Feds Launch App Contest For Facebook ‘Lifelines’ In Health Emergencies

The first thing East Coasters did when the ground began to shake this afternoon wasn’t duck under their desks, but to turn to their smartphones. The 5.8 magnitude earthquake that was felt from Durham, N.C., to Toronto was documented instantly through social media like Facebook and Twitter. And that’s just the sort of reaction Stacy [...]

Romney To Try Stealing Some Of Obama’s Jobs-Speech Thunder

How better for Mitt Romney to show that he intends to take it right at President Obama on the jobs issue than to plan a major post-Labor Day speech on jobs, just like the president? Romney announced Monday on Fox News that he intends to provide his job-creation plan on Sept. 6 in Nevada, a [...]

Libyan Fog Of War Gives Obama, Rivals Reasons To Tread Carefully

Turns out it was probably a good idea for President Obama to be relatively low key in discussing the situation in Libya Monday since some of the reports from the Transitional National Council turned out to be greatly exaggerated, to say the least. Like Seif el-Islam Gadhafi, the eldest son of and heir apparent to [...]

Biden’s Comment On China’s One-Child Policy Spurs Anti-Abortion Ire

While in China, Vice President Biden inadvertently stepped into the U.S. culture wars with a seemingly off-hand comment about China’s one-child policy that has caused American abortion opponents to rebuke him. In the question and answer session following his speech to an audience at Sichuan University Sunday, Biden was asked what the U.S. planned to [...]

Sandwich Monday: Cemitas Atomica

We’re back from our trip to Alaska, where it was more about communing with animals than eating them. So to make up for lost time, today we headed over to Cemitas Pueblas in Chicago, to try their legendary Atomica Sandwich (On the menu it has a little “TM” after it, which either stands for “trademark” [...]

Plain Vanilla No More: Ice Cream To Swoon For

My 10-year-old son and I were lolling in our chairs in a post-dinner torpor, sweating from every pore even though all we’d had to eat was cold pasta salad. “Hey, do you feel like going for an ice cream?” I asked him. He sprang to his feet, like a human exclamation point. “That’s exactly what [...]

Weird Genre Watch: TV Explores The Wildly Exciting World Of Towing Cars

I happened to notice that last night brought the first new episode in a while of something called — this is real — Lizard Lick Towing on TruTV. Lizard Lick Towing is about a towing and repo company whose owners “repossess vehicles and machinery on behalf of lien holders.” This is different from the following [...]

Coulson Received Payment From News Corp. After Taking Downing Street Job

Britain’s phone hacking scandal took another sharp turn today, after the BBC reported that a former editor at News of the World received payment from News International, even after he took a job as the Prime Minister’s top press aide. The BBC reports: These payments were part of his severance package, under what is known [...]

A New Libyan Leadership Could Recover Billions

The United States wants to give Libya its money back. The U.S. froze some $30 billion worth of the country’s assets after leader Moammar Gadhafi launched a harsh crackdown on his opponents earlier this year. With Gadhafi’s rule now near or at its end, U.S. officials and their European counterparts are prepared to quickly unfreeze [...]

Eating More Nuts And Soy May Help Beat High Cholesterol

If you’ve got high cholesterol, you know the diet advice: Go easy on foods high in saturated fat like red meat and cheese, and eat lots of fiber and whole grains. The message still holds up, but researchers say it’s time to tweak the message. A new study finds there’s extra benefit in adding plenty [...]