Darrin l curtis

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 9 ALBUHISHMA, Iraq - The smoke above the American air base was sometimes thick enough to blot out the sun. At first, residents had no idea what the foreign troops were burning. Before long, they were struggling to breathe. Farmers would return home with soot streaks on their forearms and stories about what soldiers had tipped into the burn pit that day: batteries, human waste, plastic ration packs, even refrigerators. "We were always coughing," recalls Tamim Ahmed al-Tamimi, who worked the fields back then outside Joint Base Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad. "But we didn't know that this smoke could kill people. We thought that only rockets could kill people." Twenty years on from the American-led invasion of Iraq, the scars are still visible in shot-up walls and bombed out buildings. But there is another legacy too, more insidious and enduring … [Read more...] about U.S. veterans won justice for burn pit exposure. Iraqis were forgotten.

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina's embattled top accountant will step down next month after a $3.5 billion error in the year-end financial report he oversaw, according to a resignation letter written Thursday that was obtained by The Associated Press. Republican Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom's decision to leave the post he has held for 20 years came after intense scrutiny of his performance following the blunder and amid rising calls for him to either quit or be removed. The Senate panel investigating the financial misstatement issued a damning report last week accusing Eckstrom of "willful neglect of duty.” As recently as last week, however, Eckstrom had said he would not resign. “I have never taken service to the state I love or the jobs to which I have been elected lightly, endeavoring to work with my colleagues ... to be a strong defender of the taxpayer and a good steward of their hard-earned tax dollars,” Eckstrom wrote in the letter to South Carolina Gov. … [Read more...] about South Carolina’s top accountant to resign after $3.5B error

The name of a newly discovered species of extinct Texas beaver has been given a name inspired by the state's favorite gas station chain and beloved cartoon beaver mascot: Buc-ee's . Steve May, a research associate at the University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences, recently rediscovered the bones of the extinct beaver species among its fossil collections and named it Anchitheriomys buceei , or A. buceei for short. May said he decided on the name after driving down a highway and spotting a Buc-ee's billboard that read, "This is Beaver Country," bringing to mind the Texas beaver fossils had been studying at UT's Texas Vertebrate Paleontology Collections. "I thought, 'Yeah, it is beaver country, and it has been for millions of years," he said, according to a news release . This month, May's findings about A. buceei , along with another smaller species of beaver, were published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica. The species A. buceei … [Read more...] about UT researchers use Buc-ee’s as inspiration for extinct beaver species name