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Britain's opposition Labour Party will on Tuesday take aim at "obscene" billionaires, pledging a radical redistribution of wealth to cut the power of the super rich who it says bankroll Prime Minister Boris Johnson in return for tax breaks. The Conservatives are promising to deliver Brexit while Labour says it wants to be the most radical socialist government in British history. Labour said almost a third of Britain’s 151 billionaires have donated more than 50 million pounds ($64.8 million) to the Conservatives since 2005 in return for tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations worth 100 billion pounds.

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 17:30:00 -0500

A Colorado man has been convicted of killing 29-year-old Kelsey Berreth, who was his fiancee and the mother of his young daughter, following a dramatic trial that brought bombshell testimony from witnesses, including a fellow inmate and his former girlfriend. Frazee was found guilty on all counts, including first-degree felony murder and three counts of solicitation to commit murder. Frazee was accused of attacking Berreth with a baseball bat at her Woodland Park, Colorado, home on Nov. 22, 2018 -- which was Thanksgiving -- while the couple's 1-year-old daughter, Kaylee, sat in a playpen in a back room.

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 17:25:00 -0500

Nearly 60% of a group of contaminated sites in the United States earmarked for environmental clean-up are located in areas vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, according to a congressional watchdog report released on Monday. The Government Accountability Office found that 945 of 1,571 sites on the National Priorities List (NPL) eligible for so-called 'Superfund' financing are located in areas that are prone to flooding, storm surge, sea level rise, and wildfires, which could damage those sites and potentially release contaminants that imperil public health. It called on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which oversees Superfund sites, to integrate information on the potential impacts of climate change effects into its risk assessments and response.

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 17:11:00 -0500

Population growth and climate change are putting increasingly intense pressure on the planet's limited water supplies, with worsening shortages emerging from the Middle East to Asia and Latin America, researchers and bankers said on Monday. "All the local crises around the world are building up to a global crisis," Torgny Holmgren, executive director of the Stockholm International Water Institute, told a conference on the issue at London-based think-tank Chatham House. In Jordan, the third most water-scarce country, raising water prices to reflect the shortage would make economic sense - but not when nearly 1.5 million Syrian refugees, on top of 9 million citizens, depend on it, said Craig Davies of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 17:05:57 -0500

Federal agencies responded too slowly as Beijing recruited U.S.-based researchers to transfer intellectual property from American laboratories, leaving U.S. taxpayers unwittingly funding the rise of China's economy and military, U.S. Senate investigators said on Monday. The Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released the 105-page report saying China started in the late 1990s to exchange salaries, research funding, laboratory space and other incentives for information from U.S. university laboratories and other research institutions, much of it publicly funded. As China spent 20 years recruiting researchers with access to advanced science and technology, U.S. agencies failed to adequately respond.

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 17:03:14 -0500