ROME has spoken," runs an ancient proverb of the Roman Catholic Church. "The case is closed." No longer true. Last week Pope Paul VI formally promulgated his encyclical on birth control, which condemns all methods of contraception, except rhythm, as against the will of God. The pronouncement caused perhaps the most serious outburst of dissent the Catholic Church has experienced in centuries. Innumerable Catholics made clear that they would refuse to heed the words of a reigning Pontiff. Theologians defied ...

This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in La Stampa . The Tunisian island of Djerba has for all intents and purposes become a Libyan colony. Since the beginning of the civil war, almost 50,000 Libyans have escaped to Tunisia, and 5,000 of them have flocked to Djerba, a popular tourist destination before the wave of revolts ...

How easy is it to buy illegal drugs on the Internet? Pretty darn easy, according to a new study by the United Nation's International Narcotics Control Board. The report, issued Wednesday, warns that drug traffickers are finding myriad ways to conduct their illegal transactions in cyberspace — leaving law enforcement officers struggling to keep up. The INCB study details the ways traffickers communicate with each other and with their clients, often commandeering unrelated chat rooms to set up deals, ...

Over the years, Apple has become almost as well known for the tight control it imposes on its innovations as for the tech and marketing genius behind them. If you buy an iPhone in the U.S., for instance, Apple makes you use AT&T as your carrier and it requires you to buy any new applications from its App Store. But some owners have been hacking their iPhones to get around these rules — a process known as ...

This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in Le Monde. Standing in front of a stopped truck in the desert, two workers in red overalls are pumping water out of an oil slick before installing a new derrick. The landscape is moonlike. Off on the horizon is the city of Karamay, a ...

LORI CROWN THOUGHT she was doing the right thing last year when she moved to a dryer climate in Bakersfield, California, after being plagued by asthma attacks during her six years in Hawaii. A few months later, Crown, 35, was suffering from severe headaches, a prolonged fever of 102 degreesF, swollen feet and painful bumps on her hands and legs. The diagnosis: "valley fever," or coccidioidomycosis, a dust-borne disease caused by the microscopic spores of a fungus, Coccidioides immitis. As ...

When Syrian tanks and soldiers poured into the rebellious southern flashpoint city of Dara'a last month, the Twittersphere lit up with wry comments like "Hey army, that's Dara'a, not the Golan!" mocking the fact that the same army shooting its own people hadn't fired a bullet in decades to liberate the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in the 1967 war and still the center of the long-simmering conflict between Israel and Syria. In fact, Damascus has long ...

The men with the poison-filled syringe arrived two days before Li Juan's due date. They pinned her down on a bed in a local clinic, she says, and drove the needle into her abdomen until it entered the 9-month-old fetus. "At first, I could feel my child kicking a lot," says the 23-year-old. "Then, after a while, I couldn't feel her moving anymore." Ten hours later, Li delivered the girl she had intended to name Shuang . The baby was ...

1550 B.C.An Egyptian manuscript called the Ebers Papyrus directs women on how to mix dates, acacia and honey into a paste, smear it over wool and use it as a pessary to prevent conception 1700sCasanova's memoirs detail his experiments in birth control, from sheep-bladder condoms to the use of half a lemon as a makeshift cervical cap 1839Charles Goodyear invents the technology to vulcanize rubber and puts it to use manufacturing rubber condoms, intrauterine devices, douching syringes and "womb veils" ...

Scheduled nap times may help eliminate the problem of air-traffic controllers who fall asleep on the job. But even if such measures were in place, they would have done little to prevent the brief but worrisome aborted landing of a U.S. Air Force jet carrying First Lady Michelle Obama on April 18 after it got too close to a cargo plane ahead of it. The reason: the blips of the aircraft involved had momentarily vanished from radar. The ...