by The Associated Press
A raid on an exotic animal delivery company in Texas found starving snakes, hundreds of reptiles packed in shipping crates and rodents that had killed and eaten each other, officials said.
Dozens of people with the city of Arlington and animal welfare groups took inventory Tuesday of the animals — estimated at 20,000 — and removed them from the U.S. Global Exotics during the raid. The Arlington-based company, which advertises that it delivers exotic animals worldwide, did not [...]

It was the 1950s, a time of doo-wop, sock hops and Bobby Rydell, when Americans dusted off the remnants of WWII and looked toward a more optimistic society. Or so it’s often thought. But the ’50s were often less Happy Days and more The Day the Earth Stood Still, as fears of a Cold War and mistrust of the government were just beginning to bloom. Since those fears couldn’t always be talked about, they came through in films like Invasion of the Body [...]

On July 3, 1988, during a  patrol in the Persian Gulf, the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian passenger jet that it had mistaken for a hostile Iranian fighter aircraft. U.S. Navy Captain Will C. Rogers III ordered a single missile fired from his warship, which hit its target and killed all 290 people aboard the commercial airbus. The attack came towards the end of the Iran-Iraq War, while U.S. vessels in the Persian Gulf had been patrolling to ward [...]

With more than 79,000 horses slaughtered in 2007 alone, Canada’s horse slaughter industry is among the largest in the world, and a shameful betrayal against our loyal companions.
Horses are slaughtered in Canada primarily to provide horse meat to European and Asian countries where it is eaten as a delicacy.  Horses are brought to slaughter in every possible condition—old, young, sick, healthy, injured, and even pregnant.  They are not all unwanted—often, their guardians can no longer afford to keep them, and [...]

The bloodbath begins as soon as the animals reach the shallows. Wielding spears and hooks, islanders wade toward the thrashing, terrified animals en masse. Young and old alike slam heavy metal crowbar-like hooks, called gaffs, into the helpless whales’ bodies – often into the ultra-sensitive blowhole.

Together with ropes, gaffs are a means of securing the writhing animals. Within minutes, the sea runs red with the animals’ blood, as locals knife through their flesh in an attempt to hack through the [...]

BEIJING — Nine people have been executed for taking part in ethnic rioting that convulsed a western regional capital in July and left nearly 200 people dead, a state news agency reported Monday.
The report by the China News Service did not give any further details of the executions, except to say that the cases had all been reviewed by the Supreme People’s Court, a legally mandated step in death penalty cases in China.  The report did not say when the [...]

FORT HOOD, Texas – An Army psychiatrist suspected of opening fire on fellow soldiers at Fort Hood cleaned out his apartment in the days before the rampage that left 13 people dead, a neighbor said Friday.
The neighbor, Patricia Villa, said Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan came over to her apartment Wednesday and Thursday and offered her some items, including a new Quran, saying he was going to be deployed on Friday.  She wasn’t sure if he was going to Iraq or [...]

The U.S.-based group Physicians for Human Rights says Darfuri refugees sheltering in refugee camps in Chad are subject to ongoing sexual violence. The group is calling for more global awareness of the matter in the wake of the U.S. government’s new policy on Sudan.
U.S. President Barack Obama launched the new policy last Monday. It focuses on the situation in South Sudan as well as the ongoing crisis in Darfur and calls for a “definitive end” to the fighting in the [...]

RICHMOND, Calif. – Four teens could appear in court as early as Thursday after being charged in the alleged gang rape of a 15-year-old girl outside her high school homecoming dance in Northern California.
The four – ages 15, 16, 17 and 19 – were charged Wednesday with rape and enhancements that they acted in concert, which could make them eligible for life in prison. “These are people who played a significant role in the incident,” Police Lt. Mark Gagan said. [...]

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Two powerful suicide car bombs blew up outside the Justice Ministry and city government offices in downtown Baghdad Sunday, killing at least 136 people in the deadliest attack in more than two years. Iraqi leaders said the attacks aimed to disrupt political progress in the months leading up to January’s crucial elections.
While violence has dropped dramatically in the country since the height of the sectarian tensions, the latest bombings underscored the precarious nature of the security gains [...]

Back in August, our activists sailed to Sweden to drop 180 enormous granite blocks into the sea. It was an odd sight, to be sure, but the action effectively protected an environmentally-rich area called the Kattegat from bottom-trawling, a fishing method in which nets are dragged across the ocean floor, haphazardly scooping up everything in their way.
Oddly enough, despite the fact that a recent study proved that a previous stone-dropping action in Germany was effective, the outrage was tremendous. [...]

Scientists who have produced the first robust proof that cloud seeding can increase long-term rainfall are urging developing countries considering the technology to be cautious.
Cloud seeding involves injecting clouds with chemicals that encourage water vapour to form ice crystals heavy enough to fall, melting on their way to produce rain. Chemicals can be injected into clouds using aircraft or by launching rockets.
The researchers — led by Steven Siems, an associate professor from Monash University, Australia — examined more than [...]

The people of the West African nation of Guinea are still struggling to deal with the trauma of a deadly military crackdown on a pro-democracy rally last month.
It was not the first time troops in Guinea have opened fire on civilians. What has shocked people most is that women were targeted in a wave of alleged sexual violence perpetrated by soldiers in public — in broad daylight.
On Sept. 28, security forces turned on demonstrators who had gathered in the national [...]

Imperial Tobacco Canada destroyed up to 60 early studies that linked cigarettes to addiction and carcinogens, according to a review published Wednesday in the online Canadian Medical Association Journal.
The internal studies, done from 1967 to 1984, were destroyed in 1992 on orders from head office at British American Tobacco in the United Kingdom to avoid “exposing the company to liability or embarrassment,” the authors of the review say.
The studies were later uncovered in British American Tobacco files, which began to [...]

Even as the noose tightens on the people of Palestine, Binyamin Netanyahu has the neck to talk about peace.
The Israeli Prime Minister has been in London for discussions with Gordon Brown and US envoy George Mitchell. Back in the Middle East, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians continues. There is no sign of Britain or America acknowledging this fact or calling it by its name.
As they listen over the [...]