Most Recent Posts

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court largely left intact Monday the Obama administration's only existing program to limit power plant and factory emissions of the gases blamed for global warming. But a divided court also rebuked environmental regulators for taking too much authority into their own hands without congressional approval.

The justices said in a 5-4 vote along ideological lines that the Environmental Protection Agency cannot apply a permitting provision of the Clean Air Act to new and expanded power plants, refineries and factories solely because they emit greenhouse gases.

The decision underscores the limits of using the Clean Air Act to deal with greenhouse gases and the administration's inability to get climate change legislation through Congress.

"The Supreme Court put EPA on a leash but not in a noose," said Michael Gerrard, director of Columbia University's Center for Climate Change Law.

"It reaffirmed that EPA can regulate greenhouse gases, but it can only go so far in reinterpreting the statute," Gerrard said. "The court invalidated a small corner of a secondary program. The main event — EPA's proposed rules on existing power plants — remains to be fought another day."

The EPA and many environmental advocates said the ruling would not affect the agency's proposals for first-time national standards for new and existing power plants. The most recent proposal aims at a 30 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants by 2030, but won't take effect for at least another two years.

The justices warned that the regulation of greenhouse gases is not automatic under every program of the Clean Air Act as the administration had assumed it was. Similar logic is driving the EPA's other actions on global-warming pollution.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for his conservative colleagues, said EPA could not "just rewrite the statute" to bring greenhouse gases under a provision dealing with expanded and new facilities that would increase the overall amount of air pollution. Under the program, companies must evaluate ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in order to get a permit to build. Carbon dioxide is the chief gas linked to global warming.

But by a wider, 7-2 margin, the court preserved EPA's authority over facilities that already emit pollutants that the agency regulates, other than greenhouse gases.

"EPA is getting almost everything it wanted in this case," Scalia said. He said the agency wanted to regulate 86 percent of all greenhouse gases emitted from plants nationwide, and it will it be able to regulate 83 percent of the emissions under the ruling. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas said they would go farther and bar all regulation of greenhouse gases under the permitting program.

The EPA called the decision "a win for our efforts to reduce carbon pollution because it allows EPA, states and other permitting authorities to continue to require carbon pollution limits in permits for the largest pollution sources."

The agency said that, as of late March, 166 permits have been issued by state and federal regulators since 2011.

Permits have been issued to power plants, but also to plants that produce chemicals, cement, iron and steel, fertilizer, ceramics and ethanol. Oil refineries and municipal landfills also have obtained greenhouse gas permits since 2011, EPA said.

Under Monday's ruling, the EPA can continue to require permits for greenhouse gas emissions for those facilities that already have to obtain permits because they emit other pollutants that the government has long regulated.

The program at issue is the first piece of the EPA's attempt to reduce carbon output from large sources of pollution.

The utility industry, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and 13 states led by Texas had asked the court to rule that the EPA overstepped its authority by trying to regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the permitting program. The administration failed to get climate change legislation through Congress.

In 2012, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit concluded that the EPA was "unambiguously correct" in using existing federal law to address global warming.

The agency's authority came from the high court's 2007 ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, which said the Clean Air Act gives EPA power to limit emissions of greenhouse gases from vehicles.

Two years later, with Obama in office, the EPA concluded that the release of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases endangered human health and welfare. The administration used that finding to extend its regulatory reach beyond automobiles and develop national standards for large stationary sources. Of those, electric plants are the largest source of emissions.

When the Supreme Court considered the appeals in October, the justices declined requests to consider overruling the court's 2007 decision, review the EPA's conclusion about the health effects of greenhouse gas emissions or question limits on vehicle emissions.

Scalia said the principal objection to the EPA's interpretation of the clean air law was that it claimed authority "to regulate millions of small sources — including retail stores, offices, apartment buildings, shopping centers, schools, and churches — and to decide, on an ongoing basis and without regard for the thresholds prescribed by Congress, how many of those sources to regulate. We are not willing to stand on the dock and wave goodbye as EPA embarks on this multiyear voyage of discovery."

Industry groups praised the court for reining in the EPA's authority. "It is a stark reminder that the EPA's power is not unlimited," said Harry Ng, vice president and general counsel of the American Petroleum Institute, the oil and natural gas industry's trade association.

But David Doniger, director of the climate and clean air program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the ruling was a green light for the administration's proposal to cut greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants. "There's no adverse effect on EPA's power plant proposal. In fact, it looks like the court is reaffirming EPA's authority to set those standards," Doniger said.

___

Associated Press writer Dina Cappiello contributed to this report.

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — A report released Monday detailing the handling of the Jerry Sandusky child molestation case faults police and prosecutors for long delays in bringing charges against the former Penn State assistant coach but found no evidence that politics affected the investigation.

The report, commissioned by Attorney General Kathleen Kane and written by former federal prosecutor Geoff Moulton, blamed a three-year lapse in filing charges on communication problems, an expungement of a 1998 complaint about Sandusky and a failure to take certain investigative steps early on.

"The facts show an inexcusable lack of urgency in charging and stopping a serial sexual predator," said Kane, a Democrat who had vowed to conduct a review of the investigation while running for office. "The report documents that more investigative work took place in just one month in 2011 than in all of either 2009 or 2010."

Then-Attorney General Tom Corbett, a Republican, was in the midst of his successful 2010 gubernatorial campaign during the Sandusky investigation.

Moulton said his review "revealed no direct evidence that electoral politics influenced any important decision made in the Sandusky investigation."

As a candidate in 2012, Kane said Corbett may have had a political motive to slow down the investigation, an assertion Corbett denied. The arrest of Sandusky led to the firing of longtime Penn State coach Joe Paterno while Corbett was serving as a university trustee.

"This investigation was never about politics," Corbett said in a statement Monday. "It was always about the people victimized by this man."

Sandusky was convicted in 2012 of sexually abusing 10 boys and is serving decades in prison.

At a news conference, Kane said her office knows of two young men victimized in the fall of 2009, after the attorney general took the case. But the lead prosecutors at trial disputed that claim, which was not part of Moulton's report.

"It is completely false," said Frank Fina, now with the Philadelphia district attorney's office.

One of those who testified at trial, described as Victim 9, said his contact with Sandusky ended in 2008 or 2009.

As for the time delay, the report said the lead prosecutor at the time, Jonelle Eshbach, hectored her bosses about the case during a stretch in 2010 when the probe was largely dormant.

Fina told reporters Eshbach agreed with others that the case would not succeed with just one victim.

Her lawyer disputed that.

"If that was true, why would her supervisors ask her to revise the (grand jury report) twice? Why would she repeatedly ask for permission from her supervisors to charge?" said her attorney, Ed Paskey.

Eshbach drafted a grand jury report in March 2010 based on the claims of a lone victim, but she spent much of the ensuing months — as Corbett won the primary — trying to get approval for the report.

"In the interim, no witnesses were interviewed, no witnesses testified in the grand jury and no grand jury subpoenas were issued," Moulton wrote. He said the basis for that decision was that one accuser's testimony wouldn't be enough to convict Sandusky and an acquittal would make it harder to file more charges later.

According to the report, prosecutors told Moulton they waited until 2011 to search Sandusky's home computer and subpoena child protective services records because they "believed that they were unlikely to be productive and would have risked publicly revealing the existence of the investigation."

The report said the investigation picked up steam two days after Corbett was elected governor in November 2010, when the Centre County prosecutor received an anonymous tip directing investigators to assistant football coach Mike McQueary, whose testimony eventually helped convict Sandusky.

Additional victims were identified, and on June 21, 2011, Sandusky's home was searched, producing photos and typewritten lists of children who participated in events at Sandusky's charity, The Second Mile, with some names highlighted.

More resources early on, including additional investigators, may not have speeded up the case, Moulton said, because the best leads in 2010 and early 2011 were not related to how many detectives were devoted to the matter.

He said decisions not to bring charges based solely on one accuser or, in June 2011, after three more witnesses had testified before a grand jury, "fit within acceptable bounds of prosecutorial discretion."

Moulton noted that if authorities had put together a broad-based team early on, it's possible someone may have known about or turned up a 1998 police investigation of Sandusky prompted by a mother's complaint that the coach had showered with her son.

Corbett said "electoral politics did not enter his thinking in any way," Moulton wrote, concluding the campaign donations Corbett received from people associated with The Second Mile do not appear to have affected the investigation.

The Moulton report cost the state about $180,000, Kane's office said.

___

Online:

Report: http://bit.ly/1ipOsml

BAGHDAD (AP) — The fate of Iraq may be decided over the next week, the top U.S. diplomat said Monday, and largely depends on whether its leaders keep their commitment to meet looming deadlines to seat a new government before a Sunni insurgency sweeps away hopes for lasting peace.

It was a dire message to leaders of Iraq's bitterly divided Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish political coalitions who have lived through more than three decades of dictatorship, sanctions and wars. And it sought to hold the officials to a government transition that the U.S. believes will stave off the threat of a new civil war by giving more power to Iraq's minorities.

"This is a critical moment for Iraq's future," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said at a press conference in Baghdad. "It is a moment of decision for Iraq's leaders and it's a moment of great urgency."

Kerry offered few details of his closed-door meetings in Baghdad. But he said each of the officials he met with — including Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki — committed to seat a new parliament by July 1 as the constitution requires.

"The very future of Iraq depends on choices that will be made in the next days and weeks, and the future of Iraq depends primarily on the ability of Iraq's leaders to come together and take a stand united against ISIL," Kerry said, referring to the insurgency known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. "Not next week, not next month, but now."

He also said no country — including the U.S. — should try to pick new leadership for Iraq. "That is up to the people of Iraq," Kerry said.

Al-Maliki is facing growing calls for his resignation as disgruntled Sunnis say they do not believe he will give them a greater voice in the government.

After suffering together through more than eight years of war — which killed nearly 4,500 American troops and more than 100,000 Iraqis — Washington and Baghdad are trying to shelve mutual wariness to curb the very real prospect of the Mideast nation falling into a fresh bout of sectarian strife.

Sunnis frustrated with being cut out of power are increasingly joining the ISIL, a bloody insurgency that has been emboldened by battlefield successes in neighboring Syria's civil war.

Parliament Speaker Osama al-Nujaifi, one of Iraq's top-ranking Sunnis, told Kerry that the insurgents pose "a threat to the entire world." Al-Nujaifi, is from Mosul, Iraq's second largest city which was overrun earlier this month by militants.

Of the insurgents, al-Nujaifi said "we have to confront it through direct military operations, political reforms so that we can inject a new hope into our own people so that they can support the political process and the unity of Iraq."

Iraqi officials briefed on Kerry's talks with the Iraqi prime minister said al-Maliki urged the United States to target the militants' positions in Iraq and neighboring Syria, citing training camps and convoys with airstrikes. The officials said Kerry responded by saying a great deal of care and caution must be taken before attacks are launched to avoid civilian casualties that could create the impression that Americans are attacking Sunnis.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media on the record.

President Barack Obama, in a round of television interviews that aired in the U.S., said al-Maliki and the Iraqi leadership face a test as to whether "they are able to set aside their suspicions, their sectarian preferences for the good of the whole."

"And we don't know," Obama said. "The one thing I do know is that if they fail to do that then no amount of military action by the United States can hold that country together."

Kerry arrived in Baghdad just a day after the Sunni militants captured two key border posts, one along the frontier with Jordan and the other with Syria, deepening al-Maliki's predicament. Their latest victories considerably expanded territory under the militants' control just two weeks after the al-Qaida breakaway group started swallowing up chunks of northern Iraq, heightening pressure on al-Maliki to step aside.

The offensive by ISIL takes the group closer to its dream of carving out an Islamic state straddling both Syria and Iraq. Controlling the borders with Syria will help it supply fellow fighters there with weaponry looted from Iraqi warehouses, boosting its ability to battle beleaguered Syrian government forces.

On Monday, gunmen ambushed a police convoy transferring prisoners about 85 miles (140 kilometers) south of Baghdad, killing nine policemen and 13 prisoners, according to police officials. The officials said some of the prisoners, some of whom were convicted of terrorism-related charges, were being taken to a high-security prison in the southern city of Nasiriyah 200 miles (320 kilometers) southwest of Baghdad. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

The militants' stunning battlefield successes in the north and the west of Iraq have laid bare the inadequacies of the country's U.S.-trained forces. In the north, troops fled in the face of advancing militants, abandoning their weapons, vehicles and other equipment. In some cases in the west, they pulled out either when the militants approached or when they heard of other towns falling.

Sunday's capture by the militants of crossings bordering Jordan and Syria followed the fall on Friday and Saturday of the towns of Qaim, Rawah, Anah and Rutba, all of which are in Sunni-dominated Anbar province, where the militants have since January controlled the city of Fallujah and parts of the provincial capital, Ramadi.

___

Follow Lara Jakes on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/larajakesAP

BERLIN (AP) — An American exchange student who got stuck in a giant vagina sculpture was freed by firefighters in southwestern Germany.

Tuebingen fire service official Markus Mozer said Monday that the young man slipped as he tried to climb into the stone sculpture to pose for a photo.

He couldn't free himself, so the fire service was called. Four firefighters eased him out of the sculpture.

The incident happened on Friday and the student's name wasn't released.

Mozer says no damage was done to the sculpture, created by Peruvian-born artist Fernando de la Jara.