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Have you ever noticed that herds of grazing animals all face the same way?Images from Google Earth have confirmed that cattle tend to align their bodies in a north-south direction. Wild deer also display this behaviour - a phenomenon that has apparently gone unnoticed by herdsmen and hunters for thousands of years.

Panel Said to Alter Finding on Voter Fraud By IAN URBINA WASHINGTON, April 10 — A federal panel responsible for conducting election research played down the findings of experts who concluded last year that there was little voter fraud around the nation, according to a review of the original report obtained by The New York Times. Instead, the panel, the Election Assistance Commission, issued a report that said the pervasiveness of fraud was open to debate. The revised version echoes complaints made by Republican politicians, who have long suggested that voter fraud is widespread and justifies the voter identification laws...

BANGKOK, Thailand - Warming temperatures could result in food shortages for 130 million people across Asia by 2050 and cause potentially catastrophic problems in Africa, wiping out one of the continent's staple crops altogether, according to a U.N. report released Tuesday. Climate change threatens the ecologically rich Great Barrier Reef and sub-Antarctic islands, and could melt the snow on Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro, according to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A summary of the full, 1,572-page document written and reviewed by 441 scientists was released Friday. The latest document, the second of four reports including the...

WASHINGTON, April 17, 2006 – Recent criticism voiced by a half dozen retired generals over Iraq war planning does not reflect the mainstream views of the officer corps, a senior Defense Department official told Pentagon reporters today. "There are a handful of officers that have exercised their right to speak their mind, and certainly that's their right to do that," DoD spokesman Bryan Whitman said. Brushing aside a reporter's suggestion there's widespread disagreement among senior officers over Iraq war planning, Whitman said there are thousands of active duty, reserve component and retired general officers from all of the armed services....

Abuse widespread in Islamic schools, says Muslim leader By Jonathan Petre, Religion Correspondent (Filed: 23/03/2006) A respected Muslim leader has called for tougher regulations to tackle "widespread" child abuse in Islamic religious schools. Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, the head of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, said yesterday that the 700 or so madrassas in Britain were "outside the law". He was speaking at the launch of a report about the dangers facing some of the 100,000 children who attend the institutions, which are usually attached to mosques and are the Islamic equivalents of Sunday schools. The Department for Education said...

BEIJING (AFP) - The UN's chief torture investigator has praised China's leaders for acknowledging the widespread abuse of prisoners in the nation's jails, as he begins a historic 12-day fact-finding mission. Manfred Novak, the UN Human Rights Commission's special rapporteur on torture, said Beijing had offered him freer access to detainees than the United States was prepared to give him on a recently scrapped trip to Guantanamo Bay. "There is a growing awareness that torture is quite widely practised in the common criminal proceedings (in China) by the police and that something needs to be done," Nowak said in an...

Officers feared abuse of Iraqi civilians by British soldiers 'was widespread' By Michael Smith in Osnabruck (Filed: 20/01/2005) Evidence of more widespread abuse of Iraqi civilians emerged yesterday at the court martial of three British soldiers accused of involvement in the physical and sexual abuse of prisoners. British military commanders were so concerned at the number of allegations that British troops were mistreating civilian detainees that they issued fresh guidelines warning soldiers about mistreatment of prisoners. L/Cpl Darren Larkin standing on a prisoner The incidents in which the three defendants were allegedly involved have been shown in several photographs released...

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