US News

A couple with 16 kids has been found dead in Florida. Byrd and Melanie Billings were found shot to death Thursday night in their bedroom of their home in Beulah, FL, just west of Pensacola near the Alabama border.

In the United States, celiac disease is four times more common now than it was in the 1950's, according to a study by researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

A new survey by the Pew Research center focuses on science. While the survey says Americans like science, it also confirms, by asking scientists themselves, what we already knew: the Bush Administration suppressed any results scientific research which did not comform to its own narrow POV.

Consider this the opening salvo in the new world order for credit card firms. Before Congress passed credit card reform legislation in July, bank lobbyists repeatedly warned that the law would cost them revenue and force them to raise rates and fees on consumers. The aggressive step by JP Morgan Chase - effectively a 150 percent increase in required monthly payments -- marks one of the first major changes by a card issuer.

California, which began issuing IOUs on July 2nd, tried on Thursday to shore up confidence in those IOUs. These moves came as banks prepared to stop accepting the IOUs, after today.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the U.N. in 1948, states the following:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

Apparently, conservatives may not agree.

U.S. swine flu vaccinations could begin in October with children at schools among the first in line, the Obama administration said Thursday as the president and his Cabinet urged states to figure out now how they'll tackle the virus' all-but-certain resurgence.

GOP senator John Ensign, (R-NV), 51, who in mid-June acknowledged an earlier extramarital affair with a former campaign staffer, has now admitted that his parents gave his mistress and her family nearly $100,000 "out of concern for the well being of longtime family friends during a difficult time."

It cost $150 and took about four minutes for government investigators, working in a sting operation, to make small bombs from materials they carried into high-security federal buildings that house major agencies with national security or law enforcement responsibilities..

Gov. David Paterson is naming Richard Ravitch as New York's lieutenant governor to help end the standoff in the state Senate by presiding over the chamber and breaking tie votes.

President Obama pledged during the campaign to push for overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, but has focused on the economy, healthcare, other issues since taking office.

The Obama administration will require businesses that win federal contracts to use a government electronic database system to verify that their employees have legal immigration status to work in the United States, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on Wednesday.

This image taken from a television commercial and provided Wednesday, July 8, 2009, by the Marijuana Policy Project shows Nadene Herndon of Fair Oaks, Calif.

new consumer protection agency

The Treasury Department is warning the financial services industry that it will not back down from its proposal to create a new consumer protection agency, even while lobbyists build a warchest and strategy to defeat the plan.

An employee of Lyon & Sons in Camden, New Jersey died after falling into a vat of hot chocolate on Wednesday, July 8, 2009.

Secretary of Defense during the administrations of Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, has died at age 93

Such was the assessment of a knowledgable critic: McNamara himself. The Secretary of Defense during the administrations of Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who has died at age 93, was in his day portrayed as the most brilliant technocrat in an era when brilliant technocrats were worshipped by the media and political elites.

Michael Jackson's dermatologist said he had sedated the pop star in the past for painful medical procedures but had never given him dangerous sedatives like Propofol to use.

California already has a medical marijuana law in place, which of course has run afoul of federal regulations in the past. Recently, though, AG Eric Holder said that federal agents wouldn't pursue those who were abiding by state regulations. Now the Marijuana Policy Project has launched an ad campaign advocating regulation and taxation of marijuana as a way out of California's budget crisis.

No, I'm not talking about the company, though you might think so. Oscar G. Mayer, retired chairman of the American meat and cold cut production company, owned by Kraft Foods, has died at the age of 95.

In the empty factories and laid-off workers in this struggling section of the Rust Belt, entrepreneur Wil Cashen sees "unimaginable potential.”