Monthly Archive: October 2006

Considered an indicator of self-awareness, mirror self-recognition (MSR) has long seemed limited to humans and apes. In both phylogeny and human ontogeny, MSR is thought to correlate with higher forms of empathy and altruistic...

Julie MacDonald … has been deputy assistant secretary of the interior for fish and wildlife and parks since 2004 [making] decisions on protecting endangered species [and] has repeatedly refused to go along with staff...

The commotion in the streets — goods spilling across sidewalks, traffic snarled under a searing sun — once prompted the uninitiated to conclude that Baghdad was reviving. Of course, they were seeing the city...

Both MySpace and Facebook lost visitors in September, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a Web-tracking service. The number of unique U.S. visitors at MySpace fell 4% to 47.2 million from 49.2 million in August, and the...

Someone who sees without hearing is much more uneasy than someone who hears without seeing. In this there is something characteristic of the sociology of the big city. Interpersonal relationships in big cities are...

Image Detective Tricia Hauck finished a burglary investigation at Pete’s Café and returned to the Central Division station near Skid Row. Her left foot started to feel uncomfortably warm. She wondered if it had...

If you are an American admitted to a hospital in Amsterdam, Toronto, or Copenhagen these days, you’ll be considered a biohazard. Doctors and nurses will likely put you into quarantine while they determine whether...

The Israeli army dropped phosphorous bombs on Hezbollah guerrilla targets during their war in Lebanon this summer, an Israeli Cabinet minister said Sunday, confirming Lebanese allegations … Hezbollah, meanwhile, has been criticized for failing...

Two years ago, when there were 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and effectively zero Iraqi forces, the expectation was that once the Iraqis were trained up, security would improve. Now there are 140,000 Americans...

So the emerging Bush “plan” for Iraq seems to involve cutting the country into several pieces with a partition into Syrian (western), Kurdish (northern), and Iranian (southern) spheres of influence. And then running away,...