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A report from Syria Monday night said that soldiers loyal to President Bashar al-Assad had opened fire on between 60 and 70 soldiers who attempted to leave the country in order to join opposition forces. Human rights groups in contact with Syrian rebels said that forces had killed over 30 people earlier in the day. The revelations on the murder of the soldiers came after Syria signed a deal to allow Arab League observers into the country. The observers would ensure that soldiers do not attack civilians, and that civilian protests do not erupt into violence.

Natalya Murakhver, a New York food writer and mother of an 18-month year old daughter, loved her premium brand orange juice -- the "100 percent pure" and "not from concentrate" kind that comes in the colorful carton and tastes consistently delicious. That is, until she said she learned from her first-time moms group that there's a "secret ingredient" in all premium orange juices that companies are not required to put on their labeling. Now, after writing Whole Foods, she refuses to buy her favorite, "365" juice, amid uncertainty about its contents. "One of the moms said she had read about...

International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Christine Lagarde has warned the Great Depression of the 1930s may repeat itself unless the EU pulls together and gets foreign help. Fresh unemployment statistics added to the gloom by highlighting the social cost of austerity. “If the international community does not work together, the risk from an economic point of view is that of retraction, rising protectionism, isolation. This is exactly the description of what happened in the Thirties and what followed is not something we are looking forward to," Lagarde said in a speech delivered to the US State Department on Thursday (15...

Census has released their new Supplemental Poverty Measure and I’m afraid that people are still getting the points about US poverty wrong. The SPM does indeed cure some of the problems with the old measures which I discussed here. But it introduces a new and quite glaring error at the same time.This is what leads such as Felix Salmon into the quite erroneous gambit of directly comparing the two methods of poverty measurement and the number of people who are poor in the US.Just to recap the argument about the old method (which is still the official method by the...

A young couple hopping railroad cars across the country was found dead under a mound of coal at a Florida power plant. Christopher Artes, 25, and Medeana Hendershot, 22, shared a passion for illegally hopping freight trains and traveling the country without a set plan...

SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) - A woman in the border city of Laredo, Texas who was angry because she had been denied food stamps killed herself and shot and critically wounded her two children late on Monday, authorities said on Tuesday.

Playing baseball games without keeping score. Parents not allowed to cheer for one side or the other at basketball games. Refusing to use red ink to grade tests because it's too jarring. No dodgeball. Participation trophies. Telling kids, "You're special," without their doing anything to show they're special. Newsflash: You may be special to God, your mommy, and your teacher just because you were born, but the rest of us aren't impressed. The world doesn't owe you a living, a promotion, or any special consideration at all. The people who tell you otherwise are doing it because they think you're...

Mayor Mitch Landrieu and other city leaders deemed the sweep of Duncan Plaza and eviction of protestors a success Tuesday morning, just hours after New Orleans police disbanded the high-profile encampment. In a move that had been forecast for days, dozens of officers fanned out across the public square in an early morning operation, forcing out more than a hundred people, some of whom were homeless, and others who identified with the "Occupy NOLA" movement.Landrieu, speaking at a City Hall news conference, said he thought the police sweep was "well-timed and well-organized." One person was arrested, while dozens of others...

HARTFORD —— City officials say Occupy Hartford protesters must leave their encampment at the corner of Farmington Avenue and Broad Street by 6 p.m. Tuesday. Hartford Police Chief Daryl K. Roberts said protesters camping at the area they've named Turning Point Park have been notified that they risk being arrested after the deadline passes. "I don't anticipate any trouble, but I will take appropriate corrective action," Roberts said.

DETROIT (WJBK) - A teenage girl is battered and beaten inside a Detroit school restroom while other girls watch and record the whole thing. However, this isn't the first time this girl has been assaulted at school. Her family says administrators know about the fighting and chose to look the other way. School is supposed to be about reading, writing and arithmetic, but inside the walls of Detroit's Ludington Middle School a bathroom has been used as a backdrop for brutal teenage brawls. It's a game called "30 Seconds," but no one is playing. One eighth grader pummels another while...

Washington, DC, December 1, 2011 -- Only 21 percent of surveyed medical students could identify five true and two false indications of when and when not to wash their hands in the clinical setting, according to a study published in the December issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, the official publication of APIC - the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology. Three researchers from the Institute for Medical Microbiology and Hospital Epidemiology at Hannover Medical School in Hannover, Germany collected surveys from 85 medical students in their third year of study during a lecture class that...

As Cyber Monday draws near and debate continues about the Stop Online Piracy Act, the U.S. government has again seized a bevy of domain names it says belong to Web sites that deal in counterfeit goods. Blog TorrentFreak ran a list of more than 130 domains it said were seized by the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security's Immigrations and Customs Enforcement division as part of "Operation in Our Sites." TorrentFreak called the move the largest such round of seizures to date.

Expert unease over deadly flu virus 'created' in Dutch laboratory Friday 25 November 2011 Dutch scientists have created a flu virus which is so deadly there is doubt about whether the research should be published, the Volkskrant reports on Friday. The paper says American experts are worried detailed information could fall into the wrong hands and that terrorists could recreate the virus as a weapon. The fears are notable because the work was carried out on behalf of the National Institutes of Health in the US. The research team, led by Ron Fouchier, professor of virology at Erasmus teaching hospital,...

Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad presents The Polar Express in Durango, Colorado.The Polar Express

I'm a bit late on this one, I know, but having now waded through the European Commission's green paper on eurobonds, now laughably rechristened "stability bonds" to make the idea more palatable to the Germans, I'm not impressed. You have to get through 26 pages of waffle before you hit the relevant bit, which states simply that "in order to advance on this issue, more analytical work and consultation are indispensable. Several of the key concepts, possible objectives and benefits, requirements and implementation challenges merit a more detailed consideration and analysis". You are telling me they do, starting with the...

U.S.-based multinational corporations added 1.5 million workers to their payrolls in Asia and the Pacific region during the 2000s, and 477,500 workers in Latin America, while cutting payrolls at home by 864,000, the Commerce Department reported. The faster growth abroad was concentrated in emerging markets, such as China, Brazil, India and Eastern Europe, according to economists Kevin Barefoot and Raymond Mataloni, of the U.S. Commerce Department. "Judging by the destination of sales by affiliates in those countries," the economists wrote in a recent survey, "the goal of the U.S. multinational corporations' expanded production was to primarily sell to local customers...

Police in Denver and Salt Lake City swept anti-Wall Street protesters from their camps as demonstrators and supporters in Portland, Ore., flooded a city park area in defiance of an eviction order on Sunday. In Portland, crowds that swelled to thousands and went toe-to-toe with police moved back onto sidewalks and downtown's Lownsdsale and Chapman squares after closing Southwest Third Avenue and Madison Street overnight.

BOSTON, November 7, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A lawsuit that could nullify the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) has received the support of major U.S. corporations, who filed a brief opposing the law in federal court this week. A friend-of-the-court brief filed last Thursday in the case of Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services argues that DOMA, which protects marriage as between a man and a woman in federal law, imposes crippling burdens on employers. Seventy employers are represented in the brief, including Microsoft, Starbucks, Google, NIKE, Levi Strauss and Co., CBS, Aetna, Blue Cross...

First, the context: Modern political science -- which readily understands imperialism, resistance, and clash of competing interests -- does not similarly understand “the wasting away of nations.” That, says David Goldman, author of How Civilizations Die: (and why Islam is dying too), is because political scientists tend to assume that people will follow their rational self-interest. In fact, they often don’t.From antiquity, he notes, a symptom of a civilization’s decline has been the destruction of children:Macedonian poet Poseidippus of Pella wrote: “Even a rich man always exposes a daughter.” A 200 BCE survey of seventy-nine families in Miletus, an ancient...

The United Nations will warn this week that the world's population could more than double to 15 billion by the end of this century, putting a catastrophic strain on the planet's resources unless urgent action is taken to curb growth rates, the Observer can reveal.