A federal appeals court panel on Tuesday threw out a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage passed in 2008, upholding a lower court’s ruling that the ban, known as Proposition 8, violated the constitutional rights of gay men and lesbians in California.

(more…)

A violent stampede that occurred during an Egyptian football game in Port Said on Wednesday has claimed the lives of 74 people and has left over 1000 injured.

(more…)

Egyptian authorities confirmed Saturday that a political coalition dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, the 84-year-old group that virtually invented political Islam, had won about 47 percent of the seats in the first Parliament elected since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak.

An alliance of ultraconservative Islamists won the next largest share of seats, about 25 percent.

Read more here (via The New York Times)

According to a recent article in The New York Times, an American couple that conceived their son via sperm donor seven years ago has turned to a web-based registry to seek out information regarding their child’s half-siblings, and found 150 of them.

“Now, there is growing concern among parents, donors and medical experts about potential negative consequences of having so many children fathered by the same donors, including the possibility that genes for rare diseases could be spread more widely through the population,” writes Jacqueline Mroz of The New York Times.

Read the full story here.

For over ten years, Harvard professor Teresa Amabile and researcher Steven Kramer collected and analysed over 12 000 diary entries from 238 professionals in seven different fields. An analysis of their study features in the article “Do Happier People Work Harder?” – which was published in The New York Times over the weekend.

Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer – The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which has been polling over 1,000 adults every day since January 2008, shows that Americans now feel worse about their jobs — and work environments — than ever before. People of all ages, and across income levels, are unhappy with their supervisors, apathetic about their organizations and detached from what they do. And there’s no reason to think things will soon improve.       

Employee engagement may seem like a frill in a downturn economy. But it can make a big difference in a company’s survival. In a 2010 study, James K. Harter and colleagues found that lower job satisfaction foreshadowed poorer bottom-line performance. Gallup estimates the cost of America’s disengagement crisis at a staggering $300 billion in lost productivity annually. When people don’t care about their jobs or their employers, they don’t show up consistently, they produce less, or their work quality suffers. 

Read the full article here (via The New York Times)

When Ntsiki Biyela won a winemaking scholarship in 1998, she was certainly a curious choice.

She had grown up in the undulating hills of Zululand, living in a small village of huts and shacks. People tended their patches of pumpkins and corn. The only alcohol they drank was homemade beer, a malt-fed brew that bubbled in old pots.

Read the full story here (via The New York Times)

New York became a city without one of its trademarks — the nation’s largest subway system — on Saturday as Hurricane Irene charged northward and the city prepared to face powerhouse winds that could drive a wall of water over the beaches in the Rockaways and between the skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan.

The city worked to complete its evacuation of about 370,000 residents in low-lying areas where officials expected flooding to follow the storm.

Read the full story here (via The New York Times)

On the streets of New York, scruffy young creatives are tapping their inner Steven Tyler and strapping on leather cuffs, woven friendship bracelets and nylon cords — sometimes 5 or 10 each wrist — as part of their downtown uniform.

Read the rest of this article here (via The New York Times)

It was with a sense of relief that I set out to book my two teenage children’s airfares to camp last month.

With Florence now 15, I knew I would no longer have to pay the $200 round-trip fee required by airlines like Delta and US Airways for children younger than 15 traveling without an adult. I also assumed that because Florence would be flying with Charles, her 14-year-old brother, from Detroit to Boston, he, too, would be exempt from the fee since she would be accompanying him.

Read the rest of this article here (via The New York Times)

At an American Library Association conference in 2007, HarperCollins dressed five of its male young adult authors in blue baseball jerseys with our names on the back and sent us up to bat in a panel entitled “In the Clubhouse.”

We were meant to demystify to the overwhelmingly female audience the testosterone code that would get teenage boys reading. Whereas boys used to lag behind girls in reading in the early grades, statistics show, they soon caught up. Not anymore.

Read the rest of this article here (via the New York Times)

It was a rock ’n’ roll shot heard ’round the world: the quasi-accusatory snarl of Elvis Presley growling, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.”

For “Hound Dog” alone, Jerry Leiber, who died on Monday at 78, will always be remembered in the annals of rock ’n’ roll as a revolutionary catalyst. Years before the term “generation gap” was coined, “Hound Dog” drew the line between the new and the old.

Read the rest of this article here (via The New York Times)

Her spectacles, as round as soup tureens, lend Iris Apfel a startled look.

If she seems surprised, she has good reason. At 90, she seems baffled, and clearly tickled, to find herself on the cusp of pop stardom, an unlikely celebrity whose fame has been constructed almost entirely around her look.

Read the rest of this article here (via The New York Times)

Seven weeks after it was put on sale, Hewlett-Packard killed its TouchPad tablet, the company’s competitor to Apple’s iPad.

Last year, Microsoft pulled the plug on its Kin mobile phones only 48 days after they went on sale.  Google proudly released Wave, its platform of collaborative work tools, to the general public in May 2010. It canceled Wave 77 days later…

Read the rest of this article here (via The New York Times)

John Howard Davies, who as a sweet-faced, trembling-lipped child actor played the title role in the 1948 David Lean film “Oliver Twist” and who went on to become a producer and director of some of British television’s most popular comedies, including “Fawlty Towers,” died on Monday at his home in Blewbury in southern England. He was 72

Read the rest of this article here (via The New York Times)

The Washington Monument and several other buildings in the nation’s capital remained closed Wednesday morning as engineers checked for structural problems after an earthquake on Tuesday that caused little damage but shook nerves along much of the East Coast.

Tens of thousands of people were evacuated from office buildings. Cellphone service was strangled as the quake led to disruptions in air traffic, halted trains, jammed roadways and gave some on the West Coast an opportunity to poke fun at Easterners who seemed panicked and uncertain of how to respond.

Read the rest of this article here (via The New York Times)

Rebel fighters sought to consolidate their hold on Tripoli on Wednesday and continued to hunt down an elusive and defiant Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, a day after they crashed through the gates of his fortresslike compound, ransacking its barracks for weapons and carting off mementos of his 42-year dictatorship.

Colonel Qaddafi, in an address broadcast early Wednesday on a local Tripoli radio station, called his retreat from the compound “tactical,” several news reports said.

Read the rest of this article here (via The New York Times)

NATORI, Japan — Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. met with survivors of the Japanese tsunami and spoke at an airport that was reopened just a month after the disaster with American military help, in a visit aimed at highlighting strengthened ties with Japan.

Mr. Biden was on the final leg of an eight-day trip to Asia that was dedicated mostly to improving relations with China, whose rising economic and political power is a challenge to the United States and has overshadowed a Japan mired in two decades of stagnation and then hit in March by an earthquake, a tsunami and a nuclear disaster

Read the rest of this article here (via The New York Times)

KAMPALA, Uganda — The death toll from a cattle raid in an eastern region of weeks-old South Sudan rose significantly on Monday with the United Nations saying more than 600 people had been killed in what was a retaliatory attack that has raised fears of ethnic instability on the deeply impoverished country.

The United Nations says that many weapons are accumulating in Jonglei State.

Read the rest of this article here (via The New York Times)

The fighting is not yet over in Tripoli, but the scramble to secure access to Libya’s oil wealth has already begun

Before the rebellion broke out in February, Libya exported 1.3 million barrels of oil a day. While that is less than 2 percent of world supplies, only a few other countries can supply equivalent grades of the sweet crude oil that many refineries around the world depend on. The resumption of Libyan production would help drive down oil prices in Europe, and indirectly, gasoline prices on the East Coast of the United States. Read the rest of this article here. (via The New York Times)

LONDON — Nearly 20 years ago, on the eve of the Persian Gulf war, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi protested when a visiting reporter compared him to Saddam Hussein, rejecting the suggestion that Mr. Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait had caused him to supplant Colonel Qaddafi as the West’s principal nemesis in the Arab world.

Read the rest of this article here (via The New York Times)