People with HIV Can Now Come to America
It may seem difficult to believe, but until today, people who were HIV-positive could not come to the United States of America.
The blocking law was passed in 1987, back when ignorant Americans (and apparently their elected officials) thought HIV/AIDS could be passed by handshakes and hugs. It became the late 20th century equivalent of an earlier America's "C-word" (cancer), or America's equivalent of the biblical leprosy.
But Americans, unlike the enlightened bibical writers of a few thousand years ago, were ignorant of current medical knowledge. Even in the late 1980s, the evidence was that HIV/AIDS could not be spread by casual contact.
And even if it was justified in the panicked 1980s, how could it have taken 22 years for HIV to be moved out of the category of highly contagious diseases spread by casual contact? The United States was one of only about 12 countries to have such a ban. Others include Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Libya.
It's another example of how American politics are often rooted in superstition, and how many years it can take to correct a misguided law that those in the know, in this case the medical community, had long said was not helpful and was, in fact, harmful.
Finally, after 22 years, familes who have been separated have a chance to come together again. Assuming members have not died from legally-sanctioned second-hand smoke.
http://archives.chicagotribune.com/2009/dec/01/travel/chi-hiv-travel-ban-01-dec01
Parents, moralists and media are curently attacking Sexting, or sending nude, semi-nude or sexually-explicit images and videos of yourself over phone and the Internet. They're even going after cybersex, or sexually-explicit conversations in chat rooms. Naturally, the biggest concern is when it's done by "young people."
It pains us to write this, but GeoCities, one of the Internet's early and most popular places for posting a personal website, ends today.
Social Networks are leaking your private information to tracking sites, according to a WebProNews column by Mike Sachoff (see link at bottom). Are you assuming you have privacy when you visit a website you wouldn't want strangers to know about? You may well be wrong. But keep reading to learn some things you can do to help yourself.
The most effective censorship is the censorship you don't know about. If what you can learn is controlled by a government, corporation, religion, you won't know what you're missing. You will likely believe what you're told.
America is a nation with access to some of the best medical professionals, equipment and treatment in the world. It's also a nation where an increasing number of people are refusing to be treated because they can't afford it.
Marijuana use has long been associated with problems in short term recall. Hey, did I say bud affects short term recall?
"This morning, PETA dispatched a letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, cofounders of ice cream icon Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc., urging them to replace the cow's milk in their products with human breast milk."
Hey, everyone,
The International Astronomical Union (Motto: All Astronomers Must Bow to Us!) has announced a new term for dwarf planets such as Pluto and Eris: plutoid. (See 
Arthur C. Clarke, the 90-year-old icon of science and science fiction who passed away on March 19, 2008, has been cleared of having sex with boys.
Well, well, well. Happy 60th, Roswell, New Mexico. For true believers, yours was the definitive UFO incident. 
According to the mother of the 10-year-old girl Riley, she has a birth defect--a penis. The preteen transgender girl, who is biologically a boy, finds self-identity as the opposite sex. Even as a toddler, Riley wanted "girl" toys and clothes.
On the flip side, 14-year-old girl Rebecca wrote Mom a letter saying "she" wanted to be a "he." Rebecca, now known as Jeremy, was "a boy in a girl's body."
Do search engines such as Google violate copyright laws? Is the display of a low-pixel image in a search engine illegal? The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco just said no.
"First Cloned Cat has Kittens." And before that, two later-cloned wild cats had kittens. Real-life biology has once again passed science fiction. Some of you trekkers/trekkies might remember that in the original Star Trek's vision of two or three centuries from now, cloning was wraught with problems, often including infertility. Well, the future ain't what it used to be.
America spends a much higher percentage of it's money on health care than any other industrialized nation. And yet it has the worst life expectency and highest infant mortality rate, according to a study by the non-profit and non-partisan Commonwealth Fund.
Is Pluto a planet or not? Many astronomers are up in arms over the declaration of the International Astronomical Union that Pluto, along with a couple other heavenly bodies, are not planets. Pluto has been considered the ninth planet since its discovery in 1930, so why the change? Is it because scientists discovered that Pluto didn't fit the established definition of a planet?