Rawstory | Two out of three Pakistani journalists view United States drone strikes in the region as acts of terrorism, according to a new study conducted by Washington State University and Pakistan's Lahore University of Management Sciences.

Huffington Post | The Wall Street Journal recently reported that a study of prescription patterns in 2009, conducted by IMS Health, showed that 25 percent of children in the U.S. were on regular medication. IMS Health is a firm that provides marketing intelligence to pharmaceutical companies. The firm's job is to keep the $800 billion per year global pharmaceutical industry on a continued pattern of growth. Hopefully these consultants accomplished something quite different this week. Hopefully they provided our citizens with an overdue wake-up call.

BBC | A woman's risk of developing breast cancer has risen to one in eight from one in nine, according to Cancer Research UK. The charity's figures show that breast cancer rates in the UK have increased by 3.5% in 10 years, from 42,400 new cases in 1999 to 47,700 in 2008.

Natural News | The mainstream media is just now catching on to what NaturalNews and other natural health advocates have been saying for years: type 2 diabetes can be reversed through dietary and lifestyle changes, and without the need for lifelong drug interventions. A recent report by CNN says that improving one's diet, keeping off excess weight, and regularly exercising, can help millions of people with diabetes get rid of it for good.

Guardian | White phosphorous smoke screens are fired by the US army as part of an early morning patrol in November 2004 on the outskirts of Falluja, Iraq, in preparation for an offensive against insurgents.  A study examining the causes of a dramatic spike in birth defects in the Iraqi city of Falluja has for the first time concluded that genetic damage could have been caused by weaponry used in US assaults that took place six years ago.

Irish Times | ISRAEL IS discriminating against Palestinians living in the occupied territories by depriving them of water, electricity and roads while providing a luxurious lifestyle for Israelis living in illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

Fluoride Action Network | Exposure to fluoride may lower children’s intelligence says a study pre-published in Environmental Health Perspectives, a publication of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (online December 17, 2010). Fluoride is added to 70% of U.S. public drinking water supplies. According to Paul Connett, Ph.D., director of the Fluoride Action Network, “This is the 24th study that has found this association, but this study is stronger than the rest because the authors have controlled for key confounding variables and in addition to correlating lowered IQ with levels of fluoride in the water, the authors found a correlation between lowered IQ and fluoride levels in children’s blood. This brings us closer to a cause and effect relationship between fluoride exposure and brain damage in children.”

Daily Mail | People who are rich have trouble recognising the emotions of others, a new study claims. The university research has found that those who are poorer are better at gauging how someone feels because they need to rely on other people more often. Scientists speculated that the rich performed worse in tests because they can solve their problems without relying on others. In other words, because of their wealth they are not as dependent on the people around them. 

Science Daily | US scientists are significantly more likely to publish fake research than scientists from elsewhere, finds a trawl of officially withdrawn (retracted) studies, published online in the Journal of Medical Ethics.Fraudsters are also more likely to be "repeat offenders," the study shows. The study author searched the PubMed database for every scientific research paper that had been withdrawn -- and therefore officially expunged from the public record -- between 2000 and 2010.

Reuters | (Reuters) - Doctors in the United States are still too cozy with drug companies, although they have managed to break some of those ties, U.S. researchers said on Monday.The team at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital did a national survey of 1,900 primary care doctors in 2009 about their contacts with drug companies.They found 84 percent reported some type of relationship with drug companies, compared with 94 percent in 2004.

Natural News | The average age of puberty in girls is now nine, in a phenomenon increasingly being blamed on rising obesity and exposure to hormone-disrupting pollutants in the food supply. The study was conducted in 2006 by researchers from the world-renowned Department of Growth and Reproduction at University Hospital in Copenhagen, Denmark. The researchers found that among 1,000 girls, the average age of breast development was nine years and 10 months, a full year earlier than when a similar study was conducted in 1991.

 Guardian |

Natural News | OYou know all those thousands of clinical trials conducted over the last few decades comparing pharmaceuticals to placebo pills? Well, it turns out all those studies must now be completely thrown out as utterly non-scientific. And why? Because the placebos used in the studies weren't really placebos at all, rendering the studies scientifically invalid.

Natural News | Everybody's favorite genetically modified seed and biotech company, Monsanto, has yet again proven their lovability. The world's poster child for corporate manipulation and deceit¹ was the focus of a new study looking at their top-selling product, Roundup herbicides.