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In the Republican response to last night's presidential address to a joint session of Congress, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal chided the lawmakers for earmarking "$140 million for something called volcano monitoring." The funds he was referring to are part of the $787 billion stimulus package signed into law by Pres. Obama earlier this month; some 12 percent ($98.3 billion) of the monies are set aside for transportation and infrastructure projects, including volcano monitoring and other natural disaster prevention programs. [More]

Children are losing out on their funding entitlement because schools are holding back too much money in reserve, claims a teachers' union.

The Bail Reform Act is getting a real workout during the latest spat of white-collar criminal prosecutions in the Southern District of New York. The government won the most recent round Wednesday when Judge Denise Cote set virtually unreachable bail conditions for Arthur Nadel, a disbarred lawyer turned hedge fund adviser accused of swindling investors out of tens of millions of dollars. The names of Bernard Madoff and Marc S. Dreier, who are both out on bail, were invoked during the hearing before Cote.

. Barack Obama presses Capitol Hill on energy reforms. Budget will include $15bn a year for alternative fuels Barack Obama raised the development of a green economy to the top of America's agenda tonight, calling on Congress to pass a law cutting the carbon emissions that cause global warming.The president, in a rousing speech to both houses of Congress, tried to put to rest fears that the economic recession would force him to scale back ambitious plans for energy reforms.Instead, he made it clear that he sees a direct link between America's long-term economic interests and the development of clean energy, budgeting additional funds for research into wind and solar power.The president also pressed Congress to push ahead on a new law to cut greenhouse gas emissions, defying critics who say cap-and-trade measures could be a brake on economic recovery.'To truly transform our economy, protect our security and save our planet from the ravages of climate change, we need to ultimately make cl

United Auto Workers and Ford Motor on Monday announced a tentative plan that would allow the automaker to pay up to half of the $13.6 billion it owes to a retiree health care fund using company stock, the New York Times reports.

(City College of New York) The National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute (NCI) has awarded The City College of New York (CCNY) and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center a $15.9 million grant to implement a unique partnership in cancer research, education, and outreach. The five-year, renewable award is funded by NCI's U54 program, an initiative created to develop partnerships between minority-serving institutions and NCI-designated cancer centers.

Radical plans to clean up pollution from the UK's coal plants have been drawn up by the government amid growing international pressure to curb emissions that cause climate change.The climate secretary, Ed Miliband, is understood to have asked for a thorough review of existing plans for up to eight new coal plants - described by leading US climate scientist James Hansen as 'factories of death'.Options under consideration include forcing power companies to fit carbon capture and storage (CCS) equipment - which buries the greenhouse gases - and a big increase in funding for more 'demonstration plants', which would be the first to fit the technology. Such a policy would be in line with Conservative proposals to impose CCS via a cap on emissions and to fund three or more plants to be fitted with the equipment.Miliband has asked the Treasury for billions of pounds for the new policy because energy companies have warned they cannot afford to fund the expensive, unproven technology themselves.

(Juvenile Diabetes research Foundation International) Researchers at the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation have identified a set of compounds that can trigger the proliferation of insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, using sophisticated high-throughput screening techniques.