AFP - China and Japan scrambled to ease public alarm Thursday as hundreds of Japanese reported feeling ill from eating Chinese-made dumplings, triggering an emergency cabinet session in Tokyo.
AP - Rockets slammed into the British base near the southern Iraqi city of Basra on Thursday, slightly wounding three British soldiers, a spokesman said. Iraq
AP - Thousands of Iraq war veterans who could have suffered traumatic brain injury may be getting unnecessary or inadequate health care because Veterans Affairs officials have yet to determine whether their initial screening tests are reliable, investigators say.
AP - A collaboration of botanists and computer scientists is being awarded a $50 million federal grant to conduct research into plant biology with an eye toward resolving global problems related to agriculture, environment and energy production.
AFP - A man kept his wife’s body in a drum container at the family home for 23 years after pretending she had run off with another man, Australian prosecutors said Thursday.
AFP - In a rare discovery of a new species of mammal, zoologists on Thursday said they had identified a shrew-like creature called a grey-faced sengi living in a small community in remote Tanzania.
Reuters - Women who take folic acid
supplements for at least a year before becoming pregnant can
greatly reduce their risk of delivering a baby prematurely,
researchers said on Thursday.
AP - The first pictures from the unseen side of Mercury reveal the wrinkles of a shrinking, aging planet with scars from volcanic eruptions and a birthmark shaped like a spider.
AP - Every autumn and winter, hunters from this craggy Japanese fishing village corral thousands of dolphins into a tiny, isolated cove and kill them for meat and fertilizer, turning the water red with their blood.
AP - A nurse admitted Wednesday he cut body parts from 244 corpses and helped forge paperwork so the parts, some of them diseased, could be used in unsuspecting patients.
AFP - Astrophysicists believe they are closing in on one of the cosmos’ great mysteries: why the expansion of the Universe, triggered by the Big Bang, is accelerating.
Reuters - Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper,
reinforcing an ultimatum over Afghanistan, told U.S. President
George W. Bush on Wednesday that Ottawa would withdraw its
military mission next year unless NATO sent in more troops,
officials said.
AP - A Texas doctor leaked confidential research to the makers of the popular diabetes drug Avandia weeks before a study was published tying the drug to higher heart risks, the scientific journal Nature reported Wednesday.
AP - Bats are dying off by the thousands as they hibernate in caves and mines around New York and Vermont, sending researchers scrambling to find the cause of mysterious condition dubbed “white nose syndrome.”
Reuters - Afghanistan risks reverting to a
failed state and a haven for global terrorism without new U.S.
and international efforts to win the war and deliver economic
development, two studies said on Wednesday.