Six women of note on Capitol Hill and environs are currently hobbled by fractures or other injuries to one or another of their extremities.
The latest to join the crutch-and-cast club is Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., who broke an ankle in three places when she stumbled walking down her Baltimore church's steps July 19.
She joins: Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., who broke her left foot June 15 when she fell in a briefing room at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo; Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who tore two ligaments and cartilage in her left knee on an Alaska ski slope March 8; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who shattered her right elbow in a June 17 fall at the State Department; Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., who slid into second base at a July 14 Congressional Women's Softball game and broke her left leg; and Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, who fractured her right ankle in a June 8 stumble at La Guardia airport in New York.
Perhaps this stems from their insufficiently strong stances or unsupportable positions ...
Now comes a study that tells us what anyone who's been on the road late at night knows: There are more drunk drivers on the loose in the wee hours than during the day.
That's the finding of the latest survey of alcohol use on the roadways, conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
Data collected from random stops of drivers in 2007 at 300 locations across the country found that 4.8 percent of those stopped from 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. Saturday were legally drunk, compared to 1.2 percent of those stopped between 10 p.m. Friday and midnight, and 0.2 percent during the day Friday.
Motorcyclists and pickup-truck drivers were far more likely to be driving drunk than others, and the percentage of male drivers with illegal levels of blood alcohol was 42 percent higher than that of females.
The survey, which last was taken in 1996, found that drunk driving overall had declined since then. The 2007 survey also marked the first time drivers were tested for drug use; 16 percent of those stopped at night tested positive, but researchers noted that the presence of drugs in their systems did not necessarily mean they were impaired.
Seeking to protect wildlife in Pacific Coast marine sanctuaries from the bottom of the food chain up, federal regulators have banned the harvesting of krill -- the tiny shrimplike crustaceans that feed fish, sea birds and marine mammals alike -- within 200 miles of the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington.
State rules already ban taking krill within three miles of shore, but ecologists say the wide range of many endangered and sensitive species off the coast requires broader protection of the tiny critters, which themselves eat microscopic phytoplankton that make up the most basic food source in the oceans.
If you're having trouble falling asleep, sign up to be tweeted by auditors at the U.S. Government Accountability Office. The well-regarded watchdog agency is nonetheless known for ploddingly dull prose and long, acronym-ridden reports with titles alone often longer than the tweeting maximum of 140 characters. (One recent report: "As Deepwater Systems Integrator, Coast Guard Is Reassessing Costs and Capabilities but Lags in Applying Its Disciplined Acquisition Approach.")
The GAO, one of more than 50 federal agencies that have hooked up with Twitter, promises to tweet with alerts when it releases reports and congressional testimony (https://twitter.com/usgao).
(SHNS science and health correspondent Lee Bowman contributed to this column. E-mail Bowman at bowmanl(at)shns.com and Lisa Hoffman at hoffmanl(at)shns.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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