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Ten years ago this month, Portugal rejected the conventional approach to drug policy–more laws, stiffer prison sentences, more police–and went the other way by decriminalizing all drugs, even cocaine and heroin. The drug warriors predicted a disaster. They said drug use would spike and there would be a public health crisis. That did not happen. As Glenn Greenwald showed in a 2009 Cato report, Portugal is doing better than before and in many respects is doing better than other countries in the European Union

Former Russian Interpol head says terror threat in country worse than in Israel; 4 top transportation officials fired over airport bombing. The level of terror threats in Russia is higher than that in Israel," former head of Russian Interpol Vladimir Ovchinsky stated during an interview with Novye Ivestia newspaper Wednesday. "Our war is more intensive than the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians," he added, saying pessimistically that "The war in the Caucuses may last a hundred years." There has been no claim of responsibility for the bombing that occurred at Moscow's Domodedovo Airport, killing 35 people and wounding...

The woolly mammoth, extinct for thousands of years, could be brought back to life in as little as four years thanks to a breakthrough in cloning technology. Previous efforts in the 1990s to recover nuclei in cells from the skin and muscle tissue from mammoths found in the Siberian permafrost failed because they had been too badly damaged by the extreme cold. But a technique pioneered in 2008 by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama, of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology, was successful in cloning a mouse from the cells of another mouse that had been frozen for 16 years.

IBM has announced its fifth annual Next Five in Five – a list of five technologies that the company believes “have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years.” While there are no flying cars or robot servants on the list, there are holographic friends, air-powered batteries, personal environmental sensors, customized commutes and building-heating computers.3D telepresence It may not be a flying car, but it’s definitely one we’ve seen in sci-fi movies before – the ability to converse with a life-size holographic image of another person in real time. The futurists at...

<p>US Treasuries suffered their biggest two-day sell-off since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, following a torrid month that has seen borrowing costs for western governments soar.</p> <p>Germany, Japan and the US have all seen their benchmark market interest rates rise by more than a quarter in the past month while the UK’s has risen by nearly a fifth.</p>

MONTGOMERY -- Republicans on Tuesday appeared to take control of the Alabama Legislature, with top Republicans claiming to have close to 60 seats in the 105-member House of Representatives and perhaps 22 seats in the 35-member Senate.

SALT LAKE CITY — In many ways, just looking at Elizabeth and her sister Mary Katherine today tells the story of how long "Elizabeth Smart" has been a household name throughout the nation, and how long their family has waited for justice to be served. Around the world, the picture of Elizabeth in her "missing" poster, of her in her yellow vest jacket with her hair pulled back, became ingrained in people's minds.

SAO PAULO (AP) - A man in northeastern Brazil is recovering after surgeons removed a 4-inch (10-centimeter) blade that had been stuck in his head for three years following a bar fight. Edeilson Nascimento, a 29-year-old tire repairman, tells reporters Friday he is feeling great after the three-hour surgery earlier this week. Excerpted per FR posting rules.

Last night’s “Parker-Spitzer” saw the lowest numbers yet for the program and the show did little to help the one that followed on the schedule — “Larry King Live” which had its worst numbers in more than 10 years. In its sixth outing, “Parker-Spitzer” drew 311,000 Total Viewers and 86,000 A25-54 viewers. That’s lower than the previous low for the time period set by Campbell Brown earlier this year. (332,000 / 87,000). Last week, Parker-Spitzer finished fourth in the time period averaging 465,000 Total Viewers and 124,000 A25-54. At 9pmET, “Larry King Live” put up its lowest A25-54 demo viewership...

Earliest evidence of fungus that takes over ants' behaviour for its own ends found by scientists. The oldest evidence of a fungus that turns ants into zombies and makes them stagger to their death has been uncovered by scientists. The gruesome hallmark of the fungus's handiwork was found on the leaves of plants that grew in Messel, near Darmstadt in Germany, 48m years ago. The finding shows that parasitic fungi evolved the ability to control the creatures they infect in the distant past, even before the rise of the Himalayas. The fungus, which is alive and well in forests today,...

Let me first always remind readers that polls are a snapshot in time. Two years from now, President Obama could be sitting on top of the world politically. But for now, he has lost all but 38 percent approval from the critical "independent" American voters. They're the ones that gave him the presidency. He appears headstrong in his determination to show the nation what a disastrous presidency looks like. Pundits often point to the presidency of Jimmy Carter as the modern example of a failed leader. It is no secret that I have, despite my former years as an active...

descent into irrelevancy...on King's inability (much the same as his fellow CNN hosts) to compete in the ratings with Fox News and MSNBC. At 9 p.m., the time slot King used to dominate, he's a "distant third" behind Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity. King now averages 725,000 viewers—that's about half the audience he had during the most recent presidential election; he was drawing 1.34 million in the first quarter of 2009. CNN president Jonathan Klein declined to comment on King's contract, which is up for renewal next June.

A mobile phone company has suspended the number 0888 888 888 – after every single person assigned to it died in the last 10 years. The first owner Vladimir Grashnov – the former CEO of Bulgarian mobile phone company Mobitel which issued the number – died of cancer in 2001 aged just 48. Despite a spotless business record there were persistent rumours that his cancer had been caused by a business rival using radioactive poisoning. The number then passed to Bulgarian mafia boss, Konstantin Dimitrov, who was gunned down in 2003 by a lone assassin in the Netherlands during a...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – The major earthquakes that devastated Chile earlier this year and which triggered the catastrophic Indonesian tsunami of 2004 are more than just a distinct possibility to strike the Pacific Northwest coast of the United States, scientists say. There is more than a one-in-three chance that it will happen within the next 50 years. New analyses by Oregon State University marine geologist Chris Goldfinger and his colleagues have provided fresh insights into the Northwest’s turbulent seismic history – where magnitude 8.2 (or higher) earthquakes have occurred 41 times during the past 10,000 years. Those earthquakes were thought to...

The NY Times has the story; the longtime crusading state Attorney General (he was Eliot Spitzer before Eliot Spitzer was), Richard Blumenthal has sometimes just implied it, but on other occasions (including one the NYT has on video) he’s said outright that he served in the Marines in Vietnam, when in fact he enlisted in a stateside Marine Reserve unit only near the end of the war after obtaining five draft deferments to pursue his legal education. The deferments are nothing to be proud of, but they’re a common enough story among male political leaders of that generation in both...

CHICAGO (AP) - The iconic redheaded orphan Annie is ending her time on newspaper comics pages after 85 years. Tribune Media Services announced Thursday that it will cease syndication of the "Annie" strip on June 13.

Now that our government is daily dealing in trillions of dollars, my question is ... How big is a trillion?

Met Office figures recorded a December-to-February mean UK temperature of just 1.51C, while the 1971-2000 average is 3.7C After suffering snow, sleet, rain and consistently freezing temperatures, the knowledge that the Met Office has officially recognised winter 2009-10 as the coldest in 31 years brings with it a certain grim satisfaction. Provisional figures from the forecaster show the UK winter ‑ which in forecasting terms lasts from the start of December until the end of February ‑ has been the harshest, in temperature terms, since 1978-79.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Unemployment rates will likely peak in most U.S. cities in 2010, but it will be many more years before jobless rates hit their lows of the last decade, a report released by a U.S. mayors group shows. In some areas, such as California's central valley and cities in Nevada, unemployment rates will stay at or above 10 percent through 2013, according to the report published on Wednesday by the U.S. Conference of Mayors .. The mayors group released the report a day ahead of a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama in which it will seek federal...

An Indian villager burrowed for 14 years with a hammer and chisel to cut a tunnel through a mountain so that his neighbours could reach nearby fields and he could park his truck outside his home. Ramchandra Das, 53, who lives in eastern Bihar state, carved a 10m-long, 4m-wide tunnel through the hill range from his village of Kewati. Das took up the Herculean task after villagers found the 7km trek over the mountain increasingly arduous. When the authorities refused to help to cut the journey time, Das began carving his way through the earth in the direction of the...