RIYADH - Denied the right to travel without consent from their male guardians and banned from driving, women in Saudi Arabia are now monitored by an electronic system that tracks any cross-border movements.

Since last week, Saudi women’s male guardians began receiving text messages on their phones informing them when women under their custody leave the country, even if they are travelling together.

Manal al-Sherif, who became the symbol of a campaign launched last year urging Saudi women to defy a driving ban, began spreading the information on Twitter, after she was alerted by a couple.

The husband, who was travelling with his wife, received a text message from the immigration authorities informing him that his wife had left the international airport in Riyadh.

‘The authorities are using technology to monitor women,

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WASHINGTON — Extreme weather is a growing threat to the nation’s lifelines - its roads, bridges, railways, airports and transit systems. That’s leaving states and cities trying to come to terms with a new normal.

Superstorm Sandy is the latest and most severe example. It inflicted the worst damage to the New York subway system in its 108-year history. New York isn’t alone; intense rain, historic floods and record temperatures are taking a toll on transportation across the country.

Transportation engineers build highways and bridges to last 50 or even 100 years. Now they are reconsidering how they do that.

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials is weighing rewriting its standards on design, construction and maintenance of roads and bridges to reflect new weather extremes.

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HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT — One of the most disturbing trends in American public health is that women’s life expectancy is shrinking in many parts of the U.S.

The last time life expectancy fell for a large number of American women was 1918, due to Spanish influenza.

Growing Work, Family Stress

While many scientists believe that smoking and obesity are driving the downward spiral, a growing chorus of experts contends that chronic stress may be a key culprit, too – especially the stress of juggling work and family.

‘It’s a hypothesis at this point, but a reasonable and plausible one,’ said James S. House, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Women may have gained work opportunities over the last four decades, he said, but society has done relatively little to help them support their increased responsibilities.

‘Clearly, obesity and smoking are things that contribute to chronic disease and reduced life span,’ said Carolyn Mazure, director […]

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As laid out in the previous article, Anonymous, Karl Rove and the 2012 Election Fix?, it’s possible that Karl Rove used SmartTECH’s servers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to flip the vote totals in Ohio in 2004 and thus steal the election that year for George W. Bush – and just as possible that he tried to do the same thing this year on Romney’s behalf but was thwarted by the hacktivist group Anonymous.

Many people have responded to these claims with a variation on: ‘That’s impossible. A presidential candidate committing treason? That would never happen, and, if it did, it would be front-page news. Everybody would know about it, right?’

Wrong.

Consider some simple history.

In 1952 Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidency – and there’s not a hint of scandal associated with that election. Maybe that’s because he supported a 91% top marginal income tax rate on the rich and approved of very popular New Deal programs like Social Security and unemployment benefits. As he told his brother in a letter in 1954, ‘Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in […]

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