Climate case looks at EPA’s power

Climate case looks at EPA’s power

washington

Industry groups and Republican-led states are heading an attack at the Supreme Court against the Obama administration’s sole means of trying to limit power-plant and factory emissions of gases blamed for global warming.

As President Barack Obama pledges to act on environmental and other matters when Congress doesn’t, or won’t, opponents of regulating carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases cast the rule as a power grab of historic proportions.

The court is hearing arguments today about a small but important piece of the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to cut the emissions — a requirement that companies expanding industrial facilities or building new ones that would increase overall pollution must also evaluate ways to reduce the carbon they release.

Environmental groups and even some of their opponents say that whatever the court decides, EPA still will be able to move forward with broader plans to set emission standards for greenhouse gases for new and existing power plants.

Taliban: Talks stall on prisoner exchange

ISLAMABAD

Afghanistan’s Taliban said Sunday they had suspended “mediation” with the United States to exchange captive Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl of Hailey, Idaho, for five senior Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, halting — at least temporarily — what was considered the best chance yet of securing the 27-year-old soldier’s freedom since his capture in 2009.

In a terse Pashto language statement emailed to The Associated Press, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid blamed the “current complex political situation in the country” for the suspension.

Checkpoint attack kills 21 soldiers

KABUL

Hundreds of heavily armed Taliban insurgents attacked army checkpoints in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday, officials said, killing 21 soldiers in the deadliest single incident for the Afghan army in at least a year.

In response to the assault — which also left several Afghan soldiers missing — President Hamid Karzai postponed a planned trip to Sri Lanka.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for Sunday’s attack in an emailed statement, saying that one of their insurgents was killed and two were wounded.

Bad pipe led to leak of carbon monoxide

HUNTINGTON STATION, N.Y.

A faulty water-heater flue pipe caused the carbon monoxide leak that killed a New York restaurant manager and sent more than two dozen people to hospitals, a fire official said Sunday.

Huntington Chief Fire Marshal Terence McNally said the fumes were circulated in the basement by the ventilation systems at the Legal Sea Foods restaurant at the Walt Whitman Shops on Long Island.

Restaurant manager Steven Nelson was found unresponsive in the basement Saturday night and pronounced dead at a hospital.

Forces kill US man

SHARON PRISON, ISRAEL

Israeli special forces raided a prison in central Israel Sunday after an inmate stole a gun, shot several guards and barricaded himself inside the compound, killing the notorious prisoner who was serving time for a gruesome murder carried out in the U.S.

Police identified the inmate as Samuel Sheinbein, an American who fled to Israel after murdering and dismembering another man in Maryland in 1997 and whose case sparked a high-profile row between the two allies.

Police and the Israel prison service have opened investigations into the incident.

Associated Press