ScienceDaily (Dec. 5, 2011) ? Adolescents who were abused and neglected have less gray matter in some areas of the brain than young people who have not been maltreated, a new Yale School of Medicine study shows. The brain areas impacted by maltreatment may differ between boys and girls, may depend on whether the youths [...]

PRAGUE ? The end of Czechoslovakia’s totalitarian regime was called the Velvet Revolution because of how smooth the transition seemed: Communism dead in a matter of weeks, without a shot fired. But for Vaclav Havel, it was a moment he helped pay for with decades of suffering and struggle. The dissident playwright spent years in [...]

RAMALLAH/GAZA (Reuters) ? Israel released 550 Palestinian prisoners Sunday in the second stage of a deal with Hamas that brought home soldier Gilad Shalit after five years of captivity in the Gaza Strip. While many of the 450 prisoners freed on October 18 in the first phase of the Egyptian-brokered prisoner swap were serving life [...]

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) ? A Jesuit high school in San Francisco was closed for the rest of the week on Wednesday after about 300 students and 30 faculty were stricken by a stomach ailment marked by nausea and vomiting, officials there said. The outbreak at Saint Ignatius College Preparatory school, initially believed to have been [...]

If you don’t want to drop $300 on a phone we don’t blame you — honestly, the idea makes us feel a bit dirty too. MediaTek doesn’t seen any reason for it either. The company has been working its way in to the mobile chipset business for a little while now, and its latest is [...]