Sweden's Tommy Tuvuynger and his team of professional hunters don't have to go far to find their prey. Tuvuynger is employed to keep down rabbit numbers in the Swedish capital, Stockholm. The rabbit population there has exploded over the past few years thanks to owners setting free their pets. Last year the eradication squad killed 6,000 of the furry critters, which are not native to Sweden. When the city started killing the rabbits in 2006, officials realized they would ...

Glee, the hit show about a high school Glee club, has very sharp claws, which is one reason kids like it so much. It is routinely, if hilariously, cruel . But no darker current--let alone motivation for parental monitoring--had occurred to me until I recently heard a bright, earnest youth minister tell a group of high school kids that he thought Glee was "anti-Christian." It is easy to see his point, if you look at the specifics. In ...

At first it sounded like science fiction, curing genetic diseases by giving people new genes. Then it seemed like simple fiction: while theoretically possible, gene therapy appeared unlikely to become a true therapeutic option, the field having suffered years of complications and high-profile setbacks. But over the past year, a series of small but intriguing advances has suggested that the technique may hold real future potential. In September, researchers at the University of Washington reported in the journal ...

There's something especially loathsome about torturing helpless creatures for fun and profit. And evidence of torture is what investigators found on July 8, when federal and local authorities working in teams across eight states staged the largest raid in history against the underground dogfighting racket. Twenty-six people were arrested , and more than 500 dogs were rescued, most of them pit bull terriers. The cruelty visited on the canines is harrowing. Some had been pulled behind cars to ...

Preliminary data indicates Black Friday sales got off to a roaring start this year, with consumers shopping earlier and online sales increasing significantly over last year. Retailers across the board reported strong crowds early Friday, with high-definition televisions, laptops, winter coats and the popular toy Zhu-Zhu pets among the hottest items. "There were bargain-hungry shoppers out there, and retailers really did pull out all the stops for people," says Kathy Grannis, a spokesperson for the National Retail Federation, ...

Over the past few weeks, Barack Obama has been criticized for the following: He didn't go to Berlin for the 20th anniversary of the Wall's coming down. He didn't make a forceful-enough statement on the 30th anniversary of the U.S. diplomats' being taken hostage in Iran. He didn't show sufficient mournfulness, at first, when the Fort Hood shootings took place, and he was namby-pamby about the possibility that the shootings were an act of jihad. He has spent too ...

— A 5-year-old North Carolina girl was raped and killed the same day she was taken from her home, according to an arrest warrant released Friday. Shaniya Davis was sexually assaulted and asphyxiated Nov. 10, the day her mother reported her missing from the trailer park where she was staying, according to the warrant. Authorities embarked on a nearly weeklong search that ended when the girl's body was found dumped off a rural road. ...

President Obama's trip to China yielded precious little Chinese cooperation on the Administration's key concerns, ranging from currency issues to Iran. That's a sign of the shifting balance of power between two countries that have been locked in an uneasy embrace for more than three decades. "I underlined to President Obama that given our differences in national conditions, it is only normal that our two sides may disagree on some issues," said China's President Hu Jintao. "What is important is to respect and accommodate each ...

I'm Irish. OK, I don't sport any shamrock tattoos, and you have to go back to my great, great grandmother to find a relative who was born on the Emerald Isle. But like every Irish-Catholic native of the Bronx with some semblance of ancestral pride, I was plenty peeved about the astounding screwing the Irish soccer team received this week during their World Cup qualifying match against France, when French "superstar" Thierry Henry illegally used his left hand ...

Facing reductions in state funding, public universities from Michigan to Arizona to North Carolina have slashed budgets and hiked tuition. The most extreme case is California where University of California regents voted this week to increase tuition a whopping 32% to more than $10,000 annually — a three-fold increase in a decade. The move was greeted by student demonstrations. During two days of protests at UCLA, where the UC regents met to vote on the fee increase, about 2,000 students from the 10-campus system confronted riot ...