Bipartisan efforts for healthcare reform bill fall apart

The Senate Finance Committee’s efforts to creat a bipartisan healthcare reform bill have come to a screeching halt. Committee Chairman Max Baucus announced yesterday that he will pitch his plan for a healthcare overhaul without GOP support.
The Montana Democrat’s bill had been viewed as the one most likely to placate both moderate Democrats and at [...]

Debate over carbon emissions bill heats up in Congress

By Alexander Laska >> This post syndicated with permission from Scoop44.com
Perhaps the greatest cause of contention in Congress this year, the American Clean Energy and Security Act has some calling the bill “reckless” while others hail it as having “the moral significance equivalent to that of the civil rights legislation of the 1960’s.”
Introduced by Representatives [...]

DOT secretary says modernization will create “sustainable” jobs

Our friends over at Scoop 44 recently got a chance to speak with Ray LaHood, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation. “There’s so much enthusiasm to do things states haven’t been able to do,” LaHood tells Scoop’s Alexander Heffner.
“The money simply hasn’t been there to build new buses, roadways, bike paths, and street car programs,” he [...]

Weekly Blog Round-Up: Flying Chihuahua Edition

Hello, and welcome to the Flying Chihuahua Edition of the Weekly Blog Round-Up. As always, we’ve got five great articles from our news blog to share with you, plus five awesome things from those other websites on The Internets. You know the ones we’re talking about.
From the News Blog
1) Definitely the weirdest story on our [...]

Colleges, financial aid offices fear the worst is yet to come

By Julia Leonard >> This post syndicated with permission from Scoop44.com.
As high school seniors across the country scramble to visit the schools they’ve been accepted to and to weigh the benefits and weaknesses of each college, financial aid offices are struggling to retain current students while still bringing in a strong freshman class. Reports in [...]

No swine flu cases in New England

Health officials are saying there are no confirmed cases of swine flu in New England.
In Massachusetts, officials say they’ve tested about two dozen cases in accordance with guidelines set by the CDC. None of those cases has tested positive for the H1N1 virus, which has killed more than a hundred people in Mexico.

Weekly Blog Round-Up: Swish and Flick Edition

Welcome again to the Weekly Blog Round-Up, where we recap the best stories from our newsblog and five awesome things from elsewhere online that you should check out. As always, the Round-Up is brought to you as always by Whatever Caffeinated Beverage EJ Happens to Have On Hand™. Cheers!
From the news blog
5) Could Hermione Granger [...]

IMF: Hope for the economy may be in sight

The head of the International Monetary Fund says the global economic meltdown may be starting to wind down, and that recovery could emerge in 2010.

But Dominique Strauss-Kahn says countries must act together and immediately adopt policies aimed at ending the recession.

He adds that even though recovery is possible by the first half of 2010, 2009 [...]

Older relatives joining Facebook

When it was new, Facebook appealed to young people in part because it was so simple. But as social networking sites get easier to use, everyone’s logging on–maybe even your parents and grandparents.
Facebook now has some 200 million registered users, according to this article by CNN’s John Sutter. If the networking site were a country, [...]

The truth about what happened at Columbine–ten years later

It hardly seems possible that it’s been ten years since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School and opened fire. But even a decade later, we’re still learning what happened on April 20, 1999.

USA Today’s Greg Toppo reports that many of the scintillating details we heard about the shooters–that they were frequently [...]