Lawmaking officially began last week in most states, and it should surprise no one that abortion is again high on the list of priorities for a number of legislatures going into 2015.
Since the 2010 election tipped statehouses Republican, states adopted 231 new abortion restrictions. Last year alone, 15 states enacted 26 new abortion controls, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Fetus Lawyers, Baby Daddies and ‘Legitimate Rape’: America’s Craziest Abortion Bills
Cardiac Surgeon Shot in Boston Hospital
A male cardiac surgeon was critically wounded in a shooting at Brigham And Women’s Hospital on Tuesday morning, a source told WBZ-TV.
A source told WBZ-TV’s Ken MacLeod that the shooter was a male patient who shot the surgeon, then walked to a second-floor bathroom in the Shapiro Center and shot and killed himself. Police could not immediately confirm that the suspect was dead.
Los Angeles subway to be equipped with Wi-Fi and cell phone service
- The Los Angeles subway will soon catch up with rail systems in other major cities by offering Wi-Fi and cell phone service.
The program is just beginning, and it will take two years to complete at a cost of roughly $800,000. The Red Line will receive the equipment first, which is a railway from Downtown Los Angeles to Hollywood. The project was approved two years ago but security concerns slowed progress.
Kim Upton, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokesperson, said passengers will no longer have to check for missed calls and texts once the project is complete.
Moderate quake on San Andreas fault shakes central Calif.
A moderate earthquake on California's San Andreas fault shook the central coastal area of the state early Tuesday.
The quake measured 4.4 on the Richter scale, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. It was centered about 150 miles south of Sacramento and 120 miles southeast of San Francisco.
The San Andreas Fault, stretching across hundreds of miles in western California, is the boundary between two plates that are moving past each other. The fault was responsible for the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which killed about 3,000 people in the city, and the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, which has been blamed for 64 deaths, most of them when a section of highway in Oakland collapsed.
X-rays unlock secrets of ancient scrolls buried by volcano
Scientists have succeeded in reading parts of an ancient scroll that was buried in a volcanic eruption almost 2,000 years ago, holding out the promise that the world's oldest surviving library may one day reveal all of its secrets.
The scroll is among hundreds retrieved from the remains of a lavish villa at Herculaneum, which along with Pompeii was one of several Roman towns that were destroyed when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79.
Islamic State group threatens to kill 2 Japanese hostages
The Islamic State group threatened to kill two Japanese hostages unless they receive $200 million in 72 hours, directly demanding the ransom Tuesday from Japan's premier during his visit to the Middle East. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe vowed to save the men, saying: "Their lives are the top priority."
Abe and other Japanese officials declined to discuss whether they'd pay the ransom for captives Kenji Goto and Haruna Yukawa, though their armed forces generally only operate in a self-defense capacity at home. Their kidnapping also immediately recalled the 2004 beheading of a Japanese backpacker in Iraq, carried out by the Islamic State group's predecessor over Japan's involvement in the U.S.-led war there.
The real American Sniper was a hate-filled killer. Why are simplistic patriots treating him as a hero?
I have to confess: I was suckered by the trailer for American Sniper. It’s a masterpiece of short-form tension – a confluence of sound and image so viscerally evocative it feels almost domineering. You cannot resist. You will be stressed out. You will feel. Or, as I believe I put it in a blog about the trailer, “Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper trailer will ruin your pants.”
But however effective it is as a piece of cinema, even a cursory look into the film’s backstory – and particularly the public reaction to its release – raises disturbing questions about which stories we choose to codify into truth, and whose, and why, and the messy social costs of transmogrifying real life into entertainment.
Ohio death row inmates sue to know maker of execution drugs
Four death row inmates who are suing Ohio officials over a new state law that shields the names of companies providing lethal injection drugs want a federal court to prevent the law from taking effect in March.
Attorneys for the inmates filed the motion on Monday in US district court in Columbus. They want the court to stop the provisions that they say violate the right of free speech from taking effect, pending a trial on the lawsuit.
British intelligence captured emails from the NY Times, The Guardian, Reuters and more
The British intelligence organization GCHQ instigated a test exercise in 2008 that captured the emails of journalists and editors from Reuters, the New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC, NBC, the Washington Post and others, according to recently released files from Edward Snowden.
As a result of the test, the content of the emails was shared on the organization's internal servers where anyone in the organization could read them. GCHQ was tapping fiber-optic cables in November of 2008 when they intercepted over 70,000 emails, including emails from the mentioned news companies, according to The Guardian.
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