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In Senate testimony, constitutional experts say the president has the right to appoint independent advisors as long as the distinction between practical and legal authority is rigorously maintained. Reporting from Washington - Five constitutional experts testified at a Senate hearing Tuesday that President Obama's extensive use of policy "czars" is legal -- as long as the officials do not overstep their authority.

How do I add a video to my blog posts so that they show up? I have seen some posts with videos I can watch but when I look at my previews I cannot tell if they work or not.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on Wednesday that the United States bears a substantial share of the blame for the current economic crisis but the world must work together to ease the strains. "The rest of the world needs the U.S. economy and financial system to recover in order for it to revive," Geithner told the Economic Club of Washington. "Just as importantly, we need the rest of the world to recover if we are to prosper again here at home." But a balanced recovery will mean that other countries cannot be "dependent on the U.S. consumer."

WASHINGTON – The government must toughen its monitoring of the $700 billion financial bailout to ensure that banking institutions limit their top executives' pay and comply with other restrictions, federal auditors said Tuesday in the first comprehensive review of the rescue package. The Treasury Department has no mechanism in place to track how institutions are using $150 billion in taxpayer money that the government injected into the banking system as of last month, the Government Accountability Office concluded in its report to Congress. The auditors acknowledged that the program, created Oct. 3 to help stabilize a rapidly faltering banking system,...

Yesterday, it was reported that wannabe VP Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account was hacked by a perpetrator wishing to find incriminating information in her emails. It was not done using some strange computer security vulnerability. It was not done by guessing her password. It was done just in the same way as Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile account was hacked some time ago: by guessing the answer to the respective owner’s security questions. For Paris Hilton, it was the name of her dog. For Sarah Palin, it was her zip code, date of birth, ad where she met her husband. How hard is...

To the surprise of many, the earthquake on April 18, 2008, about 120 miles east of St. Louis, originated in the Wabash Valley Fault and not the better-known and more-dreaded New Madrid Fault in Missouri's bootheel. The concern of Douglas Wiens, Ph.D., and Michael Wysession, Ph.D., seismologists at Washington University in St. Louis, is that the New Madrid Fault may have seen its day and the Wabash Fault is the new kid on the block. The earthquake registered 5.2 on the Richter scale and hit at 4:40 a.m. with a strong aftershock occurring at approximately 10:15 a.m. that morning, followed...

WASHINGTON - President Bush's refusal to let two confidants provide information to Congress about fired federal prosecutors represents the most expansive view of executive privilege since Watergate, the House Judiciary Committee told a federal judge Thursday. Lawyers for the Democratic-led panel argued in court documents that Bush's chief of staff, Josh Bolten, and former White House counsel Harriet Miers are not protected from subpoenas last year that sought information about the dismissals. The legal filing came in lawsuit that pits the legislative branch against the executive in a fight over a president's powers. The committee is seeking the testimony as...

Source: University of Oxford Date: August 21, 2007 San Andreas Fault Likely Much More Destructive Than Current Models Predict Science Daily — High-speed ruptures travelling along straight fault lines could explain why some earthquakes are more destructive than others, according to an Oxford University scientist. In this week’s Science, Professor Shamita Das suggests that ruptures in the Earth’s surface moving at 6km per second could make future earthquakes along California’s San Andreas fault much more destructive than current models predict. A box canyon on the San Andreas fault: High speed ruptures travelling along the straight section of the fault could...

Astronomer Sir Patrick Moore thinks TV is worse than it used to be - because the BBC is run by women. The presenter of The Sky At Night also belittled female newsreaders in an interview with the Radio Times, describing them as "these jokey women". Sir Patrick, 84, criticised the BBC for showing interesting programmes late at night, especially the 650th edition of The Sky At Night, which went out at 2am Astronomer Sir Patrick Moore

Science Daily — Tiny tremors and temblors recently discovered in fault zones from California to Japan are generated by slow-moving earthquakes that may foreshadow catastrophic seismic events, according to scientists at Stanford University and the University of Tokyo. In a study published in the March 15 issue of the journal Nature, the research team focused on weak seismic signals known as "non-volcanic tremor" and "low-frequency earthquakes," which seismologists say may be useful in forecasting the likelihood of potentially destructive mega-quakes of magnitude 8 or higher."Non-volcanic tremor is a weak shaking of the Earth that was discovered about five years ago...

Magnitude 6.5 - KEPULAUAN OBI, INDONESIA 2007 February 20 08:04:27 UTC Earthquake Details Magnitude 6.5 (Strong) Date-Time Tuesday, February 20, 2007 at 08:04:27 (UTC) = Coordinated Universal Time Tuesday, February 20, 2007 at 5:04:27 PM = local time at epicenter Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones Location 1.059°S, 127.066°E Depth 31.3 km (19.4 miles) Region KEPULAUAN OBI, INDONESIA Distances 210 km (130 miles) S of Ternate, Moluccas, Indonesia 315 km (195 miles) NNW of Ambon, Moluccas, Indonesia 1320 km (820 miles) NNW of DARWIN, Northern Territory, Australia 2325 km (1440 miles) ENE of JAKARTA, Java, Indonesia Location Uncertainty...

Texas view on environment is 18 lanes wide-critics By Anna Driver Fri Jan 19, 8:45 AM ET HOUSTON (Reuters) - As President Bush readies a new plan on global warming, environmentalists say an 18-lane highway going up in Houston speaks volumes about how people in his home state of Texas view the planet. Between 2003 and 2009, $2.7 billion of state and federal money will have been plowed into expanding 23 miles of Interstate-10 in west Houston to as wide as 18 lanes in some stretches of the city's main east-west road."It is a concrete monstrosity," said Jim Blackburn,...

A fault line beneath Lake Tahoe could rupture at any time and unleash a massive earthquake that triggers an underwater landslide and sends 30-foot waves crashing into nearby parks, campgrounds, homes and marinas, researchers said. Such an event along the West Tahoe Fault, the biggest of Lake Tahoe's three geologic faults, could also send waves over a dam that regulates water flow into the Truckee River, according to research presented last week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. The West Tahoe Fault, which skirts the lake's western shore and runs through Fallen Leaf Lake and...

WASHINGTON A company that claimed it developed a way to harvest stem cells from days-old human embryos without harming the embryos was accused at a Senate hearing Wednesday of misrepresenting its work. Advanced Cell Technology Inc. of Alameda, Calif., drew fire from Sens. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Tom Harkin, D-Iowa., authors of a bill vetoed by President Bush that would have expanded embryonic stem cell research through government funding. Supporters of such research say it could lead to treatments and cures for a wide variety of ailments, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease and spinal cord injuries. Bush and abortion foes,...

The southern end of the San Andreas fault near Los Angeles, which has been still for more than two centuries, is under immense stress and could produce a massive earthquake at any moment, a scientist said on Wednesday. Yuri Fialko, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at La Jolla, California, said that given average annual movement rates in other areas of the fault, there could be enough pent-up energy in the southern end to trigger a cataclysmic jolt of up to 10 metres (32 ft). "The observed strain rates confirm that the southern section of the San Andreas fault may...

SAN FRANCISCO - If an earthquake like the one that devastated the city in 1906 struck today, the toll would be staggering: tens of thousands of buildings damaged and hundreds of people dead, according to a new study. The report released Monday calculated that a repeat of that 7.9-magnitude temblor would cause 1,800 to 3,400 deaths, damage more than 90,000 buildings, displace as many as 250,000 households and result in $150 billion in damage. "We already witnessed the effect of the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people from last year's hurricanes," said Bill Ellsworth, a geophysicist with the U.S....

Rumbles are attributed to plate shifts, not volcanic activity Tremors within the Earth are usually--but not always--related to the activity of a volcano. Now, such vibrations have been recorded nowhere near a volcano, but at a geologic observatory at the San Andreas Fault. Scientists believe the fault tremors may be related to activity at a subduction zone--a place where one of Earth's constantly moving tectonic plates slips beneath another. To determine whether the San Andreas Fault is moving with the tremors, scientists with the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD) are installing instruments to measure the tremors' activity. Located...

HAYWARD, Calif. (AP) -- New cracks appear in Elke DeMuynck's ceiling every few weeks, zigzagging across her living room, creeping toward the fireplace, veering down the wall. Month after month, year after year, she patches, paints and waits. "It definitely lets you know your house is constantly shifting," DeMuynck said. So do the gate outside that swings uselessly 2 1/2 inches from its latch, the strange bulges in the street and the geology students who make pilgrimages to her cul-de-sac. DeMuynck could throw her paint brush from her front stoop and hit the Hayward Fault, which geologists consider the most...

Fault East of Bay Area 'Locked and Loaded' Saturday March 25, 2006 7:31 PM By SCOTT LINDLAW Associated Press Writer HAYWARD, Calif. (AP) - New cracks appear in Elke DeMuynck's ceiling every few weeks, zigzagging across her living room, creeping toward the fireplace, veering down the wall. Month after month, year after year, she patches, paints and waits. ``It definitely lets you know your house is constantly shifting,'' DeMuynck said. So do the gate outside that swings uselessly 2 inches from its latch, the strange bulges in the street and the geology students who make pilgrimages to her cul-de-sac. DeMuynck...

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush said Wednesday the responsibility for invading Iraq based in part on faulty weapons intelligence rested solely with him, taking on the issue in his most direct and personal terms in the 1,000-plus days since the war's first shots. "It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong," Bush said. "As president, I'm responsible for the decision to go into Iraq." The president's mea culpa was accompanied by a robust defense of the divisive war. "Saddam was a threat - and the American people and the world is better off because he...