Free Republic

<p>Pediatricians are forced to engage in risky "trial-and-error" medicine when they give drugs to children because two-thirds of all drugs they routinely prescribe have never been adequately studied on kids, according to a study by Food and Drug Administration researchers to be published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.</p>

A federal appeals court on Wednesday upheld a Minnesota law that required a man to register as a sex offender even though he has not been convicted of a sex crime. Minnesota's sex offender registration law and the Minnesota Supreme Court's interpretation of it "turn reason and fairness on its head," wrote Judge C. Arlen Beam, who nonetheless concurred in the unanimous decision of a three-judge panel of the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis. Brian Gunderson was charged in 1998 in St. Louis County with first-degree criminal sexual conduct after a woman he met in a...

In Foreign Parts: City that never sleeps grows uneasy without Rudy By David Usborne in New York 18 January 2003 The other night, we were passing a fancy new apartment block in the Chelsea area of Manhattan (units rent for $6,000 (£3,500) a month) when a large rat zipped across the pavement. Nasty, I thought. It was surely even less pleasant for the tramp sleeping in cardboard boxes across the street. It's only an impression, but Manhattan seems to be getting scruffier again. Every night, honking rubbish trucks disturb my sleep, yet the heaps of bursting bin- bags outside never...

It was the kind of uranium that — if highly enriched — would, by some estimates, provide about half the material required for a crude nuclear device and more than enough for a so-called dirty bomb — a nightmare scenario for U.S. authorities. "I would say that the single largest, most urgent threat to Americans today is the threat of nuclear terrorism," said Graham Allison, an expert on nuclear terrorism. Allison is the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a former assistant secretary of defense. This suitcase's journey was...

<p>FRANKLIN, N.H. - The bride wore white: a traditional long dress, with a veil, pearls, and bouquet. The groom wore his best brown suit. They were married in June, in a home ceremony. You'll excuse the couple if they jumped the gun on the kiss sealing the deal. The bride is 82, and it was her first trip down the aisle. The groom, a 73-year-old widower, was first married more than 50 years ago.</p>