On Nov. 23, 2010, in Cayuga County, New York, Phil Niles pleaded guilty to animal cruelty. He was ordered to pay a fine of $555, and not to have contact with animals for one year. Niles, who had been a longtime employee of Willet Dairy, had been caught hitting a cow on the head with a tool on an undercover video taken by the group Mercy for Animals in 2009. But some are moving to make that very ...

A former animal research technician was sentenced Friday to 44 years in prison for killing a Yale University graduate student days before her wedding in 2009 after anguished relatives described how plans to celebrate her marriage suddenly turned to unimaginable grief as they returned home with her in a coffin. Raymond Clark III, 26, apologized in New Haven Superior Court for strangling 24-year-old Annie Le of Placerville, Calif. Her body was found upside ...

What are you doing when you aren't doing anything at all? If you said "nothing," then you have just passed a test in logic and flunked a test in neuroscience. When people perform mental tasks--adding numbers, comparing shapes, identifying faces--different areas of their brains become active, and brain scans show these active areas as brightly colored squares on an otherwise dull gray background. But researchers have recently discovered that when these areas of our brains light up, other areas go ...

It is an irony not lost on the Chinese public that the Year of the Tiger has not been good for the big cats. On Tuesday, state media reported that dozens of tigers and other endangered animals had died of malnutrition over the past two years at the Northern Forest Zoo in the Chinese city of Harbin. Workers, who later leaked the story to the media, buried their bodies in a 3-meter pit to hide the animals ...

When people write on Chinese websites that they "love the future," it should be a sentiment the government can get behind. After all, the authorities in Beijing have pressed their subjects to embrace the country's bright economic prospects. But of late, "love the future" has taken on a new meaning. Online, people have begun to use the phrase, which is ai wei lai in Mandarin, as a code for the artist and political activist Ai Weiwei, whose name became too ...

There are fresh concerns about the safety of China's food supply after the country's largest meat processor was last week reported by CCTV, China's state TV broadcaster, to have produced and sold pork tainted with a banned drug. The drug, clenbuterol, also known as "lean meat powder" is a fat-burning animal feed additive that causes nausea and dizziness if consumed by humans. A total of 158 pigs from nine farms in central China's Henan Province have been ...

As I write this, tomorrow is Tuesday, which is a cardio day. I'll spend five minutes warming up on the VersaClimber, a towering machine that requires you to move your arms and legs simultaneously. Then I'll do 30 minutes on a stair mill. On Wednesday a personal trainer will work me like a farm animal for an hour, sometimes to the point that I am dizzy — an abuse for which I pay as much as I ...

Famously dubbed the "mad dog of the Middle East" by former President Ronald Reagan, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has a reputation that has run the gamut from eccentric revolutionary to international pariah over his long career. Often seen swathed in animal skins and surrounded by a posse of virgin female bodyguards, the colorful leader has become as well known for his unusual personality as for his controversial political moves, the latest of which included celebrating convicted ...

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 ...

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 ...