When going ‘green’ makes people sick

When communities like San Francisco and Seattle began banning plastic bags, said Ramesh Ponnuru, it seemed like a public-spirited thing to do. But’ benign-seeming laws often have unintended consequences— and the plastic-bag ban is now producing a sickening result. The reusable shopping bags that people now use to bring groceries home turn out to be breeding grounds for bacteria carried […]

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Horror over baby murder

Changchun, China The senseless killing of an infant has plunged China’s social media sites into another round of soul-searching. The baby was in a car stolen outside a grocery in northeastern China, and the carjacker admitted to strangling and burying the child. Chinese Internet users contrasted the story with a similar incident in New York City last month, in which […]

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Chimps: Natural-born killers

Why do chimpanzees kill one another? For years, many studies have shown that chimps that were observed killing one another had become more aggressive only when humans encroached on their environment. But new studies have lent weight to an alternative theory: Chimpanzees are, like humans, natural-born killers who use violence as a means of expanding their territory and increasing their […]

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A body of water

■    Tourists at a Los Angeles hotel were distressed to learn they’d been drinking, bathing, and brushing their teeth with water from a rooftop tank in which a dead body had been decomposing. The body was discovered by a maintenance worker who was trying to figure out why the water pressure was so low. “The water did have a funny […]

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Acupuncture’s Real Benefits

To the surprise of doctors, new research on acupuncture has found that the ancient Chinese healing technique provides real pain relief. Acupuncture involves sticking needles into specific points in the body that Chinese healers believe contain unseen energy pathways; the needles supposedly stimulate the flow of “qi,” or energy. Western medicine has viewed these claims with deep skepticism, contending that […]

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