A high-level military commission is set to recommend that the Pentagon reverse its long-standing policy that bars women from being in combat. Hundreds of thousands of women are currently serving in the U.S. military, and many of them are in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the Pentagon's policy, women are, and always have been, barred from taking part in any ground combat operations.
But in reality, women are already in the thick of the fight — and an upcoming report will recommend that the Pentagon acknowledge the reality on the ground and allow women to be assigned to combat units.
Panel To Recommend Allowing Women In Combat
Resist Giving This to Your Child - Even if Your Doctor Recommends it
More than a quarter of children and teens in the United States are taking a medication on a regular basis. Close to seven percent are on two or more prescription drugs.
Prescribing medications to children can cause problems; many of them have not had their effects on children researched.
Even in ones that have, the consequences of using them over the course of a lifetime is usually unknown.
FDA seeks less acetaminophen in prescription drugs
U.S. health regulators are requesting a limit on the amount of acetaminophen in prescription pain medicines in an effort to curb the risk of liver damage.
The move announced on on Thursday aims to limit combination drugs such as the opioids Percocet and Vicodin to 325 milligrams of acetaminophen per pill and calls for them to carry a "black box" warning about potential liver failure.
2010's Hall of Shame -The Year in Pills
2010 will go down as the year the diet pill Meridia and pain pill Darvon were withdrawn from the market and the heart-attack associated diabetes drug Avandia was severely restricted.
But it was also the year the Justice Department filed the first criminal, not civil, charges against a drug company executive. Lauren Stevens, a former VP and assistant general counsel at GlaxoSmithKline, hid some 1,000 instances of GSK-paid doctors illegally promoting Wellbutrin to other doctors, say authorities.
Obama administration cracks down on mountaintop mining
The Environmental Protection Agency took the unusual step of revoking a permit Thursday for the country's largest surface mine, a setback for the controversial practice of "mountaintop removal" that helps produce 10 percent of the nation's coal.
The 2,300-acre operation at the Mingo Logan Coal Co.'s Spruce No. 1 coal mine in West Virginia has been mired in litigation since 1998.
US banks 'foreclosed on record 1m homes in 2010'
Banks repossessed a record one million US homes in 2010, and could surpass that number this year, figures show. Foreclosure tracker RealtyTrac said about five million homeowners were at least two months behind on their mortgage payments.
Foreclosures are likely to remain numerous while unemployment remains stubbornly high, the group said. Among the worst hit states were Nevada, Arizona, Florida and California, once at the heart of the housing boom.
Scientists make chickens that don't spread bird flu
British scientists have developed genetically modified (GM) chickens that cannot transmit bird flu infections -- a step that in future could reduce the risk of avian flu spreading and causing deadly epidemics in humans.
Scientists from Cambridge and Edinburgh universities said that while the transgenic chickens still got sick and died when they were exposed to H5N1 bird flu, they didn't transmit the virus to other chickens they came into contact with.
Autism Advocacy Organizations and Parent Groups Support Dr. Andrew Wakefield
...Urging Both Scientists and Journalists to Do More Thorough Research Into Vaccines and Autism.
Last week, an article in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), written by a freelance newspaper reporter, Brian Deer, created a media firestorm in the United States. In his article, Brian Deer accuses Dr. Andrew Wakefield of deliberate fraud regarding his 1998 case series, which was published in the British journal, The Lancet. Dr. Wakefield reported that the children in his case series were suffering from a novel form of bowel disease and that parents reported a temporal link between the onset of symptoms and receipt of the MMR vaccine. Contrary to what has been reported in the media over the years, Dr. Wakefield never stated that the MMR vaccine caused autism. The full text of the original paper is available at www.generationrescue.org.
Thousands of fish washed up in Chicago and hundreds of birds perish in California as animal deaths continue to bemuse scientists
Thousands of gizzard shad fish have been washed up on Chicago's harbours while more than 100 dead birds have been found clustered on a California highway.
The two instances appear to be a continuation of the strange mass animal deaths that have struck in the past fortnight - in America and elsewhere.
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