On May 12, 2009, the ACLU and the Public Patent Foundation at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law (PUBPAT) filed a lawsuit charging that patents on two human genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer are unconstitutional and invalid. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of four scientific organizations representing more than 150,000 geneticists, pathologists, and laboratory professionals, as well as individual researchers, breast cancer and women's health groups, genetic counselors and individual women. Individuals with certain mutations along these two genes, known as BRCA1 and BRCA2, are at a significantly higher risk for developing hereditary breast and ovarian cancers.

Bush’s Backward Sprint To The Finish

In its final days, the administration is rushing to implement a sweeping array of "midnight regulations" — de facto laws issued by the executive branch — designed to lock in Bush's legacy. Under the last- minute rules, which can be extremely difficult to overturn, loaded firearms would be allowed in national parks, uranium mining would be permitted near the Grand Canyon and many injured consumers would no longer be able to sue negligent manufacturers in state courts. Other rules would gut the Endangered Species Act, open millions of acres of wild lands to mining, restrict access to birth control and put local cops to work spying for the federal government.

The Censored Eleven is a group of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons that were withheld from syndication by United Artists in 1968. UA owned the distribution rights to the Associated Artists Productions library at that time, and decided to pull these eleven cartoons from broadcast because they are based on racist depictions of African Americans and are deemed too offensive for contemporary audiences. The ban has been upheld by UA and the successive owners of the pre-August 1948 Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies[1] catalog to this day, and these shorts have not been officially broadcast on television since the late 1960s.

Obama’s speech underscored the Americans’ feeling that Turkey is in a prime position to influence events. To be Turkish is to balance oneself between the West and the Islamic worlds, as well as between the United States and Russia. Washington wants to use Turkey’s position as the leading Muslim state — with influence from the Middle East to South Asia — to deal with the unrest in the Arab/Muslim world and, ideally, as a hedge against Russia. Judging from the abject flattery and language indicating that Obama thought highly of Turkey’s ability to act in accordance with mutual best interests, it is fairly clear that Obama’s talks with the Turkish leadership went extremely well.

So which 9 states are projected to see 1 in 4 teenage girls become mothers? Mississippi, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Arkansas, Nevada, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Tennessee. All of those states are well-known hotbeds of marraige equality. So in contrast, how did Connecticutt and Massachusetts — where same-sex marraige is legal — rank? In the entire country, only Vermont and New Hampsire have lower projected teen motherhood rates. Oh, and by the way, Vermont’s senate just voted for legalizing gay marriage.

Privacy groups are urging the Federal Trade Commission to open an investigation on cloud computing services—especially Google's. If the FTC finds that Google isn't doing enough to protect user data, one organization suggests that the Big G's web-based services should be shut down.

The EFF has put its entire archive of government documents online. These have been "pried loose from secretive government agencies" through Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits over the years, but EFF has scanned and indexed all of them, then created a custom search engine to make browsing or digging much easier.

China should seek guarantees that its $682 billion holdings of U.S. government debt won’t be eroded by “reckless policies,” said Yu Yongding, a former adviser to the central bank.

A suicide technique that mixes household chemicals to produce a deadly hydrogen sulfide gas became a grisly fad in Japan last year. Now it's slowly seeping into the United States over the internet, according to emergency workers, who are alarmed at the potential for innocent causalities.