"Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked." - Peter de Vries

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American lawbreaking: How laws die - "The importance of understanding why and when we will tolerate lawbreaking cannot be overstated. Lawyers and journalists spend most of their time watching the president, Congress, and the courts as they make law. But tolerance of lawbreaking constitutes one of the nation's other major—yet most poorly understood—ways of creating social and legal policy. Almost as much as the laws that we enact, the lawbreaking to which we shut our eyes reflects how tolerant U.S. society really is to individual or group difference. It forms a major part of our understanding of how the nation deals with what was once called "vice." While messy, strange, hypocritical, and in a sense dishonest, widespread tolerance of lawbreaking forms a critical part of the U.S. legal system as it functions."

Museum drops race row scientist - "The Science Museum has cancelled a talk by American DNA pioneer Dr James Watson after he claimed black people were less intelligent than white people"
200 years ago they'd have dropped you if you claimed black people were as intelligent as white people.

2 Scholarly Articles Diverge On Role of Race in Medicine - "A view widespread among many social scientists, endorsed in official statements by the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association, is that race is not a valid biological concept. But biologists, particularly the population geneticists who study genetic variation, have found that there is a structure in the human population. The structure is a family tree showing separate branches for Africans, Caucasians (Europe, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent), East Asians, Pacific Islanders and American Indians... Dr. Risch and nine co-authors say that ignoring race will "retard progress in biomedical research.""

Fearing Crime, Japanese Wear the Hiding Place - "Deftly, Ms. Tsukioka, a 29-year-old experimental fashion designer, lifted a flap on her skirt to reveal a large sheet of cloth printed in bright red with a soft drink logo partly visible. By holding the sheet open and stepping to the side of the road, she showed how a woman walking alone could elude pursuers — by disguising herself as a vending machine."
Damn Japs.

Optimism 'no bearing on cancer' - "The power of the mind has been overestimated when it comes to fighting cancer, US scientists say. They said they found that a patient's positive or negative emotional state had no direct bearing on cancer survival or disease progression."

Naked sleepwalking? - "In June 2005, a London 15-year-old left her home near a building site, climbed an overhead crane and walked across a narrow beam while remaining fast asleep. In 2004, a woman in Australia was found to be having sex while sleepwalking. At night while asleep, the middle-aged sleepwalker left her house and had sexual intercourse with strangers. The behaviour continued for several months and the woman had no memory of her nocturnal activities. In 1987, a Canadian man was acquitted of murder because he was sleepwalking at the time. He drove 23 kilometres from his home in Pickering, Ontario, to his in-laws house, where he strangled his father-in-law unconscious, and stabbed his mother-in-law to death."

Speedy Gonzales Caged by Cartoon Network - "The rapid rodent has been deemed an offensive ethnic stereotype of Mexicans, and has been off the air since the cable network became the sole U.S. broadcaster of old Warner Brothers cartoons in late 1999. But that has animated fans of the spunky character who want Speedy cartoon shorts — and the famous "Arriba! Arriba! Arriba!" cry — back on the airwaves... And where do you draw the line with a medium that, by its nature, relies on caricature for humor, Mukhtar asked. "What about Pepe LePew? His chasing of unwilling females surely sends the message to children that's it's OK to stalk and attack them if they resist," he wrote in an e-mail. "Plus, because he's French, does this mean that all Frenchmen are sexual predators?"... there is a place where Speedy can still be found zipping across TV screens — and, presumably, where the crude stereotypes he embodies don't touch a cultural nerve. That place: The Cartoon Network Latin America, where, ironically enough, Speedy Gonzales is "hugely popular," Goldberg said."
Seems he's back now, yay; I'm sure there's a PC theory about false consciousness to explain why Latin Americans love him.