By Jane Bosveld | Discover | Jun. 30, 2008
Widespread fear after 9/11 pushed people from (safe) planes to (dangerous) cars. In the aftermath of 9/11, many Americans were so afraid of flying that they chose to drive instead. That decision, based on the perceived threat of another airliner hijacking, led to 1,600 casualties in the following year. The families of the people who died in those crashes thought they had lost them to “the routine traffic accidents we accept as the regrettable cost of living in the modern world.” Daniel Gardner begs to differ: What killed them was fear.

By Mike Stobbe | Time.com| Jun. 30, 2008
The Supreme Court's landmark ruling on gun ownership last week focused on citizens' ability to defend themselves from intruders in their homes. But research shows that surprisingly often, gun owners use the weapons on themselves.

By Tony Platt | truthdig.org | Jun. 23, 2008
The 1942 U.S. Supreme Court case of Skinner v. Oklahoma is remembered for protecting “the right to have offspring,” and by implication the right not to have offspring. Skinner, according to Victoria Nourse, the author of an important new book on American eugenics, typically “sits in the shadow of the abortion and gay marriage debates.”

San Francisco Business Times | Jun. 12, 2008
The Wachovia Foundation will provide $16.25 million to help economic development in Latino communities in the United States. The foundation has formed a partnership with the National Council of La Raza. The bank will provide $5 million in grants over five years for counseling in homeownership and community-development efforts.

By Estelle Shirbon | Reuters | Jun. 10, 2008
Doctors Nearly Removed 'Dead' Man's Organs. The case of a man whose heart stopped beating for 1-1/2 hours only to revive just as doctors were preparing to remove his organs for transplants is fuelling ethical debates in France about when a person is dead.

By Ross Kaminsky | HumanEvents.com | Jun. 3, 2008
In the quadrennial marathon to see who can be the nation’s worst governor, Colorado’s Bill Ritter is in a full sprint. On Thursday, Ritter signed Senate Bill 200 which expands “anti-discrimination” law to cover sexual orientation, meaning not only homosexuality or bisexuality, but also “transgender status or another person’s perception thereof.”

By Jonathan Fildes  | BBC | June 4, 2008
The whereabouts of more than 100,000 mobile phone users have been tracked in an attempt to build a comprehensive picture of human movements. The study concludes that humans are creatures of habit, mostly visiting the same few spots time and time again.

By Chelsea Schilling | WorldNetDaily.com | Jun. 5, 2008
Habitat for Humanity is abandoning its plan to help Planned Parenthood open a 3-story, $8-million abortion facility in the Rosemary district of Sarasota, Fla., after the organization was inundated with phone calls and e-mail from concerned people across the country.

By Stefanie Cohen | New York Post | June 4, 2008
A shady stockbroker who ripped off a 9/11 widow's share of the federal Victim Compensation Fund in order to renovate his New Jersey home and buy a time-share in Florida pleaded guilty to fraud yesterday.

By Marie Woolf | Times Online | Jun. 1, 2008
Scientists are to be permitted to use tissue from dead people to create cloned human stem cells for research, under a legal change put forward by the government.

By Stephanie Clifford  | New York Times | May 31, 2008
Billboards are a different story. For the most part, they are still a relic of old-world media, and the best guesses about viewership numbers come from foot traffic counts or highway reports, neither of which guarantees that the people passing by were really looking at the billboard, or that they were the ones sought out.

By Richard Esposito and Anna Schecter | ABC News | May 29, 2008
New York AG Says Company Profited From Individuals That May Have Been Tortured or Executed in China. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo says the company that has made millions of dollars with U.S. exhibitions of plasticized human bodies used "the remains of individuals that may have been tortured and executed in China."

By David Mattingly  | CNN | May 23, 2008
An 18-year-old who gave birth in state custody after she was incorrectly seized in a raid on a polygamist sect ranch says the state kept her in foster care in an effort to seize her baby.

By Steven Ertelt | LifeNews.com | May 21, 2008
Michelle Obama, the attorney wife of pro-abortion Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, is coming under fire for a letter she wrote defending partial-birth abortions. The 2004 letter, written to help Obama in his campaign for his U.S. Senate seat, opposes the ban on the abortion procedure.

By Mark Henderson & Francis Elliott | TimesOnline | May 20, 2008
The amendment to ban all admixed embryos was defeated by 336 votes to 176. The prohibition on true hybrids was defeated by 286 votes to 223