Month: February 2014

A U.S. judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked a pharmacy from providing a compound execution drug to Missouri jailers to use in the February 26 lethal injection of Michael Taylor, guilty in the death of a 15-year-old girl. Missouri and several other U.S. states that have the death penalty have increasingly been forced to look for alternate drugs and sources of drugs for executions as pharmaceutical companies have raised objections to their products being used in capital punishment. Some states have turned to so-called compounding pharmacies, which produce small amounts of drugs by prescription and are not regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, prompting defense attorneys to question the quality of the drugs and whether they could cause undue pain during an execution. U.S. District Court Judge Terence Kern on Wednesday afternoon granted a temporary restraining order preventing one such pharmacy, The Apothecary Shoppe, from supplying compounded pentobarbital to the Missouri Department of Corrections.

By Mari Saito TOKYO (Reuters) – The operator of Japan's wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant knew about record high measurements of a dangerous isotope in groundwater at the plant for five months before telling the country's nuclear watchdog, a regulatory official told Reuters. Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) said late on Wednesday it detected 5 million becquerels per liter of radioactive strontium-90 in a sample from a groundwater well about 25 meters from the ocean last September. A Tepco spokesman said there was uncertainty about the reliability and accuracy of the September strontium reading, so the utility decided to re-examine the data. Shinji Kinjo, head of a Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) taskforce on contaminated water issues at Fukushima, told Reuters he had not heard about the record high strontium reading until this month.

By David Lawder WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Congress just wants the U.S. budget wars to be over. If any more evidence was needed, 12 Republican senators swallowed their principles and voted to propel a "clean" one-year debt limit increase toward passage on Wednesday. As a result, any major deficit reduction efforts are stalled in Washington for at least a year, and perhaps until the next president takes office in 2017. The procedural vote, potentially toxic for some of the senators, would have been considered heresy three years ago, when the Republican Party made deficit reduction its top priority and the debt limit its main lever.

Severe pollution in Beijing has made the Chinese capital "barely suitable" for living, according to an official Chinese report, as the world's second-largest economy tries to reduce often hazardous levels of smog caused by decades of rapid growth. Pollution is a rising concern for China's stability-obsessed leaders, keen to douse potential unrest as affluent city dwellers turn against a growth-at-all-costs economic model that has tainted much of the country's air, water and soil. The report, by the Beijing-based Social Science Academic Press and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, ranked the Chinese capital second worst out of 40 global cities for its environmental conditions, official media reported on Thursday. China's smog has brought some Chinese cities to a near standstill, caused flight delays and forced schools to shut.