The White House said Friday President Joe Biden intends to nominate Judge Ketanji Jackson Brown as associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, passing over J. Michelle Childs, who has presided over a number of cases involving Department of Energy nuclear-weapon programs.
Biden was expected to formally introduce the 51-year-old Brown, currently serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, as his choice during a White House ceremony. He announced the pick in a press release on Friday. The judge’s nomination does fulfill Biden’s campaign promise to pick a black woman to serve on the high court.
Childs seemed to have the backing of the state’s two Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott. Scott is the only black Republican in the Senate. The high court opening is created by the retirement plans of Stephen Breyer. As for Childs, the Biden administration had already nominated her to serve on the D.C. Circuit Court where Brown now sits.
A couple of British experts suggested the United Kingdom “dust off” its nuclear defense plans in light of the burgeoning conflict on the continent between Russia and Ukraine, the Daily Telegraph reported this week.
“In the depths of the Cold War we were very prepared and there was a realisation an attack was a reality. We had hundreds of bunkers around the country. But fast forward to 2022 and a lot of the planning and infrastructure has gone into abeyance and crumbled,” Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a current fellow at Magdalene College and formerly of the British Army, told the conservative-leaning daily staple.
During this week in 1941, Glenn Seaborg isolated the element plutonium at a laboratory in California. It was the second transuranic element discovered during the war years. Edwin McMillan discovered the first, Neptunium, a year earlier, in 1940.
The National Nuclear Security Administration could stand to standardize cost data it collects from its contractors, according to a Government Accountability Office report released in February.
“NNSA collects common financial reporting data using a data reporting and analysis tool, known as CostEX,” the office wrote, “but not all contractors submit standardized data.”
