WASHINGTON — In a major policy reversal, the Obama administration said Wednesday it will no longer defend the constitutionality of a federal law banning recognition of same-sex marriage.

Attorney General Eric Holder said President Barack Obama has concluded that the administration cannot defend the federal law that defines marriage as only between a man and a woman. He noted that the congressional debate during passage of the Defense of Marriage Act ‘contains numerous expressions reflecting moral disapproval of gays and lesbians and their intimate and family relationships – precisely the kind of stereotype-based thinking and animus the (Constitution’s)Equal Protection Clause is designed to guard against.’

The Justice Department had defended the act in court until now.

‘Much of the legal landscape has changed in the 15 years since Congress passed’ the Defense of Marriage Act, Holder said in a statement. He noted that the Supreme Court has ruled that laws criminalizing homosexual conduct are unconstitutional and that Congress has repealed the military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy.

At the White House, spokesman Jay Carney said Obama himself is still ‘grappling’ with his personal view of gay marriage but has always personally opposed the Defense of Marriage Act as ‘unnecessary and unfair.’

Holder wrote to House […]

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The 21-year-old woman was carefully trained not to flirt with anyone who came into the laboratory over the course of several months. She kept eye contact and conversation to a minimum. She never used makeup or perfume, kept her hair in a simple ponytail, and always wore jeans and a plain T-shirt.

Each of the young men thought she was simply a fellow student at Florida State University participating in the experiment, which ostensibly consisted of her and the man assembling a puzzle of Lego blocks. But the real experiment came later, when each man rated her attractiveness. Previous research had shown that a woman at the fertile stage of her menstrual cycle seems more attractive, and that same effect was observed here - but only when this woman was rated by a man who wasn’t already involved with someone else.

The other guys, the ones in romantic relationships, rated her as significantly less attractive when she was at the peak stage of fertility, presumably because at some level they sensed she then posed the greatest threat to their long-term relationships. To avoid being enticed to stray, they apparently told themselves she wasn’t all that hot anyway.

This experiment was part of a […]

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The protest has been organised by trade unions

Thousands of people have gathered in the Indian capital, Delhi, to take part in a rally to protest against rising food prices and unemployment.

A steady stream of protesters, carrying red flags, has been marching through the streets of central Delhi since early morning.

The rally has led to massive traffic jams in the city.

Trade unions who have called the rally say nearly 40,000 people will attend a meeting at the Ramlila grounds.

Thousands will then march to parliament, they say.

Security is tight across the city with thousands of policemen deployed at the rally ground and along the route of the march.

The protest has been organised by major trade unions, including the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) and the Centre for Industrial Trade Union (CITU).

The Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC) – which is backed by the governing Congress party – is also supporting the strike saying it wants to remind the government about its commitments to the poor.

A CITU statement said workers from 19 states, thousands of women among them, were participating in the march.

Food inflation has been consistently rising in India, pushing up household budgets.

The cost of pulses, milk, wheat, rice and vegetables […]

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SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea already claims the world’s fastest Internet connections – the fastest globally by far – but that is hardly good enough for the government here.

By the end of 2012, South Korea intends to connect every home in the country to the Internet at one gigabit per second. That would be a tenfold increase from the already blazing national standard and more than 200 times as fast as the average household setup in the United States.

A pilot gigabit project initiated by the government is under way, with 5,000 households in five South Korean cities wired. Each customer pays about 30,000 won a month, or less than $27.

‘South Korean homes now have greater Internet access than we do,

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A ground breaking study published today by one of the world’s leading neuroscientist’s challenges the longstanding conviction that radiation emitted from cell phones is too weak to have an effect on the brain.

You can think of cell phone saturation as one giant, uncontrolled human experiment. There are now 293 million wireless connections in use in the United States, according to the trade group, CTIA-The Wireless Association. And Americans log a staggering 2.26 trillion minutes yakking on those mobile devices every year-all at a time when the biological effects of cell phones remain controversial and the research on those effects often of dubious quality.

A study published today by leading researchers in the premiere medical journal, JAMA hasn’t found a smoking gun, but it does challenge the longstanding conviction that radiation emitted from cell phones is too weak to have an effect on the brain. It is notable not only for that finding and for appearing in a top journal-it is also turning heads because the lead researcher is Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and one of the world’s leading brain scientists.

She and colleagues from the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory took brain scans of 47 […]

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