Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Articles”
The victory of the Conservative Party and the debacle of the Labour Party in the recent British general elections is yet another sign of the crisis facing left-wing forces today, leaving aside the question of how, under the British electoral system, the Labour Party actually increased the number of votes it won but saw a reduction in the number of …
In addition to the ethical questions and the serious unintended health consequences, this would also open the door to patenting human DNA. Action Alert! Late last month, a group of Chinese scientists published a study that tried to answer the question, “Is it possible to edit the genetic makeup of human embryos?” It’s a question that has occupied scientists and medical researchers for …
The world’s largest privately-held coal company has been exposed capitalizing off the Ebola crisis in West Africa—a move public health officials called “ludicrous” and “opportunistic.” A Guardian exposé reveals that Peabody Coal’s new public relations campaign—which aims to brand the iconic pollutant as a “21st century fuel”—promotes its product “as an answer to Africa’s devastating public health crisis.” Journalist Suzanne Goldberg reports: Greg Boyce, …
A second-grade teacher in Smithville, Ohio, was fired from his job in December because he wrote on his Facebook page that he was against dairy farming. According to local affiliate Fox8, Keith Allison is a vegan and animal rights advocate who often openly posts his views regarding those issues to his Facebook page. In August, Allison took pictures of a local …
If you are of a certain age, you may have heard about the so-called “Mozart Effect,” the idea that playing classical music (particularly any of the music composed by a short, spendthrift Austrian prankster with a fondness for scatalogical humor) is a sure-fire way to boost the intelligence of your unborn child. This idea gained so much popular currency that …
The Midwest’s ongoing avian flu crisis is wreaking havoc on the region’s large-scale egg and turkey farms. Last week alone, the US Department of Agriculture confirmed that the virus had turned up in more than 20 additional facilities in the region, condemning 4 million birds to euthanasia. Altogether, the H5N2 virus—”highly pathogenic” to birds, so far non-threatening to humans—has affected …
The Federal Trade Commission and all 50 states on Tuesday accused four cancer charities of scamming donors out of $187 million that the operators then spent on gym memberships, dating website subscriptions, jet ski outings, and other personal expenses. In a complaint field in the Phoenix. Arizona Federal Court, the plaintiffs say the charities — the Cancer Fund of America, …
One might think New York was a bastion of abolitionist sentiment before the Civil War. Hamilton’s Federalists had led a move for gradual emancipation in 1799; the last black person was freed in 1842. They, too, needed John Brown and mass abolitionism from below. Wall Street had founded the slave trade in 1711. Fernando Wood, mayor in 1860, proposed joining the …
Prominent advocacy organizations charged on Tuesday that the YouTube Kids app, marketed by Google as a family-friendly and child-appropriate platform, is in fact neither, featuring “disturbing” and “potentially harmful” content. The latest accusations were issued by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and Center for Digital Democracy as an update to an earlier complaint against Google, owner of YouTube, filed with the Federal Trade …
We are all patriotic. Let’s start with the Star Spangled Banner. You all are familiar with some of it, but perhaps some of you may not know this particular stanza: Don’t worry, I won’t sing it: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave.” Keep in mind that the …
