Even with a persistent gender gap in a presidential election year, House Republicans have not given up on their campaign to narrow access to birth control, abortion care, and lifesaving cancer screenings. Far from it. A new Republican spending proposal revives some of the more extreme attacks on women’s health and freedom that were blocked by the Senate earlier in this Congress. The resurrection is part of an alarming national crusade that goes beyond abortion rights and strikes broadly at women’s health in general. These setbacks are recycled from the Congressional trash bin in the fiscal 2013 spending bill for federal health, labor and education programs approved by a House appropriations subcommittee on July 18 over loud objections from Democratic members to these and other provisions. The measure would bar Planned Parenthood’s network of clinics, which serve millions of women across the country, from receiving any federal money unless the health group agreed to no longer offer abortion services for which it uses no federal dollars — a patently unconstitutional provision. It would also eliminate financing for Title X, the effective federal family-planning program for low-income women that provides birth control, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and testing for sexually-transmitted diseases. 
July 31, 2012
July 30, 2012
Unsettling data about IQ and Gender according to Dr. Paul Irwing a senior lecturer in organizational psychology at Manchester University. “All the research I've done points to a gender difference in general cognitive ability. There is a mean difference of about five IQ points. The further you go up the distribution the more and more skewed it becomes. There are twice as many men with an IQ of 120-plus as there are women, there are 30 times the number of men with an IQ of 170-plus as there are women. I don't know why this is, all I can say is that we have a huge amount of data. In my 2005 paper in the British Journal of Psychology we looked at 22 surveys sampling 20,000 university students. In 21 out of the 22 studies males always had an advantage. That's a lot. We ignored the survey from Mexico because the results were consistent with a university that was extremely selective with respect to females. 
July 28, 2012
Having just recovered from 5 surgeries for sunburn-related skin cancer, I found this information very useful, if also a bit late: Only 25% of 800 tested sunscreens are effective at protecting your skin without the use of potentially harmful ingredients, according to the 2012 Sunscreen Guide released by the Environmental Working Group. The Environmental Working Group says 56% of beach and sport sunscreens contain the chemical oxybenzone. The primary function of oxybenzone is to absorb ultraviolet light, but some research shows oxybenzone can be absorbed through the skin. 
July 27, 2012
There had been a 17-fold increase in computer attacks on American infrastructure between 2009 and 2011, initiated by criminal gangs, hackers, and other nations. The assessment by the head of the National Security Agency and United States Cyber Command, appears to be the government’s first official acknowledgment of the pace at which America’s electricity grids, water supplies, computer and cellphone networks, and other infrastructure are coming under attack. 
July 23, 2012
The Price of Offshore Revisited, a study commissioned by the Tax Justice Network, claims that a global super-rich elite had at least $21 trillion hidden in secret tax havens by the end of 2010. That figure is equivalent to the size of the US and Japanese economies combined. The author of the study claims that $21tn is actually a conservative figure and the true scale could be $32tn. The report uses data from the Bank of International Settlements, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and national governments. 
July 20, 2012
Western governments, including the United States, appear to be stepping up efforts to censor Internet search results and YouTube videos, according to a "transparency report" released by Google. Google received 187 requests from United States law enforcement agencies and courts to remove content from its Web properties from July to December 2011, up 103% from the 92 requests it received in the previous reporting period. In one incident cited in the report, a U.S. law enforcement agency asked Google to take down a blog that "allegedly defamed a law enforcement official in a personal capacity." 
July 16, 2012
With the implementation of the latest Internet Protocol (IP) standard called IPv6, the Internet grew from 4.3 billion unique addresses to 340 undecillion (340 trillion trillion trillion), a growth factor of 79 octillion (billion billion billion). IP is a global communications standard used for linking connected devices together. 
July 12, 2012
According to a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine Drinking a daily cup of coffee -- or even several cups -- isn't likely to harm your health, and it may even lower your risk of dying from chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. The new study is by far the largest of its kind to date. As part of a joint project with the AARP, researchers from the National Institutes of Health followed more than 400,000 healthy men and women between the ages of 50 and 71 for up to 13 years, during which 13% of the participants died. 
July 4, 2012
Bill Moyers on July 4th : Here comes the Fourth of July, number 236 since the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence and riders on horseback rushed it to the far corners of the thirteen new United States -- where it was read aloud to cheering crowds. These days our celebration of the Fourth brings a welcome round of barbecue, camaraderie with friends and family, fireworks, flags, and unbeatable prices at the mall. But perhaps, too, we will remember the Declaration of Independence itself, the product of what John Adams called Thomas Jefferson's "happy talent for composition." Take some time this week to read it alone, to yourself, or aloud with others, and tell me the words aren't still capable of setting the mind ablaze. The founders surely knew that when they let these ideas loose in the world, they could never again be caged. Yet from the beginning, these sentiments were also a thorn in our side, a reminder of the new nation's divided soul. Opponents, who still sided with Britain, greeted it with sarcasm. How can you declare "All men are created equal," without freeing your slaves? Jefferson himself was an aristocrat whose inheritance of 5,000 acres, and the slaves to work it, mocked his eloquent notion of equality. He acknowledged that slavery degraded master and slave alike, but would not give his own slaves their freedom. 
April 22, 2012
On April 17, 2012, the highly-respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its latest study of world military spending. World military spending reached a record $1,738 billion in 2011, an increase of $138 billion over the previous year. The United States accounted for 41 percent of that, or $711 billion. Why are military expenditures continuing to increase, indeed, why aren’t they substantially decreasing, given the governmental austerity measures of recent years? Amid the economic crisis that began in late 2008 (and which continues to the present day), most governments have been cutting back their spending dramatically on education, libraries, healthcare, housing, parks, and other vital social services. 
April 19, 2012
About 150 Afghan schoolgirls were poisoned after drinking contaminated water at a high school in the country's north, officials said, blaming it on conservative radicals opposed to female education. Since the 2001 toppling of the Taliban, which banned education for women and girls, females have returned to schools, especially in Kabul. But periodic attacks still occur against girls, teachers, and their school buildings. "We are 100 percent sure that the water they drank inside their classes was poisoned. 
April 17, 2012
Data released for Equal Pay Day show that wages for Utah women remain considerably lower than for men. Women in Utah are paid 69 cents for every dollar paid to men — amounting to a yearly gap of $14,446. And with nearly 85,500 Utah households led by women, the new data show that these gaps harm families and the state economy, according to a report by National Partnership for Women & Families. A woman working full time, year round receives $32,163 per year, while the median yearly pay for a man is $46,609. 
April 14, 2012
New analyses of capital punishment show gross injustice in its application and enormous costs in continuing to impose it. In Connecticut, a powerful, comprehensive study provided evidence that state death sentences are haphazardly meted out, with virtually no connection to the heinousness of the crime. Decades of research show that racial bias pervades death penalty cases. Minority defendants with white victims are much more likely to be sentenced to death than others;
April 10, 2012
When it comes to “reforming the global financial system”, regulators have focused on banks. Weakened by the 2008 crisis, destabilised by the eurozone sovereign debt mess, and then hit with higher capital requirements, traditional lenders are on the retreat. Meanwhile, the "shadow banking" system, a phrase used to encompass a broad range of institutions and mechanisms, from hedge funds to "repo" markets, has recovered more rapidly and is poised to usurp banks in a variety of ways. Regulators are now grappling with how to deal with a vast sector that has little or no supervision. Shadow banking was a fundamental cause of the banking crisis; it is not a separate phenomenon from banking but a deeply related one. 
April 8, 2012
Letters written by George Washington, Henry David Thoreau’s pencil-drawn map of Walden Pond, and Mark Twain’s manuscript of “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” are among the items from the New York Public Library’s American collections that will soon be digitized and made available to the public online. The library, aided by a $500,000 grant from the Polonsky Foundation, 
April 5, 2012
According to NOAA, March 2012 will go down as the warmest March in the United States since record-keeping began in 1895. In addition, the three-month period of January, February, and March was the warmest first quarter ever recorded in the Lower 48 states.
April 3, 2012
There’s good news and bad news. As befits my always sunny worldview, we’ll do the good news first. According to new research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, about one-fifth of U.S. adults have read an e-book in the past year. And if you expand that to include Americans over 16 who have used an e-reader device or app to read news articles or magazine-style features, the figure is 43%. E-book users tend to read more often than people who read only print material, Pew found. In particular, they read more books. A typical e-book user read 24 books in the past year, compared with the 15 books reported by typical non-e-book users. 
March 31, 2012
By the end of the decade, exaFLOP computers are predicted to go online. Those machines will perform at least 1,000 times faster than today's most powerful supercomputers. Supercomputer performance is measured in FLOPS, an acronym for FLoating Point Operations per Second. "Exa" is a metric prefix which stands for quintillion (or a billion billion). Exascale computers will perform approximately as many operations per second as 50 million laptops. Currently, the fastest supercomputers operate at the petaFLOP level, performing in excess of one quadrillion (or a million billion) operations per second. The first computer to break through the petaFLOP barrier was IBM's Roadrunner in 2008. But its reign as the fastest computer in the world didn't last long, with the Cray Jaguar installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory 
March 28, 2012
The ideological nature of the health care case was obvious on the last day of oral argument. By the time the proceedings were over, much of what the conservative justices said in court seemed like part of a politically driven exercise — especially because the issues addressed on Wednesday were not largely constitutional in nature. In fact, they were the kinds of policy questions that are properly left to Congress and state governments to answer, not the Supreme Court. The court heard arguments on the issue of “severability” — the question of what should happen with the rest of the 2,700-page statute if the requirement that most Americans obtain health insurance is struck down. The insurance mandate was effectively reduced to a bumper sticker by the opponents in their constitutional challenge, and the entire law reduced to little more than an appendage to the mandate. “My approach would be to say that if you take the heart out of the statute, the statute’s gone,” Justice Antonin Scalia said, 
March 26, 2012
New statistics show an ever-more-startling divergence between the fortunes of the wealthy and everybody else. Even in a country used to income inequality, these thefts are stunning. In 2010, as the nation continued to recover from the recession, a dizzying 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year, compared to 2009 — $288 billion — went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with at least $352,000 in income. That delivered an average single-year pay increase of 11.6 percent to each of these households. Still more astonishing was the 
