Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

By Laura Zuckerman SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - A federal judge has approved a far-reaching settlement giving Montana until 2014 to clean up polluted streams and lakes in 28 watersheds across the state, capping nearly 15 years of legal battles, officials said on Monday. [More]

By Meredith Wadman of Nature magazine Was the case a fluke or a forewarning? Now that a federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit that sought to halt US government funding of research using human embryonic stem cells, scientists who depend on that support are left wondering whether the battle is truly over, or is merely moving on to a different arena. Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the US District Court for the District of Columbia issued his decision on 27 July, acknowledging a higher court's opinion that overruled a preliminary injunction that he had placed to suspend the funding last August (see 'Trying times' )

Earlier this year a 22-year-old college dropout, Jared Lee Loughner, shot Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords through the head near a Tucson supermarket, causing significant damage to Giffords’s brain. In the same shooting spree, Loughner killed or wounded 18 others, including a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl. Information from Loughner’s postings on YouTube and elsewhere online suggests that he is severely mentally ill.