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A school bus driver who chatted about stem cell research with her pupils was fired for inappropriate behavior, a local newspaper said on Thursday.

Stem cell research was a divisive issue in the November U.S. presidential election. Supporters say it may eventually help people with conditions such as Alzheimer’s and cancer but opponents argue it would be unethical when it involves cloning human embryos or harvesting cells from embryos.

The Buffalo News said Julianne Thompson, 42, was fired from her job in Grand Island, New York after parents complained about her discussing the issue with pupils on Nov. 1 — the day before the presidential election.

Thompson told the newspaper she had read an interview where movie director Mel Gibson said more than 20 years of embryonic stem cell research had not cured any diseases but more than 300,000 cures had been found with adult stem cells. She said she then shared the stated facts with the pupils, without offering her opinions.

“In the midst of all the misplaced outrage, is the story of the sad and disturbing success of a fraudulent social ‘conscience’ that devalues life in favor of demonstrably failed science, wasting billions of dollars in the process,” she was quoted as saying.

Education authorities in the town were not immediately available for comment but the paper quoted schools Superintendent Thomas Ramming as saying employees were not allowed to discuss political issues with students.

“You can say anything you want as a private citizen when you are off duty,” Ramming said.

Providing you’re alone, your apartment is sufficiently sound-proofed, in your bathroom, with the door locked and with brown paper bag over your head. Softly. Unless you’re having sex at the same, time, of course. We can’t have that.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., places a bouquet on the casket of Marine Lance Cpl. Dimitrios Gavriel of Haverhill, Mass., during funeral services, Thursday, Dec. 2, 2004, at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va. Gavriel was based at Camp LeJeune, N.C., and was killed in action last month outside Fallujah, Iraq. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

A Japanese dad and his newborn. The city council of Ota, Japan, will require male employees to take a total of six weeks of paid leave before their babies’ first birthdays and then explain what they learned in a bid to end perceptions that child care is only a woman’s job(AFP/File/Yoshikazu Tsuno)

I’ve gone into hundreds of [fortune-teller's parlors], and have been told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her.

– New York City detective

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The Federal Government had rejected mandatory filtering of the internet to stop child pornography, Parliament was told today.

Communications Minister Helen Coonan said the government had recently reviewed ways of preventing child pornography, including a British-style national internet filtering system but rejected it.

Senator Coonan said the study had found such a filter would cost around $45 million a year initially and $33 million a year in later years.

She said it also had the potential to choke the internet and drive up costs for consumers and small business.

“The biggest issue is not so much the money but such an expensive scheme would not necessarily solve the problem and small to medium ISPs (internet service providers) would be driven out of business for little or no benefit,” Senator Coonan said. “What does work is greater information and parental supervision and that is the kind of program that the government is promoting.”

The government has provided $30 million to educate parents about the perils of the internet and ISPs are required to provide cost-price filtering software to subscribers.

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It worked in mice. It worked in monkeys. And now in humans, a therapeutic vaccine has stopped HIV in its tracks.

The vaccine is made from a patient’s own dendritic cells and HIV isolated from the patient’s own blood. Dendritic cells are crucial to the immune response. They grab foreign bodies in the blood and present them to other immune cells to trigger powerful immune system responses to destroy the foreign invaders.

HIV infection normally turns these important immune system responses off. But animal studies show that when dendritic cells are “loaded” with whole, killed AIDS viruses, they can trigger effective immune responses that keep infected animals from dying of AIDS.

Wei Lu, Jean-Marie Andrieu, and colleagues at the University of Paris in France and Pernambuco Federal University in Recife, Brazil, tested the vaccine on 18 Brazilian patients. All had HIV infection for at least a year. Their T-cell counts — a crucial measure of AIDS progression — were dropping, meaning their disease was worsening. None was taking anti-HIV medications.

After getting three under-the-skin injections of the tailor-made vaccine, the amount of HIV in the patients’ blood (called the viral load) dropped by 80%. After a year, eight of the 18 patients still had a 90% drop in HIV levels. All patients’ T-cell counts stopped dropping.

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Advocaat R. Moszkowicz eist namens een aantal islamitische cli�nten een verbod op het uitbrengen van een vervolg op de film Submission van VVD-Kamerlid Ayaan Hirsi Ali en de vermoorde filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Ook willen deze moslims dat de rechter Hirsi Ali verbiedt om zich voortaan nog kwetsend, grievend of godslasterlijk uit te laten over de islam.

Onlangs werd bekend dat de ondergedoken VVD-politica werkt aan een vervolg op Submission. Deze film van haar en Van Gogh ging over de mishandeling van moslimvrouwen. Het thema van het tweede deel van Submission is de manier waarop volgens Hirsi Ali de islam het individu onderdrukt.

Het kort geding waarin het verbod wordt gevraagd, wordt naar verwachting bij de rechtbank in Den Haag behandeld, zegt Moszkowicz. Dat was volgens hem de laatste bekende woon- en verblijfplaats van Hirsi Ali. Een datum is nog niet bekend.

Gezien de toelichting van de VVD-politica op de tweede film verwacht Moszkowicz dat het vervolg van Submission ook godslasterlijke elementen zal bevatten en “krenkend” voor moslims zal worden. Ook wijst de raadsman op recente uitlatingen van Hirsi Ali “waarin zij andermaal stelt dat het islamitisme levensgevaarlijk is, nog wel zonder onderscheid te maken tussen fundamentalistisch islamitisme en islamitisme in het algemeen”.

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Most German men wear condoms of the wrong size, a condom distributor has said, after asking more than 2,500 men to measure their erect penis.

“People measure their feet when they buy shoes. Why shouldn’t they measure their penises? A man would not wear children’s shoes,” said Jan Vinzenz Krause of Vinico, which released the study’s findings on World AIDS Day.

Most condom boxes in Germany indicated size but men, due to embarrassment or vanity, rarely checked or just bought those marked “extra large”, he said on Wednesday.

Vinico’s survey recommended various brands to be used — depending on the endowment of the wearer.

The study found the average erect penis size was 14.7 cm (5-3/4 inches), with 40 percent of participants reporting lengths between 12 and 15 cm (4-3/4 and 5-7/8 inches).

When compared with the condoms normally used by the participants, the results showed only 18 percent wore the right size, with nearly half squeezing into condoms that were too small and 34 percent trying to use those that were too big.

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A television commercial promoting a church’s acceptance of all people, including gays and lesbians, was deemed too touchy by CBS and NBC, who refused to air it Tuesday.

The 30-second United Church of Christ spot is aimed at attracting gays and others who feel alienated by other denominations, said the church. The ad features two “bouncers” standing guard outside a church and selecting which individuals are permitted to attend Sunday services. A gay male couple is among those rejected before written text interrupts the scene, announcing, “Jesus didn’t turn people away. Neither do we.”