US president-elect Barack Obama is expected to select Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu(朱棣文) to be his energy secretary, US media reported on Thursday.
Chu shared the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics for developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light. He has since focused on climate change for several years, saying last year that the best scientist have realized that the world is facing a “crisis situation.”
Chu has been head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California since 2004, which specializes in alternative and renewable energy, particularly the development of carbon-neutral sources of energy.
In other key appointments, Obama plans to name Carol Browner to a new White House post, coordinating policy related to energy, the environment and climate across various departments, the Washington Post reported.
Browner was the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for eight years during the administration of former president Bill Clinton. She is currently at the Albright Group, an investment advisory firm that focuses on emerging markets.
Obama was also to pick Lisa Jackson, former head of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, to lead the EPA.
At a private meeting Tuesday with former vice president Al Gore, Obama said delaying action on climate change was no longer an option. He has pledged an aggressive effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the US — including forcing dirty companies to pay for pollution permits — and re-engaging in international climate talks.
The president-elect has also made investments in clean energy a cornerstone of his economic recovery plan as he tries to pull the US out of a year-long recession.
Obama is also expected to put a former leader of the Senate in charge of coordinating efforts to overhaul the US health care system.
The appointment of former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle as the Health and Human Services secretary and as chief of a new White House Office of Health Reform will be announced Thursday in Chicago, said a Democratic official familiar with the plan.
“He will be the White House’s voice on this critical issue” of health care, said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the development.
The US is one of the few Western countries without universal health care.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.