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I’ve always loved the song "Spanish is a Loving Tongue" by Emmylou Harris: "Spanish is a loving tongue, soft as music, bright as sun. Once knew a boy who taught me some: ‘Te amoro mi Corazon.’"

Nobody is more cognizant of how hard it is to learn a foreign language than I am. I’ve studied French off and on for YEARS, and can speak it pretty well when I get into the "French" part of my brain–in Paris, for instance–but I can’t retrieve it at a moment off the top of my head. I WAS glad, however, to be able to help a French speaking couple I overheard while walking down the sidewalk in our beachside town. "Quand la mer?" I heard one of them say. I helpfully pointed toward the ocean and said, "La Bas" (over there). read more

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Representative Michele Bachmann, who may be the Republican candidate in 2012, has been quoted as saying that the vaccine to prevent cervical cancer is "dangerous." Meanwhile, her husband runs a religious clinic that tries to turn gays "straight." It turns out that pediatricians in Appalachia are less likely than doctors in other areas to encourage parents to have their children receive the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, despite studies showing that Appalachian women are more likely to get cervical cancer and to die from it than women living elsewhere. Could this be a religious bias borne out of a fear of encouraging sexual promiscuity in adolescent girls?
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By now, climate change is obvious to everyone except the most ardent deniers. But the data collected by the Center on Climate Change and National Security remains classified. What are they hiding from us?

In Wired.com, David Kravets describes a Freedom of Information Act request made by Jeffrey Richelson, to which he received this reply from the agency’s information and privacy coordinator, Susan Viscuso: "We completed a thorough search for records responsive to your request and located material that we determined is currently and properly classified and must be denied in its entirety." 
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