Less than two months after giving $10,000 to an initiative campaign committee tied to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a well-connected private prison company was tentatively awarded a $20 million contract by the state of California to operate a San Joaquin Valley…

A little bit of spicy chili peppers is all African farmers need to keep hungry elephants from stealing crops. Meanwhile, in our backyard garden, I’ve got about ten species of hot peppers growing, including the fearsome Habanero, which are just…

“A quintet of ‘podheads’ in Oklahoma has struck cyber-gold on the Internet with a rock-and-roll song that celebrates podcasts and denigrates terrestrial radio. “On a Podcast” is a light-hearted and profane anthem praising the freedom that artists have to create…

We posted yesterday about the new Microsoft policy of checking if your copy of Windows is legal before doing Windows updates. How does the update work, a tech friend asked, and indeed, I was wondering that too. There seemed no obvious…

Miami – This week, [Luis] Diaz, who in 1980 was convicted of seven rapes and sentenced to life in prison, walked free. Defense lawyer Barry Scheck, whose New York-based Innocence Project helped free Diaz, called the former cook’s release from…

CNN suspended contributor and conservative columnist Robert Novak on Thursday after he cursed and stormed off a live studio telecast of the cable network’s program “Inside Politics.” In suspending Novak, the network called his on-air actions “inexcusable.”

A federal grand jury on Thursday indicted two former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on charges they received classified national defense information from a Pentagon analyst. AIPAC is the most powerful of the pro-Israel lobbies. This…