Balanced News Blog

A zoo in Australia has held a 175th birthday party for one of the world’s oldest known living creatures, a Giant Galapagos tortoise.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Tuesday joined the Bush administration’s attack on Iraq war critics, quoting Clinton administration officials who contended in the late 1990s that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was a security threat to the United States and its allies.

Now, is it just me, or is HIV/AIDS pretty much impossible to get rid of? If you have it, you’re going to die (sooner than the rest of us who don’t have it), that’s pretty much the long and the short of it. The virus is a ruthless enemy, making itself fully at home in our bodies, and evolving against all the dangerous and nasty drugs we throw at it. That’s why this news from the UK is groundbreaking, to say the least.

Some 13 million hectares of forests are destroyed around the world each year, an area the size of Greece, although the net loss of trees has finally slowed thanks mainly to new plantations, the United Nations said on Monday.