A new Public Policy poll confirms what many have long suspected – that many Americans get their news from sources that hew to their pre-existing beliefs.

But this phenomenon was not balanced on both sides of the ideological spectrum. While Democrats trust most news outlets, to varying degrees, Republicans trust only a single one – Fox News. While a massive 73 percent of Republicans trust Fox, the next highest rating among any major TV news outlet is PBS, which just 30 percent of GOPers trust, according to the Public Policy poll.

The numbers show just how powerful Fox can be in setting the agenda and influencing the world view of conservatives, with virtually no competition or accountability from the outside world. This monopoly on news penetration for an entire half of the electorate would be bad no matter the network, but it’s especially troubling considering Fox’s shoddy, and often agenda-driven ‘reporting.

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A new study suggests that people living along the coast of northern Peru were eating popcorn 1,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Researchers say corncobs found at an ancient site in Peru suggest that the inhabitants used them for making flour and popcorn.

Scientists from Washington’s Natural History Museum say the oldest corncobs they found dated from 4700BC.

They are the earliest ever discovered in South America.

Ancient food

The curator of New World archaeology at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, Dolores Piperno, says maize was first domesticated in Mexico nearly 9,000 years ago from a wild grass.

Ms Piperno says that her team’s research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that only a few thousand years later maize arrived in South America, where it evolved into different varieties now common in the Andean regions.

Her team discovered the maize in the archaeological sites of Paredones and Huaca Prieta.

‘This evidence further indicated that in many areas corn arrived before pots did, and that early experimentation with corn as a food was not dependent on the presence of pottery,’ Ms Piperno explained.

She says that at the time, though, maize was not yet an important part of their diet.

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Michigan’s 2010 elections had just concluded, and Rich Robinson, the state’s leading campaign finance reform advocate, was conducting his usual postmortem. As he tallied the big money behind the conservative groundswell that swept Republican Rick Snyder into the governor’s mansion and placed the state Legislature solidly under GOP control, one particular political action committee caught his eye.

Created in December 2009 and shut down shortly after the election, RGA Michigan 2010 had come out of nowhere to spend nearly $8.4 million-54 percent more than any other PAC had poured into any election in Michigan history. Ninety-six percent of the group’s donors lived outside the state, and its top three funders included Texas homebuilder Bob Perry, Koch Industries’ David Koch, and New York City hedge fund CEO Paul Singer. On the other side of the ledger, RGA Michigan 2010 had given $5.2 million to the Michigan Republican Party-no surprise there-but, mysteriously, it had also funneled $3 million into the campaign coffers of Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

Robinson, the executive director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, began to connect the dots. He remembered the phone calls from reporters in Maine and Florida asking if Robinson knew why money from the Michigan Chamber of […]

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LOS ANGELES — Detectives investigating a decapitated human head found by hikers in the hills below the famed Hollywood sign discovered a pair of severed hands nearby on Wednesday, a Los Angeles police spokesman said.

The two hands were uncovered about 50 yards apart during search of Griffith Park, where two female hikers came across the head in a plastic bag on Tuesday, Los Angeles Police Commander Andrew Smith said.

The first appendage was located on Wednesday morning by a cadaver dog and the second several hours later by a forensics investigator who ‘thought something looked suspicious to him’ in the brush, Smith said.

‘We did find another hand, it’s the second hand. It’s kind of grisly,’ Smith said after the second hand was discovered. ‘We definitely believe they are related.’

The head and both hands were all found in the same general area about a half-mile below the Hollywood sign in a popular recreation and tourist area not far from Griffith Observatory.

All of the body parts were being turned over to the Los Angeles County Coroner for examination.

Coroner’s spokesman Ed Winter said that investigators there would try to take fingerprints from the hands to identify the man.

Smith said detectives would continue searching for […]

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New Delhi

Here’s a job most 27-year-olds never get: starting up a new university – from scratch. Like an Athenian at the dawn of Greece, Dhawal Sharma is converting 25 acres of farmland outside New Delhi worked by man and ox for millenniums into the kind of marble-and-grass campus that launches odysseys of the mind.

But Mr. Sharma, a recent business-school graduate, is also young enough to still be in a band. He drums in a metal-rock group that plays the songs of 1970s headbangers like Judas Priest.

‘I really wonder if any other person who is doing the same job is as inexperienced as I am,’ says Sharma, who is the project manager for the future Ashoka University. ‘I’ve been told this in a number of government offices as well – ‘you look too young.’ ‘

The truth is India needs the young, the entrepreneurial – and maybe especially the headbanging cymbal-crashers – to help carry out what may be the most ambitious experiment in higher education in the world today. It may also be the most daunting.

Consider just these statistics:

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