AP - Majida Hamid Ibrahim seemed no different from any other victim in Iraq — her body was put in a plastic bag and sent to the morgue for relatives to collect. But authorities were already bemoaning her death.
AP - The percentage of retailers selling tobacco to underage youth during unannounced inspections dropped to 10.9 percent last year, the government reports.
AP - For nearly her entire life, Mary had a crippling fear of cramped spaces that meant she couldn't travel on airplanes, subways, or cars. Seeing a psychologist didn't help. So she tried something else. The 61-year-old bookkeeper, who only gave her first name to protect her privacy, sat down in front of a computer and spilled out her problems to a kind of psychiatric computer game called "Fearfighter."
AP - Early in the AIDS epidemic, people infected with the virus often lost a dangerous amount of weight, at times looking gaunt and ghostly. Today, they are facing the opposite problem. Many who have HIV, but not full-blown AIDS, are struggling with obesity, which has overtaken "wasting syndrome"as the top concern.
AFP - Scientists who discovered that Viagra helps hamsters overcome jet lag and a Japanese researcher who extracted vanilla flavoring from cow dung won top honors Thursday at the 17th annual Ig Nobel Awards.
Reuters - Willis Ochieng, 10, scavenges through smoking refuse piled as high as a house at one of Africa's biggest rubbish mountains, his friends sitting nearby sucking on dirty plastic bottles of noxious yellow glue.
Reuters - Elderly patients with an aggressive form of blood cancer lived about 20 months longer when given the drug thalidomide as part of their treatment, French researchers said on Friday.
