South Dakota abortion rights supporters said they filed a petition Tuesday to halt the state’s new abortion ban, which became law in March as a direct challenge to the 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion.
The South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families said it had obtained more than 38,000 signatures on a petition aimed at repealing […]

A federal judge has tossed the case against Max, whose popular Web site celebrates his boozy carousing. On Friday, U.S. District Court Stewart Dalzell dismissed the claim by local publicist and event planner Anthony DiMeo III, who had contended his reputation suffered from comments made on TuckerMax.com after his New Year Eve party went awry.
[…]
The […]

The broad, nonpartisan movement for Internet freedom notched a major victory today, when a bipartisan majority of the House Judiciary Committee passed the “Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2006? — a bill that offers meaningful protections for Network Neutrality, “the First Amendment of the Internet.”
20 members of the Commitee (6 Republicans and 14 Democrats) […]

A good sign that Tom DeLay doesn’t have the facts on his side: the top source for his latest defense against his critics is Stephen Colbert.
This morning, DeLay’s legal defense fund sent out a mass email criticizing the movie “The Big Buy: Tom DeLay’s Stolen Congress,” by “Outfoxed” creator Robert Greenwald.
The email features a “one-pager […]

The senate has passed a much saner immigration bill than the house. It remains to be seen what will happen with either bill from here. Both could wind up as dead legislation. But I’m happy the new bill passed without the legislation making illegal immigrants and those that aid them into felons.
Full Story: AP […]

A U.S. jury convicted Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling of orchestrating the fraud that destroyed Enron Corp., giving prosecutors a victory a case that came to symbolize corporate crime sparked by the stock market bust in 2000.
Full Story: Bloomberg.
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

Scientists have reached a landmark point in one of the world’s most important scientific projects by sequencing the last chromosome in the Human Genome, the so-called “book of life.”
Chromosome 1 contains nearly twice as many genes as the average chromosome and makes up eight percent of the human genetic code.
Full Story: Wired News.
These icons link […]

An Italian company has begun marketing a cement that is capable of absorbing pollution from vehicles.
Italcementi, which spent 10 years developing its TX Active, said the building material is capable of reducing urban pollution by more than 40 percent, the Italian news agency ANSA reported Tuesday.
Full Story: UPI on Monsters and Critics.
(via Good News Network).
These […]

Carter learned that half the village’s population was hobbled by the disease. The grotesque vision prompted him to expand the mission of his center, founded in 1982 to advance human rights, to public health. Nearly 25 years later, the Carter Center’s success in pushing the parasite to the brink of extinction is one of several […]

A WOMAN is pregnant with the UK’s first baby designed not to inherit a hereditary form of cancer.
The woman carrying the child decided to use genetic screening to ensure that she does not pass on the eye cancer.
[…]
The mother, who suffers from the disease, chose to conceive her child by IVF, even though she and […]