Due to the handiwork of a fringe religious activist, Mississippians will soon vote on a ballot initiative that would ban abortion in cases of rape and incest. ...If it passes, it would have a "chilling effect" on women's health care access—including seemingly unrelated procedures such as in vitro fertilization. "When you have in vitro fertilization, multiple eggs will get fertilized, but not all of them can be implanted," she explains. "And now you have that problem of eggs which can't be implanted, or of implanting too many or all of them, which would put the woman's health at risk. So really, the only choice the woman would have would be to not to go forward."

The Colorado River, a water source to at least 30 million people in seven states and Mexico, is drying up. It hasn't reached the sea in ages, and in 2002, for the first time, total demand for the river's water climbed higher than the total river's supply.

Bush: "Damn Right" I Ordered Torture.

Researchers have demonstrated how it is possible to use GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) data along with a few tools to track down a person’s mobile phone number and their location, and even listen in on calls and voicemail messages.

“I think we should keep this clean, keep it simple, go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant,” she said. “They’re quite clear that we would create law based on the God of the Bible and the 10 commandments, it’s pretty simple.”

All this time I've been using pagan clowns?? RT @ebertchicago
A professional level of Christian clowning.

Brain Scan Shows Vegetative Patient Responding To Yes-or-No Questions http://bit.ly/ciyAjT

'If 100 books a year is already my limit, that means that I will be lucky to get through another 3,000 before I die'

Tennessee Mayor accuses Obama of deliberately preempting “A Charlie Brown Christmas” in his speech at West Point because he’s “a secret Muslim.”

child beauty pageants

Multiyear Arctic ice is effectively gone

An asteroid about the size of one that leveled more than 800 square miles of forest in Siberia a century ago just buzzed the Earth. The asteroid named 2009 DD45 was about 48,800 miles from Earth when it zipped past early Monday, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported.

"This looks like the biggest breach ever disclosed, and they're doing it on inauguration day?" Litan said. "I can't believe they waited until today to disclose. That seems very deceptive."

...as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor.

International bicycling phenomenon Lance Armstrong was named the top water user in Austin, according to a list published by the Statesman. He paid $1,630 for 222,900 gallons of water.

Local councils, health authorities and hundreds of other public bodies are to be given the power to access details of everyone's personal text, emails and internet use under Home Office proposals published yesterday. Ministers want to make it mandatory for telephone and internet companies to keep details of all personal internet traffic for at least 12 months so it can be accessed for investigations into crime or other threats to public safety. The Home Office last night admitted that the measure will mean companies have to store "a billion incidents of data exchange a day". As the measure is the result of an EU directive, the data will be made available to public investigators across Europe.

seems fishy to me.

The Senate and House have voted to reauthorize the Higher Education Act and approved controversial new provisions that will require universities to provide students with access to commercial music downloading services and implement traffic filtering technologies in order to deter peer-to-peer filesharing. The bill now goes to President Bush, who is expected to sign it into law.

Muslim medical students are refusing to obey hygiene rules brought in to stop the spread of deadly superbugs, because they say it is against their religion.

A total of five cables being operated by two submarine cable operators have been damaged with a fault in each.