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Too big a price to pay for decelerating your epigenetic clock?If you're a gentleman looking to counteract the effects of ageing, a new study on sheep may have the answer – but you're going to have to say goodbye to your family jewels in return for a slowdown of your DNA's ageing process."Both farmers and scientists have known for some time that castrated male sheep live on average much longer than their intact counterparts," explained first author Victoria Sugrue, an anatomy PhD student at the University of Otago. "However, this is the first time anyone has looked at DNA to...

Sarah Palin’s husband is endorsing Newt Gingrich for president, Todd Palin told ABC News today. But Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and John McCain’s 2008 Republican running mate, has yet to decide “who is best able to go up against Barack Obama,” Todd Palin said. Palin said he has not spoken to Gingrich or anyone from the former House speaker’s campaign. But he said he respects Gingrich for what he went through in the 1990s and compared that scrutiny in public life to what Sarah Palin went through during her run for the vice presidency.

An enraged father who disapproved of his daughter's older boyfriend went to his home and castrated him with a bread knife. Helmut Seifert, 47, an ethnic German originally from Russia, was enraged when he heard his 17-year-old daughter was having a relationship with Phillip Genscher, 57. He went to police in the town of Bielefeld where he lives but officers said they were powerless to intervene. "The man then recruited two work colleagues at his factory and then went to the house of the victim," said police. "The man was forced to remove his trousers and, fully conscious, he was...

In a report on a recent release of decades old documents detailing CIA operations in the 1960's and 70's, Reuters seems to find it necessary to interject "criticism" of president Bush "being too secretive now" even though not one part of the story has anything to do with president Bush or any modern CIA operations. It would be like talking about the Civil War and interjecting a Bush comment, or talking of Roman times and suddenly sticking in a "US imperialism" comment into the mix where it doesn't legitimately belong. The MSM's Bush Derangement Syndrome is so pervasive that they...

by [author] 6/29/07 The publication of the CIA’s “family jewels”––the record of its domestic spying, hare-brained plots against Castro, and mind-control experiments, among other oddities–– is sure to add fuel to that roaring bonfire of a myth that so-called “progressives” have been warming their egos at for forty years. You know the story, since it continues to be told non-stop by the media, television, movies, and half the curricula in schools and universities: Evil American corporations and their lackeys in the government were (and still are) brutalizing the Third World in order to maximize profits and strengthen their hold on...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA worked with three American mobsters in a botched "gangster-type" attempt to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro in the early 1960s, according to documents released by the CIA on Tuesday. The CIA hauled the skeletons out of its closet by declassifying hundreds of pages of long-secret records that detail some of the agency's worst illegal abuses during about 25 years of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying and kidnapping. CIA Director Michael Hayden released the documents to lift the veil of secrecy on the agency's past, even as the Bush administration faces criticism of being too secretive...

The CIA declassified nearly 700 pages of secret records Tuesday recording its illegal activities during the first decades of the Cold War, publishing a catalog of adventures that run the gamut of spy movie clichés from attempts to kill foreign leaders and intercept domestic mail to garden-variety break-ins and burglaries. “Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA’s history,” the CIA’s director, Gen. Michael Hayden, said last week in announcing plans to release the documents, which had been considered so sensitive that they were known internally as the agency’s “family jewels.” Much of the material had previously entered the...

WASHINGTON - The CIA released hundreds of pages of internal reports Tuesday on assassination plots, secret drug testing and spying on Americans that triggered a scandal in the mid-1970s. The documents detail assassination plots against foreign leaders such as Fidel Castro, the testing of mind-altering drugs like LSD on unwitting citizens, wiretapping of U.S. journalists, spying on civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protesters, opening of mail between the United States and the Soviet Union and China and break-ins at the homes of ex-CIA employees and others. The 693 pages, mostly drawn from the memories of active CIA officers in 1973,...

CIA's 'family jewels' on show By Alex Spillius in Washington Last Updated: 2:51am BST 23/06/2007 The CIA calls them the "family jewels" but there is nothing pretty about them. State secrets: Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford Next week America's spy agency will release 700 pages of documents on secret and illegal operations, which will confirm the worst suspicions of its Cold War activities. They promise to involve assassination plots against foreign leaders, domestic spying and kidnapping and infiltration of Leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s. They will include accounts of break-ins and theft and "behaviour modification" experiments on...

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday. The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs....

WASHINGTON - Little-known documents now being made public detail illegal and scandalous activities by the CIA more than 30 years ago: wiretappings of journalists, kidnappings, warrantless searches and more. The documents provide a glimpse of nearly 700 pages of materials that the agency plans to declassify next week. A six-page summary memo that was declassified in 2000 and released by The National Security Archive at George Washington University on Thursday outlines 18 activities by the CIA that "presented legal questions" and were discussed with President Ford in 1975. Among them: _The "two-year physical confinement" in the mid-1960s of a Soviet...

Spying: They call it the CIA's "dirty laundry": declassified documents on assassination plots, domestic surveillance, abductions and the like. But those fighting the terror war can't win without getting their hands dirty. In announcing the public release of nearly 700 pages detailing controversial CIA activities over the quarter century preceding the mid-1970s, the agency's director, Gen. Michael Hayden, remarked that it provided "a glimpse of a very different time and a very different Agency." But if America is to combat the elusive terrorist enemies we face today, our intelligence agencies may well have to return to some of their aggressive...

The Central Intelligence Agency violated its charter for 25 years until revelations of illegal wiretapping, domestic surveillance, assassination plots, and human experimentation led to official investigations and reforms in the 1970s, according to declassified documents posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden announced today that the Agency is declassifying the full 693-page file amassed on CIA's illegal activities by order of then-CIA director James Schlesinger in 1973--the so-called "family jewels." Only a few dozen heavily-censored pages of this file have previously been declassified, although multiple Freedom of Information...

Maryland Del. LeRoy E. Myers Jr. to truckers: If you've got 'em, you don't need to flaunt 'em. As the General Assembly debates global warming and the death penalty, Myers (R-Washington) has something else on his mind: the outsized plastic testicles that truckers dangle from the trailer hitches of their pickups. To some truckers, they are manly expressions of rural chic. But Myers, who says his Western Maryland district is brimming with giant fakes on the roadways, calls them vulgar and immoral -- and filed legislation this week to outlaw them. "People are making a joke out of it," Myers...

This is funny.