Warning: young children should not keep hedgehogs as pets - or hamsters, baby chicks, lizards and turtles, for that matter - because of risks for disease. That's according to the nation's leading pediatricians' group in a new report about dangers from exotic animals.
Besides evidence that they can carry dangerous and sometimes potentially deadly germs, exotic pets may be more prone than cats and dogs to bite, scratch or claw - putting children younger than 5 particularly at risk, the report says.
Doctors: No hamsters or exotic pets for young kids
U.S. to allies: Fight in Afghanistan or write check
The United States has asked Japan and NATO allies who have refused to send troops to Afghanistan to pay the estimated $17 billion needed to build up the Afghan army, according to U.S. defense officials.
The push to quickly increase the size of Afghanistan's army and spread the cost of the initiative underscores the financial and military strain the war has placed on the United States and NATO members, many also operating in Iraq and elsewhere.
Bailout Provision Provides Equal Coverage for Mental and Physical Ailments
More than one-third of all Americans will soon receive better insurance coverage for mental health treatments because of a new law that, for the first time, requires equal coverage of mental and physical illnesses.
VIDEO: John McCain and the Making of the Financial Crisis
The current economic crisis demands that we understand John McCain's attitudes about economic oversight and corporate influence in federal regulation. Nothing illustrates the danger of his approach more clearly than his central role in the savings and loan scandal of the late '80s and early '90s.
John McCain was accused of improperly aiding his political patron, Charles Keating, chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. The bipartisan Senate Ethics Committee launched investigations and formally reprimanded Senator McCain for his role in the scandal -- the first such Senator to receive a major party nomination for president.
Uighur Detainees May Be Released to U.S.
A federal judge is considering whether to order a group of detainees held at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay released into the United States, in what would instantly become a landmark legal decision in the years-long battle over the rights of terrorism suspects there.
The men, a small band of Chinese Muslims who have been held for nearly seven years, are no longer considered enemy combatants by the U.S. government, but they are caught in a well-documented diplomatic bind.
Klein: Bush admin creats crises to 'enrich themselves and their friends'
"Whole societies also go into states of shock when there's a crisis, like when there's a terrorist attack, or a huge natural disaster, or a huge economic crisis," said Klein. "Something happens, people don't know what's going on, and they'll kinda do whatever people in authority want them to do."
Klein continued: "They use shocks to enrich themselves and their friends... People are becoming shock resistant, which is wonderful because they remember the way this administration used the shock of Sept. 11 to build the Homeland Security industry; How Rudy Giuliani went into that industry himself as soon as he left office. They remember how the war in Iraq was used to privatize the government."
TVNL Comment: They did not just use the shock of 9/11...they created it. They wrote about it. It was the "new Pearl Harbor" that they wrote about! But nobody is allowed to say this on any TV network! Not even Comedy Central!
New Jersey Grants Rights to Build a Wind Farm About 20 Miles Offshore
Regulators in New Jersey awarded the rights on Friday for construction of a $1 billion offshore wind farm in the southern part of the state to Garden State Offshore Energy.
Talks with Taliban the only way forward in Afghanistan, says UK commander
Britain is stepping up pressure for a political and diplomatic settlement to the conflict in Afghanistan, a move set in sharp relief yesterday by the commander of UK troops who warned that the war against the Taliban was not going to be won.
The message is being delivered with increasing urgency by British military commanders, diplomats and intelligence officers, to Nato allies and governments in the region, the Guardian has learned.
Vaccine for breast cancer within reach, says expert
Enough is known about the causes of breast cancer to make a vaccine or prophylactic drug a real possibility, a leading cancer expert said last night.
Professor Valerie Beral of Oxford University, who leads the Million Women's Study into the causes of the disease, told the Guardian the study had put beyond doubt what had long been guessed - that many breast cancers are caused by the absence of hormonal changes connected with childbirth.
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