Somali Pirate Attacks Persist Despite Global Navy Effort

Correction appended April 28, 2010 This time last year, Somali pirates dominated headlines in the U.S. The hijacking of the Maersk Alabama, a tanker captained by an American, led to a made-for-Hollywood intervention by sharp-shooting Navy SEALS and triggered a media frenzy about the rise of piracy off the Horn of Africa

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Study: Neanderthal DNA Lives On in Modern Humans

Correction Appended: May 8, 2010A decade after scientists first cracked the human genome, researchers announced in the May 7 issue of Science that they have done the same for Neanderthals, the species of hominid that existed from roughly 400,000 to 30,000 years ago, when their closest relatives, early modern humans, may have driven them to extinction. Led by ancient-DNA expert Svante Pbo of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, scientists reconstructed about 60% of the Neanderthal genome by analyzing tiny chains of ancient DNA extracted from bone fragments of three female Neanderthals excavated in the late 1970s and early ’80s from a cave in Croatia.

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Behind the Migrant Row, Europe Keeps Shifting to the Far Right

When France temporarily blocked trains from Italy headed to French coastal destinations over the weekend, the move marked a dramatic escalation in the two countries’ spat over how to handle migrants fleeing unrest in North Africa — and raised legal questions about fundamental travel accords long embraced many European Union member states.

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