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Animal tests have linked BPA exposure to a range of health problems, including cancer, obesity, diabetes, and early puberty. The studies are controversial though, and how they related to human health is not fully clear, according to WebMD.

If you're worried about being exposed to the cancer-causing compound BPA, you may already know to be wary of some water bottles and food cans. But you'll never guess where BPA, a.k.a. bisphenol A, is showing up now:Cash register receipts.

What brings this journalistic parable to mind is the arrogantly unapologetic way that Andrew Breitbart has reacted to the furor over the ripped-out-of-context Shirley Sherrod speech excerpt that he posted on his website. Choosing bluster over blushing, Breitbart told Matt Lewis in a Politics Daily interview: "I couldn't wait to get this story. I knew from past experience that I had a news cycle to get this out." Later in the interview, Breitbart underscored his cavalier publish-or-perish approach to fact-checking: "It had to be done at the exact moment in time that the press would notice it." A new report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism details how the Sherrod charade migrated from conservative blogs taking their cues from Breitbart to Fox News and then to CNN.

STRATFOR begins its assessment of Turkey at the Sea of Marmara because, until the Turks secured it — most famously and decisively in May 1453 with the capture of Constantinople — they were simply one of many groups fighting for control of the region.

The Misconception: You rationally analyze all factors before making a choice or determining value. The Truth: Your first perception lingers in your mind, affecting later perceptions and decisions.

In many situations, people make estimates by starting from an initial value that is adjusted to yield the final answer. The initial value, or starting point, may be suggested by the formulation of the problem, or it may be the result of partial computation. In either case, adjustments are typically insufficient…that is, different starting points yield different estimates, which are biased toward the initial values. - “Judgment Under Uncertainty” by Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky

As of this past weekend, it has been two years since the 2008 Russia-Georgia war.

The Caucasus region is no stranger to the Russian military. The region has more than its fair share of problems from the Kremlin’s perspective, including Muslim militants, a pro-U.S. Georgia, tense relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia and other regional powers attempting to challenge Russia’s domination. Because of the mountainous geography and complex political situation, the Caucasus region is difficult to control. Only through brute force has Russia asserted its dominance in the past.

Should Iran break International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards at Bushehr, it could conceivably divert and begin to reprocess spent nuclear fuel for use in a nuclear device.

While the fueling of Bushehr may be an important milestone, it is not a recent or surprising development. The project dates back more than 35 years to a deal between the German company Siemens and the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Israel and the United States obviously are opposed to Bushehr coming on line, but the idea that Iran is about to cross a red line misunderstands the issue.

"The creation, selection, promotion, and proliferation of numbers are … the stuff of politics," the editors write in their introduction. No debate lasts very long without a reference to data, and as the numbers boil their way into the argument, you must challenge them or be burned blind by them. The essays presented in Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts—about human trafficking, the Bosnian death count, the Darfur genocide, armed conflict, drugs, terrorism, and more—counsel exactly that sort of skepticism.

Often, the editors write, even the most rigorous-seeming statistics conceal squishy measurements. Inflated numbers are designed to create the sense that something must be done now. Depressed counts are intended to convince the recipients that the problem is too small to worry about. Whether it's body counts in Iraq or kilos of Colombian drugs, the creators and disseminators of the numbers usually have greater interest in their size than their veracity.

the drug bureaucracy spends extra billions to produce bigger numbers because the public associates "more" with "better."

Russia is launching a massive modernization program that involves seriously upgrading — if not building from scratch — many key economic sectors, including space, energy, telecommunications, transportation, nanotechnology, military industry and information technology.

However, there are two factors that could keep Russia from remaining strong enough to carry out its plans.

This is all the more important since 50,000 troops will remain in Iraq, and while they may not be considered combat troops, a great deal of combat power remains embedded with them.

The United States invaded Iraq in 2003 with three goals: The first was the destruction of the Iraqi army, the second was the destruction of the Baathist regime and the third was the replacement of that regime with a stable, pro-American government in Baghdad.

I've had the huge pleasure of giving a talk at TED Global in Oxford, about the lessons games can teach us about engagement and about learning itself. The full video will be online in due course; until then, here's a summary of a few central points.

The proportion of full-time college professors with tenure has fallen from 57 percent in 1975 to 31 percent in 2007. The numbers for 2009, soon to be released by the Department of Education, are expected to dip even lower.

To which some educators are saying: good riddance.

As tuition climbs and universities struggle to pay their bills, tenure is starting to look unaffordable. Keeping a professor around indefinitely—tenure means they can't be forced to retire—simply costs a lot.

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this: 1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal; 2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it; 3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web.

‘carved in stone.’

hen you and/or the people with whom you identify and spend time experience discrimination and marginalization on a regular basis, it affects the way you view politics. Ann's point is that calls for interest groups to sacrifice "their" issues for the sake of "the greater good" of the progressive movement also have an implicit background in identity - usually a comparatively advantaged one.

None of this is to suggest that Ann is wrong in saying that "all politics are identity politics." It's just to say that, contrary to what many progressives wish to believe, the goals of different identity groups are usually in more tension than they are harmony.

Mountain ranges inhibit trade and armies alike while peninsulas and islands limit the ability of larger powers to intimidate or conquer smaller ones. Because of such features, it isn’t as much of a surprise that Europe has never united under a single government as it is that anyone has ever tried.

The first is the North European Plain

As Santayana would remind us, “Logically, everything is possible; and if a certain sequence of events happens not to be found in our experience, nothing proves that it may not occur beyond.”

The advantage of Hume’s approach is that it is rigorously empirical. Hume makes no assumptions based on logical, rhetorical, or moral principles but attempts to settle the issue in relation to experience interpreted via human intelligence.

Keith, a global leader in investigating this topic, says that geoengineering, or engineering the climate on a global scale, is an imperfect science. "It cannot offset the risks that come from increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If we don't halt man-made CO2 emissions, no amount of climate engineering can eliminate the problems – massive emissions reductions are still necessary."

Keith suggests two novel geoengineering approaches–'levitating' engineered nano-particles, and the airborne release of sulphuric acid

In his study–published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a top-ranked international science journal–Keith describes a new class of engineered nano-particles that might be used to offset global warming more efficiently, and with fewer negative side effects, than using sulphates.

There is little hiding the fact that Cuba’s socialist economy has run out of steam. The more interesting question is whether the Cuban leader is prepared to acknowledge this fact and what he is prepared to do about it.

Cuba has been seeking an injection of capital to generate income while still trying to leave the capitalists out of the equation in order to maintain control. There is no easy way to resolve this paradox, and the problem for Castro in his advanced age is that he is running out of time.

Obama and America are disenchanted today less because they have different values within the American political spectrum than because they have different orientations toward politics as a whole. More than any American president within memory, Barack Obama embodies the “ethic of responsibility” identified by the sociologist Max Weber in his lecture Politics as a Vocation. Obama weighs possible consequences carefully and tries to produce the best result. This comes in contrast to the “ethic of ultimate ends” favored by large swaths of the American public. The president’s detractors—from the Tea Party to his progressive base—prefer moral imperatives to the weighing of consequences. Do what is right, they say, and if others lack the insight to follow, that’s their problem. Foreseeable consequences are beside the point. To Obama, this posture has always seemed like empty moralizing masquerading as morality, a rejection of politics itself. What seems truly right, to him, is to act in ways likely to make this world better, not to insist on noble extremes that will backfire.

Since 1989 the population of the Russian Far East declined by 14% to 6.7 million in 2002; shorn of subsidies from the center, it is now dependent on the rest of East Asia for food and consumer imports. It sits next to Chinese Manchuria (the provinces of Heilongjiang, Liaoning and Jilin), an environmentally-strained rust belt of 108 million souls. Thus it is not surprising to see American geopolitical jockeys, Russian xenophobes and anti-Putin "liberals" alike (i.e. Radio Free Europe's Aleksandr Golts and Echo Moskvi Radio's Yulia Latynina, etc) claiming that a stealth demographic invasion of Russia is well underway which will in a few years result in a Chinese Far East.

The issue of Chinese migration to Russia and its political consequences starts with one main question - how many of them are there? All reputable estimates are in the range of 200,000 to 400,000, with 500.000 as the absolute maximum, most of them shuttle traders or seasonal laborers. The academic Gel'bras first came with these figures in 2001, based on adding up numbers from separate towns and regions.

Most migrants come from cities or small towns, and only 20% from villages - although the latter figure is higher in Moscow. Only 5% were employed in agriculture back in China. 38% were "workers" and 11% were "worker-peasants". Although only 6% admitted they had been unemployed, the real figure is much higher since 70% of workers and 68% of worker peasants said they migrated because they couldn't find a job in China.

A Google search for the phrase “America’s decline” turns up 42,500 hits. Comparisons to Rome and other once-powerful empires abound, as in Cullen Murphy’s popular 2007 book Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. From the Tea Party right comes the constant, screeching cry that President Obama and the Democrats are “destroying America.” The National Intelligence Council itself, a few years ago, predicted the “erosion” of American power relative to China and India. Clearly, the most popular classical figure in America today is that high-strung Trojan lady, Cassandra.

Twenty-two years ago, in a refreshingly clear-sighted article for Foreign Affairs, Harvard’s Samuel P. Huntington noted that the theme of “America’s decline” had in fact been a constant in American culture and politics since at least the late 1950s.

What is particularly fascinating about these older predictions is that so many of their themes remain constant. What did our past Cassandras see as the causes of America’s decline? On the one hand, internal weaknesses—spiraling budget and trade deficits, the poor performance of our primary and secondary educational systems; political paralysis—coupled with an arrogant tendency toward “imperial overstretch.” And on the other hand, the rise of tougher, better-disciplined rivals elsewhere: the Soviet Union through the mid-'80s; Japan until the early '90s; China today.