In what could be a revolutionary discovery, Chinese scientists have found a newer, safer way to make adult stem cells as flexible as embryonic stem cells.First, a little background. During the Bush years, there was a lot of controversy over embryonic stem cell research, a line of experimentation that sought to use cells harvested from […]

William and Kate have finally settled on a name for their son: George Alexander Louis. George will be third in line to the throne and known as Prince of Cambridge. BBC News reports: “George was the bookmakers’ favourite for the first name of the prince, who was born on Monday at 16:24 BST, weighing 8lbs 6oz.Royal […]

Greens used to like gas, but something about the shale boom soured them on the energy source. What happened? The Wall Street Journal reports: For years, environmental groups saw gas as something of an ally in the cause. Gas has half the carbon footprint of coal. It was the ideal substitute for coal and a “bridge” to […]

Unless you’ve been living on a desert island, you’ve probably heard by now that former US Representative and New York Mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner has once again been caught sending “lewd texts and photos” to women. What’s more, these texts came after Weiner resigned from Congress for a similar “sexting” scandal, and after he asked the […]

For the first time, a Chinese warplane has flown through international airspace between the disputed Senkaku Islands and Okinawa. Japan scrambled its own fighter jets in response. To make matters even more interesting, just yesterday Chinese ships completed an entire circuit of the Japanese archipelago, passing for the first time through La Pérouse Strait which separates […]

On July 16, 2013, Asia News, an online Roman Catholic newsletter published out of Rome, carried a story involving Hindu-Muslim relations in India. I want to put this story into a wider context.The story reports on a controversy sparked by an offensive remark by Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat and currently […]

Ever since the ouster of Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s military has been wreaking havoc on the lives of Palestinians in Gaza. The 1.7 million residents of the Gaza Strip rely heavily on trade through a network of tunnels on the Egyptian border for their livelihood. But with the Muslim Brotherhood out of power, the Egyptian military […]

Yesterday we reported on the strange, perverse way a little-known AMA committee has been artificially inflating the payment doctors receive for common procedures. Today the Washington Post has some good news: a bipartisan group is working to fix the problem, and yesterday House subcommittee approved a draft of a bill that aims to do it. […]

Steven Rattner is calling for a bailout of Detroit. No one likes bailouts or the prospect of rewarding Detroit’s historic fiscal mismanagement. But apart from voting in elections, the 700,000 remaining residents of the Motor City are no more responsible for Detroit’s problems than were the victims of Hurricane Sandy for theirs, and eventually Congress […]

With 12 dead and 86 wounded in Cairo on Tuesday, the highest casualty toll since July 8 when the army opened fire on Muslim Brotherhood protesters and killed 62, a quick return to normalcy for Egypt after Morsi is looking increasingly unlikely. The NY Times has the grim details: The clashes, which flared in several Cairo […]