. Guess it's time to face the facts: We're surrounded by loony toons ... and this one thinks she's a god. Sheesh. Loony.Toons.

According to the indictment, Farquharson persuaded the mother of two of the children to let them live with her by claiming to be a god. She legally adopted the third child. All three of the children are British nationals.

The children were 11, 7 and 2 years old when they started living with Farquharson, the indictment says. Starting in 1992 they lived in Marbella, Spain, until Farquharson moved them to a house on Hampton Downs Road in Monroe in 2001. They lived there until 2005.

Farquharson allegedly convinced the children she was a god.

The indictment claims she forced them to work from before dawn until after midnight cooking, cleaning, weeding gardens and tending to a flock of about 100 chickens.

Read the entire article at Charlotte.com.