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When people in other countries speak English, they usually translate it directly from their own language, which can lead to some strange sentences. The spelling of the UK and American versions of the English language diverged some time ago, when Benjamin Franklin, and other early Americans, “modernized” our spelling. Now scientists are asking why we can’t modernize it even more, to make it easier for kids to learn to read.

Darlene Superville writes in LiveScience.com that people who advocate more simplified spelling say it would help children learn to read faster. People have been trying to simplify the English language for centuries?both Andrew Carnegie and Theodore Roosevelt tried to do it around a century ago.
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China is proposing new legislation that would make it a crime to report information about riots, disasters or outbreaks of disease without government permission. The government has been notoriously and dangerously secretive about such things as SARS and Bird Flu outbreaks, and this new legislation appears aimed at preventing even the sketchy information that usually appears from leaving the country.

Clifford Coonan writes in the Independent that the government claims it merely wants to enforce accuracy in reporting, but it actually wants to “save face” with the rest of the world. However, this is a dangerous concept when it comes to things like pollution, global warming and disease, which have a direct effect on people in the rest of the world.
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The US has been the object of criticism worldwide for using depleted uranium in its bullets. The radioactive dust from these bullets causes cancer and persists in the environment for years. Now that global warming is causing more and more air from the Middle East to blow into Europe, European scientists are discovering a sudden and frightening increase in radioactivity levels. And a US company is monitoring them–and fighting release of data.

Leuren Moret writes on the American Free Press website that British scientists Chris Busby and Saoirse Morgan think that the use of uranium weapons in Iraq has led to radioactive contamination in Europe.
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UFO hacker Gary McKinnon is to be extradited to the US by Great Britain, according to a decision handed down by British Home Secretary John Reid. McKinnon is accused of hacking into NASA and US military computers in search of UFO evidence. According to what he told Dreamland listeners, he did not hack into anything, but simply entered computers on insecure networks that had no firewalls and were not password protected. McKinnon faces a virtual certainty of a long prison sentence in the US, and almost no chance of receiving a fair trial. The extradition order came as a surprise to him. He has two weeks to appeal, but appeals in such cases are rarely granted. In general, however, Mr.read more