Lifestyle

Fourteen pilgrims, three of them Indian nationals, who were travelling to Shi'ite holy sites in Iraq were abducted and slain in Anbar province - the heartland of the Sunni insurgency. An official at the Al-Hussein hospital in Kerbala stated that the men were bound and then shot in the head. Some of the bodies that were brought to the hospital showed signs of having been tortured, and one had been partially beheaded. An attack on a Shia shrine this February has led to increasing sectarian violence in Iraq, prompting the Pentagon to release a

American freesolo rock climber John Bachar was injured in a car crash in Nevada, in which a co-passenger was killed. At approxiamately 7:25 p.m. on Sunday, August 13, Forty-nine year-old Bachar of Mammoth Lakes, California, 49, was driving southbound on U.S. Route 93, about 33 miles north of Ely, Nevada, when he allowed his Toyota 4Runner to drift off the west edge of the road and struck a mile-marker post. Bachar overcorrected to the left, causing the Toyota to rotate counterclockwise and travel across both lanes to the east side of the road

The Green Party of Canada will elect a new leader today. The new leader will replace Jim Harris, who stepped down after holding the position since 2003. The candidates are: Elizabeth May, a former Sierra Club executive director David Chernushenko, the party's deputy leader Jim Fannon, a real estate agent from St. Catharines, Ontario who is a four-time Green candidate, and founder of Nature's Hemp food company. May and Chernushenko, have emerged as frontrunners of the leadership race. "We draw pretty much equally from across the entire poli

An 8th case of mad cow disease was found in a cow in the province of Alberta. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency did a test and found BSE. The agency found no part of the beef cow's carcass entered either the human or animal feed chains. The CFIA said that, "the cow could have likely lived another 6 months or so, but died of complications of mastitis". "The animal's age is between eight and 10 years", said the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. The CFIA also traced 172 animals would likely ate feed out of that load. "The cow's exposure to BS

The Australian federal government has announced it will subsidise the breast-cancer drug Herceptin under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) for women with HER2 positive cancer. Those with advanced breast cancer will continue to be eligible for special assistance from Medicare Australia independently from the PBS. According to the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing, around 2,000 of the 14,000 cases of breast cancer diagnosed annually are of the HER2 positive type. Herceptin has shown to prevent the recurrence of cancer in 30% of

A report by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) says rising demand for irrigation to produce food and biofuels will aggravate scarcities of water. "One in three people is enduring one form or another of water scarcity," states the report compiled by 700 experts. IWMI warns there has to be a radical transformation in the management of water resources - citing as examples Australia, south-central China, and last year’s devastating drought in India. Report authors claim that the price of water could double or triple over the next

NASA has announced that rockets will be launched from Woomera in outback South Australia to service the International Space Station (ISS) — starting in 2008. NASA has selected two American companies to launch rockets from the Woomera base. Rocket Plane Kistler and Space-X will conduct orbital flight tests and commercial operations. The Woomera site would also be used to launch cargo such as fuel and food to the ISS as often as every two weeks. Woomera, named for an Aboriginal spear-throwing tool, was originally involved in testing of long-rang

On August 9 in the Polish city of Poznań, Krysztof Wantoch-Rekowski, an anti-hunger, anti-war campaigner from the international Food Not Bombs network was detained by police. He was sentenced to six weeks imprisonment on the charge of "destroying" his identity card, which is a criminally punishable action under Article 276 of the Polish Criminal Code. In a press statement made on August 15, supporters said that Wantoch-Rekowski did not destroy his card, he only stuck a "paper illustration" on it to prevent it from falling apart ("podkleił 'pa

Sri Lanka government jets bombed the LTTE on front lines in the battle for the Jaffna peninsula as fighting continued in the ethnic strife. The last week of fighting has claimed the lives of hundreds. Government air strikes continued on targets in the northern rebel-held territory of Kilinochchi and near the eastern port town of Trincomalee. The peninsula, which has largely been cut off form the outside world, has seen tens of thousands have flee their homes. There are shortages of food and lines for fuel. During a brief break in the fightin

A woman detained after an evacuation at a U.S. airport in Huntington, West Virginia, has been cleared of all charges after further tests revealed that the liquid contained in water bottles in her carry-on luggage was not explosive. This result came despite earlier tests which seemed to indicate explosives were present. The evacuation affected 100 people. The woman, who is of Pakistani descent, has been cleared by U.S. authorities to travel as early as Friday.

Indonesian Health officials are concerned that a 9-year-old girl who died of the H5N1 Avian Flu virus, contracted the illness as a result of human to human transmission and officials say a team of experts are on the way to the area to determine if a cluster exists. "The tests were positive. She died of bird flu. A team left this morning to check if there is a cluster or not," said Bird Flu Information Center scientist, Nurdin. Ai Siti Amanah who lived in Garut, located in West Java died on August 15 before health officials were able to determ

According to Japanese and American scientists, healthy offspring have resulted from the injection of sperm into female mice from male mice that have been in a deep freeze for 15 years. The mice, as a whole, were kept frozen in temperatures of -20 degrees celsius. Scientists at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research Bioresource Center which is located in Tsukuba, Japan, say that cryogenic techniques were not used and that the mice were kept in a freezer. Scientists also say that the sperm was not alive when it was thawed out. At leas