Monday, Dec 29th
Last update09:19:04 AM GMT
The torture and murder of 5-year-old Lama Al Ghamdi could hardly have been more horrific—and news of it, repeated in countless Twitter feeds, has enflamed opinion around the world.
But the fact that this story of one little girl’s death and one father’s monstrosity went public is also a sign of just how hard women in Saudi Arabia are working to fight the cruel misogyny embedded in the kingdom’s version of Islamic law. And among those women is a daughter of the king.
The idea that a cosmic impact ended the age of dinosaurs in what is now Mexico now has fresh new support, researchers say.
The most recent and most familiar mass extinction is the one that finished the reign of the dinosaurs — the end-Cretaceous or Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, often known as K-T. The only survivors among the dinosaurs are the birds.
It is illegal to sell medical marijuana through private shops, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled Friday in a decision one lawyer called “the end of the road” for the hotly debated issue.
In a 4-1 decision, the state’s highest court affirmed an Appeals Court finding that Michigan’s 2008 medical marijuana law does not allow people to sell pot to each other, even if they’re among the tens of thousands who have state-issued marijuana cards.
Last year's super drought ook a big bite out of the two most prodigious US crops, corn and soy. But it apparently didn't slow down the spread of weeds that have developed resistance to Monsanto's herbicide Roundup (glyphosate), used on crops engineered by Monsanto to resist it. More than 70 percent of all the the corn, soy, and cotton grown in the US is now genetically modified to withstand glyphosate.
Back in 2011, such weeds were already spreading fast. "Monsanto's 'Superweeds' Gallop Through Midwest," declared the headline of a post I wrote then. What's the word you use when an already-galloping horse speeds up? Because that's what's happening. Let's try this: "Monsanto's 'Superweeds' Stampede Through Midwest."
Shoddy practices and unsanitary conditions at three large-scale specialty pharmacies have been tied to deaths and illnesses over the past decade, revealing that the serious safety lapses at a Massachusetts pharmacy linked to last fall’s deadly meningitis outbreak were not an isolated occurrence, records and interviews show.
The series of safety failures happened long before national attention focused on the New England Compounding Center, whose contaminated steroid shots were linked to 45 deaths and 651 illnesses.
The nearest Earthlike planets could be just 13 light-years away, putting them in our cosmic "back yard", astronomers have claimed.
Six per cent of red dwarfs, the most common stars in our galaxy, have Earth-sized planets which could be habitable, according to data from Nasa's Kepler space telescope. On this basis, experts from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics calculated that the closest Earthlike world is probably as close as 13 light-years to Earth.
A week after the dumping of at least 20,000 gallons of toxic and potentially radioactive fracking waste into a storm drain that empties into a tributary of the Mahoning River in Youngstown, Ohio, by Hard Rock Excavating, state regulators have yet to disclose information about the quantity of waste and the chemicals involved.
Environmental advocates are urging the state to act quickly to prosecute the perpetrator and look beyond the one incident to take more aggressive steps to protect the state’s public health and environment from future threats.
An Arkansas lawmaker said Tuesday that he would ease his proposed ban on most abortions in the state so the procedure could still be performed until a heartbeat is detected using an abdominal ultrasound.
Even with the change, state Sen. Jason Rapert's proposal would likely be the strictest abortion ban in the nation, prohibiting the procedure as early as 10 to 12 weeks into pregnancy. Rapert had original proposed a ban that could have applied as early as six weeks into a pregnancy, and North Dakota lawmakers are considering similar legislation.
I'll bet you five bucks you'd react differently than you think you would, once your doctor tells you that you've got lung cancer. And that it's been using your body as a combination playground and nursery for four years. Or that it's possible you might not be here this same time next year.
No, wait -- scratch that idea. The only way I could collect on such a bet would be for your doctor to actually break that same news to you, and I wouldn't wish that pronouncement on anyone -- not even on lower life forms like brain-damaged Teabaggers, deluded Ayn Rand supporters, those struggling with the selfish demons of religion, or any other member of the helpless, hopeless, and hoodwinked.
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