The National Tracing Center is the only place in the nation authorized to trace gun sales. Here, researchers with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives make phone calls and pore over handwritten records from across the country to track down gun owners. I
n contrast with such state-of-the-art, 21st-century crime-fighting techniques as DNA matching and digital fingerprint analysis, gun tracing is an antiquated, laborious process done mostly by hand. The government is prohibited from putting gun ownership records into an easily accessible format, such as a searchable computer database.



It started with a fingerprint of a 25-year-old college professor who opposed the Vietnam War and ended with a search for his remains, 32 years later, in a wooded area near Eveleth, Minn.
Scientists searching the Amazon have discovered new species — creatures such as a baldheaded parrot, a blue-fanged tarantula and a bright red catfish — at the rate of about one every three days for the past 10 years, the World Wildlife Fund reported Monday.
The British military has been training interrogators in techniques that include threats, sensory deprivation and enforced nakedness in an apparent breach of the Geneva conventions, the Guardian has discovered.
Heavy smoking in midlife more than doubles your odds of developing Alzheimer's disease, a Kaiser Permanente study said Monday.
"If you're asking, are there al-Qaeda in Iraq, the answer is yes, there are. It's a fact, yes." Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defence, August 2002
Large trucks in the U.S. must cut emissions as much as 20 percent by 2018 under the first standards proposed for work vehicles, the Obama administration said today.





























