At 6:48 a.m. on April 22, 2009, a leading flu blogger named "Revere" posted the first warning about a remarkable bit of news he'd spotted in a routine weekly report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. With what he labeled "an element of luck," the CDC had...

I was expecting something unpredictable early in 2007, when I made my way to Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn to watch the iconoclastic classical musicians and composers known as the International Street Cannibals mix it up with some young boxers. I'd been invited to a show in a series...

In 1967, after a vicious round of Nigerian coups, counter coups, and ethnic massacres, an Ibo military governor declared independence for his people, whose land held big oil reserves. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu proved more charismatic than gifted at winning a civil war. The Republic of Biafra was swiftly surrounded.

The only global organization that has ever tried to control whaling may be on the rocks. The International Whaling Commission, says a U.S. official, "might just fall apart" at its June meeting in Morocco if delegates fail to reach consensus on overhauling the 63-year-old voluntary organization.

An IWC...

Dawn Brancheau found her vocation at 9, when she visited Seaworld in Orlando and delightedly watched killer whales perform. She became a top trainer at Seaworld and was publicly drowned last week by its top draw, a killer whale named Tilikum.

As a youth in England, Philip Hoare...

This may be just the time to brush up on Cointelpro, the notorious program through which FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover vigorously disrupted the activities of American political dissidents.

From 1956 until 1971, the FBI stalked and sabotaged a wide range of groups - from the Communist Party...

After agonizing over claims that dangerous toxins lurk in swine flu vaccines, Americans are lining up for their shots. That doesn't mean pro-vaccine forces have conclusively won the debate that's been raging on the Internet. People are simply more frightened of swine flu than they are of the (49% mercury)...

With so much fire aimed at a swine flu vaccine that's only beginning to circulate, there's been little talk of potential shortcomings in the seasonal flu vaccine. But in this season of discontent, the annual shot aimed at quelling "normal" flu may have a bad year.

To start with, the...

Just as Americans balance fears of various strains of influenza with concerns about how vaccines for seasonal flu and swine flu might affect them, the medical world has been vexed by "the Canada Problem:" A Canadian study has concluded that people under the age of 50 vaccinated for seasonal...

Reading about the microbial adventures of Sanjay Gupta and Anderson Cooper in Afghanistan has made me wonder about something rather personal. I'd just had an extremely sore throat with no fever that kept me up all night, day after day. I visited the CDC page for "Interim Guidance on...