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American Bully XL dogs are to be banned in the UK by the end of the year, the country's Prime Minster Rishi Sunak has announced. It comes after a man in England died following what Mr Sunak described as "another suspected XL bully attack" on Thursday. It was the latest in a series of deadly incidents. *** The XL is the largest of four types of American Bully: standard, pocket, classic and XL. Strong enough to overpower an adult, the American bully XL can weigh more than nine stone (60kg). American Bullies are said to have originated in the US...

President Joe Biden’s dog, Commander, reportedly bit or attacked Secret Service agents as many as 10 times between the months of October 2022 and January 2023. One incident involving the dog reportedly required a hospital visit for the Secret Service agent, according to records from the Department of Homeland Security that were released following a FOIA request by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch. Per the Associated Press: On Nov. 3, 2022, a Secret Service official emailed colleagues that Commander had bitten a uniformed officer twice — on the upper right arm and thigh. Staff from the White House medical...

Are we to presume that woke corporations, like Disney, teachers' unions, “progressive” academics, corporate media, and chic Hollywood have once and for all settled the long and contentious nature-nurture debate? Seems so. No one is born a certain way, say nurturers. The next time a gay guy or Admiral (Rachel née Richard) Levine tells you that “he was born that way,” tell him that the enlightened elite have changed the rules. Spread the word to any purple-haired, nose-pierced, tattooed LGBTQIA+ you happen to know. The push by self-professed incredibly smart, sophisticated, and science-dedicated progressives to sexualize kids -- starting at...

SNIP Sarah Bernhardt and Franz Kafka; Albert Einstein and Rosalind Franklin; Benjamin Disraeli and (sigh) Karl Marx — how is it that a people who never amounted even to one-third of 1 percent of the world’s population contributed so seminally to so many of its most pathbreaking ideas and innovations? The common answer is that Jews are, or tend to be, smart. When it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, it’s true. “Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average I.Q. of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data,” noted one 2005 paper. “During the 20th century, they made up about 3...

CNN reports: "James Watson, who discovered the double-helix structure of DNA alongside Francis Crick in the 1950s based on the work of British chemist Rosalind Franklin, said in a PBS film that genes cause a difference in intelligence between white and black people in IQ tests. "The 90-year-old's comments were labeled 'reprehensible' by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) on New York's Long Island, where Watson had been the director from 1968 to 1993. The laboratory said it 'unequivocally rejects the unsubstantiated and reckless personal opinions Dr. James D. Watson expressed,' noting the statements were 'reprehensible [and] unsupported by science[.]'"...

Enlarge ImageHuman nature. Children born via IVF may hold clues to what makes us who we are. Credit: Jupiter Images It's perhaps the most controversial question in biology: Are we shaped by our genes or by our environment? The debate extends even to the womb, where the chemistry of the fetal environment may play as much of a role in our development as the genes we inherit from our parents. Now, scientists believe they have found a clever way to disentangle the effects of genes and environment in the womb. The solution is to look at babies conceived in...

Not all children can harness the full goodness of their mother’s milk. Does breast-feeding a child boost its brain development and raise its intelligence? Only if the child carries a version of a gene that can harness the goodness of breast-milk, say researchers. The results add to the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate over intelligence, by showing how the two effects can interact. The question of whether people are born intelligent or made intelligent by their environment has been debated for decades. Research with identical twins separated at birth has shown that both genetics and rearing conditions are important in determining...

Jan-Peter Boening for The New York TimesStudying the genetics of domestication, Dmitri K. Belyaev developed colonies of silver foxes, river otters and minks, as well as rats, starting in 1959. On an animal-breeding farm in Siberia are cages housing two colonies of rats. In one colony, the rats have been bred for tameness in the hope of mimicking the mysterious process by which Neolithic farmers first domesticated an animal still kept today. When a visitor enters the room where the tame rats are kept, they poke their snouts through the bars to be petted. The other colony of rats...

Lesbians' brains react differently to sex hormones than those of heterosexual women, new research indicates. That's in line with an earlier study that had indicated gay men's brain responses were different from straight men - though the difference for men was more pronounced than has now been found in women. Lesbians' brains reacted somewhat, though not completely, like those of heterosexual men, a team of Swedish researchers said in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A year ago, the same group reported findings for gay men that showed their brain response to hormones was similar to...

<p>EAST ASIAN and European cultures have long been very different, Richard E. Nisbett argued in his recent book "The Geography of Thought." East Asians tend to be more interdependent than the individualists of the West, which he attributed to the social constraints and central control handed down as part of the rice-farming techniques Asians have practiced for thousands of years.</p>

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version November 19, 2004, 10:47 a.m. They're Home AloneKids want to know: "Mom, Dad — where are you?" Mary Eberstadt has written an unwelcome book. That doesn't make it any less important or less necessary. But many people will want to look the other way. In Home-Alone America, Eberstadt confronts us with the consequences of a revolution in American parenting that has left children increasingly deprived of time — or any relationship at all — with their mothers and fathers. This revolution has two causes: "The...

The Titanic of Gay Rights, leaving all in its wake, is about to founder on a large and immovable fact. My concern is not for the glamorous first-class passengers - the prominent doctors and judges - or for the Mardi Gras exhibitionists leering and lurching across the deck - but for the unknown homosexuals down in their lonely cabins feeling sick. These are the ones who want to stop the ship and get off. The homosexuals who do not want to be homosexual but who are told that change is impossible, and that any talk of change is disloyal to the...

A BACTERIAL disease spread through sodomy between rams was increasing their risk of infertility, NSW Agriculture said yesterday. Senior field veterinary officer at Wagga Mr Rob Walker said the disease, ovine brucellosis, was becoming more common among NSW rams. Recent blood testing of commercial sheep flocks in southern NSW had found between 40 and 50 per cent of rams carried the infection. The percentage of rams in each flock that were infected had increased from six to 12 per cent during the past 15 to 20 years.

<p>SUISUN CITY -- He's a 5th-degree black belt, a registered Republican, a whiz with computers, a gadget geek and a big Tom Clancy fan. He dotes on his nieces and nephews. He admires Colin Powell and Abraham Lincoln. In his holster is a Walther PPK, James Bond's preferred pistol.</p>

P>This is an important book. It was declared among the best non-fiction books of the year by: Amazon.com, Borders, Globe and Mail, Evening Standard, The Independent, Los Angeles Times, New Statesman, New York Times, Publishers Weekly, The Spectator, The Telegraph and the Literary Supplement. Many professionals and others reviewed this book. Because the book is long (509 pages) and comprehensive, it is amenable to a variety of reviews --both positive and negative. The actual number of book reviews is astounding. Put Steven Pinker into your Internet search engine and you will find hours of reading material. The importance of the...

<p>WHEN THE BRITISH EDUCATOR Richard Mulcaster wrote in 1582 that ''Nature makes the boy toward, nurture sees him forward,'' he gave the world a euphonious name for an opposition that has been debated ever since. People's beliefs about the roles of heredity and environment affect their opinions on an astonishing range of topics. Do adolescents engage in violence and substance abuse because of the way their parents treated them as toddlers? Are people inherently selfish and aggressive, which would justify a market economy and a strong police, or could they become peaceable and cooperative, allowing the state to wither and a spontaneous socialism to blossom? Is there a universal aesthetic that allows great art to transcend time and place, or are people's tastes determined by their era and culture? With so much at stake, it is no surprise that debates over nature and nurture evoke such strong feelings.</p>

I was standing by a swimming pool in Australia in 1993, entangled in a rapidly degenerating politico-philosophical argument, when my interlocutor saw the light. I was, she said, a humanist. I thought this was a nice thing to be (still do), but she emitted the word with anger and derision and took it to end the argument in her favour. I discovered that humanism is a term of heavy moral opprobrium in fashionable, post-modern, politically correct areas of the academy; a term of abuse that denotes someone like Winston in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four - someone who believes in a...