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According to a statement released by the Combined Joint Task Force, the anti-ISIS coalition conducted a total of 32 airstrikes on ISIS insurgents yesterday.23 of the sorties were conducted in Syria while air raids were especially intense over Raqqa. The statement continued to read that 10 strikes engaged seven ISIS tactical units, destroying three fighting positions, three technicals and destroying two bridges.US-led airstrikes were also conducted on Islamic State militants near Deir Ezzor and Palmyra, two cities that have Syrian government forces stationed nearby.No American airstrikes were conducted on ISIS militants at Al-Bab, suggesting some tension between the US and...

The UN's climate change panel is set to release a report next month that reluctantly concludes there has been no warming of the earth in at least the last 15 years. Fewer and fewer people are believers that climate change is man made. This hasn't stopped the Obama administration from releasing new rules governing "carbon pollution" at new power plants that would mean the virtual destruction of the coal industry.

A tsunami generated by a massive earthquake off Alaska could cause major damage to California's economy and force 750,000 people to evacuate, a report published Wednesday warned. One third of all boats in California's marinas could be damaged or sunk, costing some $700 million in losses, while major ports would struggle to get huge cargo vessels out to sea in time to avoid being buffeted by tsunamis. Experts from the US Geological Survey (USGS) based their damage assessment on the scenario of a 9.1 magnitude quake off Alaska's Pacific Coast, which it said was "hypothetical but plausible." "In this scenario...

The Daily Mail stirs up some Euro anxiety with a headline today "Is a super-volcano just 390 miles from London about to erupt?" The story talks about the little known Laacher See volcano in northwestern Germany. It last erupted about 12,000 years ago and the Daily Mail believes it is due to erupt again. It is not considered extinct, merely inactive. An eruption of the Laacher See volcano would destroy much of Europe as we know it. London is 390 miles away. The German capital of Bonn is about 25 miles away. The potential eruption of the Laacher See volcano...

Washington -- California gets $79 billion a year from the federal government - nearly 40 percent of what it spends. The money goes to everything from highways to universities. So when the federal government sneezes, California catches a cold. Washington's frantic debt-ceiling negotiations are about to let loose a $1 trillion-plus sneeze. The cuts headed California's way are unknown as yet, because no deal has been reached in Washington to increase the debt ceiling and prevent the Treasury from running out of cash to pay its bills Tuesday. But it is obvious from the cuts revealed so far in Democratic...

GAUHATI, India - Teeming monsoon rains have inundated wide swaths of northern India and neighboring Bangladesh, killing at least 166 people and washing away villages and farmland that 19 million people depend on, officials said Thursday. With rain-swollen rivers bursting their banks along the fertile plains south of the Himalayas, India sent soldiers to help evacuate people from some of the worst-hit areas. "I have not seen such flooding in the last 24 years. It's a sheet of water everywhere," said Santosh Mishra, a resident of the Gonda district in Uttar Pradesh, one of the areas soldiers were sent. Authorities...

SACRAMENTO (AP) - A major Northern California earthquake could severely damage the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta levee system and jeopardize the water supply for two-thirds of Californians for more than a year, a top state water official warned Tuesday. Last year, the unexplained collapse of a single levee shut water pumping for days and cost $100 million to repair. An earthquake could lead to the collapse of many sections of levees, which channel Northern California rivers on their run to San Francisco Bay, said Lester Snow, director of the California Department of Water Resources. "This is not a worst-case scenario," he...

A DEVASTATING burst of gamma-rays may have caused one of Earth's worst mass extinctions, 443 million years ago. A team of astrophysicists and palaeontologists says the pattern of trilobite extinctions at that time resembles the expected effects of a nearby gamma-ray burst (GRB). Although other experts have greeted the idea with some scepticism, most agree that it deserves further investigation. GRBs are the most powerful explosions known. As giant stars collapse into black holes at the end of their lives, they fire incredibly intense pulses of gamma rays from their poles that can be detected even from across the universe...

The US intends to shatter Iraq "physically, emotionally and psychologically" by raining down on its people as many as 800 cruise missiles in two days. The Pentagon battle plan aims not only to crush Iraqi troops, but also wipe out power and water supplies in the capital, Baghdad. It is based on a strategy known as "Shock and Awe", conceived at the National Defense University in Washington, in which between 300 and 400 cruise missiles would fall on Iraq each day for two consecutive days. It would be more than twice the number of missiles launched during the entire 40...