By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article The large black sailor was naked in the middle of a roped-off area below decks, and he was none too happy. “He kept saying ‘Not my boots, too. My wife just bought them for me.’ But they made him take them off anyway, and he was just there, naked. Then they made him scrub,” recalled Maurice Enis, navigator of the USS Ronald Reagan, one of the Navy’s newest aircraft carriers. “They gave him this really abrasive stuff that we us

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article The Department of Defense has decided to walk away from an unprecedented medical registry of nearly 70,000 American service members, civilian workers, and their families caught in the radioactive clouds blowing from the destroyed nuclear power plants at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan. The decision to cease updating the registry means there will be no way to determine if patterns of health problems emerge among the members of the

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Articlle In a sense, it could fairly be said to have begun with patent number 252,386, issued January 17, 1882 to a young Black inventor named Lewis Howard Latimer. Latimer, the only inventor to work with both of America’s icons of modern technological development – Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell – patented the carbon filament which made the electric light bulb possible. By bringing high intensity light to the factory floor,

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article Congress and the Obama Administration are on a course to provide the nation’s nuclear industry an unprecedented financial package which could dwarf the combined expenditures of the bailout programs enacted during the past year. The legislative package is accompanied by restrictions – billed as efforts to streamline bureaucracy – which would block the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from completely examining the major components

By Roger Witherspoon Download and/or Print Article “There’s no reason why technologically we can’t employ nuclear energy in a safe and effective way.  Japan does it and France does it.  And it doesn’t have greenhouse gas emissions, so it would be stupid for us not to do that in a much more effective way.” –President Barak Obama New Orleans, 10/15/09 “That’s going to finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America — legislation that will make the best use of