Robert Weller

Is this the future of sports for American youngsters. Parents of a private Boulder ice hockey club are trading text messages to see whether their children might have been sexually exploited online by a 23-year-old coach.

Gina Finney, whose son was one of those who may have been assaulted, told...

NATO has admitted it is "highly likely" it was responsible for an attack by warplanes and helicopters that killed dozens of Pakistan soldiers on an Afghan border post near Mohmand. Pakistan forces returned fire.

Reuters and Al Jazeera said the toll could reach or exceed 30....

President Obama met with immense ridicule when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize not long after taking office, but who could have known how effective he would be.

If he had lived a century ago he might have been a bounty hunter carrying a Colt Peacemaker: Muammar Gaddafi, Osama...

Britain's police, already embarrassed by its failure to catch News international's snooping on celebrities and survivors of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and children and others murdered, has proven itself unable to stand riots and looting throughout the U.K.

As is happening in many nations, most major cities have...

In March, while the Pentagon and Obama Administration were in the middle of trying to shut down the whisteblowing Wikileaks, 24,000 sensitive files were stolen from the defense department's computers.

It could not have been Pfc. Bradley Manning, who has been in a military prison for nearly a...

Anyone looking for an answer to the Libyan crisis should look to France, they have two. Negotiate with Gaddafi, who after all has already agreed to leave. Or bomb him up to the Stone Age.

It is reminiscent of the Holy Grail crew's treatment by the French, who for some unknown reason had a castle in England.

"What are you doing in England," one of King Arthur's knights asks? "None of your business," says the French warrior atop the castle.

Another possible solution: get one of Murdoch's boys to get all of Gaddafi's codes and put them on the Internet, unencrypted. See what the Vox Pop can do.

Sort the following out yourself:

BBC: French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe says Gaddafi is ready to leave and is sending messagers with that Kafka-esque message to the four corners of the world.

"We are receiving emissaries who are telling us 'Gaddafi is prepared to leave. Let's discuss it.'"

The New York Times reported at the same time that France's Parliament voted to extend its participation in NATO's bombing of the desert, oil-rich country.

"A political solution in Libya is more indispensable than ever and it is beginning to take shape," said French Prime Minister Francois Fillon.

Having already employed their helicopters, navy and other weapons, it is not clear what Paris has left. Perhaps the Killer Bunny. Hopefully the Libyans will not lobbest the Holy Hand Grenade.

In that case, fire a hologram.
...

Long known for his randy reputation, Dominique Strauss-Kahn appeared to be likely to be able to return to his high rank in French politics even after being charged with sexual assault. That suited much of the media and its desire for a narrative that would draw viewers to...

For the first time in the history of the world contest for coldest dog nose, a Scottish terrier has won.

The dog, Gruff, recorded a nasal temperature of somewhere between 99 and 102.5 F. Celsius 37.2 to 39.2.

His owner, Ingmar Bergman, said, "Ever...

While writers tell the exuberant story of skiers and snowboarders on the mountains a few days from summer in the Rockies, not all that unusual at such high altitudes, the question is whether this is a...

It was predictable that hoaxes would proliferate in the new electronic journalism. Almost everyday some celebrity dies a Twitter death.

The Amina story may set a record, as coverage seems to have increased as it became more widely known it was untrue.

Does that mean we can look forward to...

At the end of the Arab Spring will they all have gone to Riyadh?

For years Muslim dictators have been able to go to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment or asylum. Not all returned.

The latest is Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who officially had such minor wounds...

It seemed so horrible when I first heard

Though that Kabul suicide bombing blast lent just the right tone

For the day some said would be the apocalypse

But if it were really true would we have even heard

It only takes a few minutes to get over things these days anyway

And if there is even a faint pulse a blood pulp can be kept alive

When a bullet to the head would be more merciful

Or bullets to the chest and head like Bin Laden

Those covered in blood learn so many neutral ways to explain it

Things not even a Primo Levi would try to make sense of

Let's just call it post-traumatic stress disorder

Because there are so many neutral ways

To tell stories that shouldn't even be imagined Let alone told

A rape is a sexual assault

A bloody bombing is the work of "militants"

Kind of makes you wonder what you call really bad people

It's unlikely a Shakespeare or Camus would be up to it

Better left to an Edgar Allan Poe or even Stephen King

But our world clearly passed even them by years...

The movie "Awakenings" illustrates how there is often more than meets the eye in a victim of a brain injury or mental illness.

The valiant struggle of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, victim of a bullet that traversed her brain "through and through," is a marvel. It is just four months since she was shot in the left hemisphere of the brain, the side most studied because injuries to it are more obvious. Even though a teaching hospital was nearby, making state-of-the art care available, neither that nor her will to recover would have mattered without "neuroplasticity."

In short, neuroplasticity, also known as "cortical remapping," is a term for how the brain can find other ways to make things work when its usual pathways are destroyed or blocked. Imagine that you are driving down a road and suddenly it stops and you have to figure out where to do. The brain has a kind of GPS that will find a way.

Doctors and scientists had believed for more than a century that brain damage was incurable. They also believed the development of the brain virtually ended after early youth.

But as early as 1890, psychologist William James proposed that brains could evolve, in what is now known as "remapping."

Wikipedia explains neuroplasticity thus:

Neuroplasticity (also known as cortical remapping) refers to the ability of the brain to change as a result of one's experience, that the brain is 'plastic' and 'malleable'. The discovery of this feature of the brain is rather modern; the previous belief amongst scientists was that the brain does not change after the critical period of infancy.

The brain consists of nerve cells (or "neurons") and glial cells which are interconnected, and learning may happen through change in the strength of the connections, by adding or removing connections, and by the formation of new cells. "Plasticity" relates to learning by adding or removing connections, or adding cells.

James wrote about this possibility in "The Principles of Psychology," published in 1890. Sigmund Freud suspected this in a phenomenon he called transference, when he observed in 1914 that memories thought forgotten could reappear as actions. For more than a century the theories of James, Freud and others were widely rejected.

Just four years ago, while researching new brain scan techniques that could accurately spot minor traumatic brain injuries in soldiers, I was told by a science writer that I shouldn't bother because there were no treatments for brain damage.

There is much more to tell, and I will elsewhere. It is worth noting that what acclaimed physician-author Dr. Oliver Sacks would have called Giffords' "therapeutic moment" came early. An emergency room physician asked her to squeeze his hand with her left hand as she entered, and she could. The right hand wouldn't respond, showing that there was much to be done.

Giffords' staff has been pushing Congress to make the same kind of care she received available to everyone. Presently, many insurance companies require patients to pay out of their own pocket for the latest in brain spect scans. Fine if you have several thousand dollars or more not being used for anything else.

And the Catch-22 is that some won't pay if depression is considered part of the equation. Wow. Which came first: the depression or the trauma?

Perhaps one of the most horrible stories in the history of medicine is that many thousands of brain injury or disease patients were considered little more than vegetables, to be fed and watered, as described in Sacks' movie "Awakenings."

Why assume the patients were completely unaware of what was going on around them? Because the alternative was unthinkable, said a physician played by Max Von Sydow in...

Now some may read that headline and think it is a non-starter because with a year past since he was first detained in the WikiLeaks case, his constitutional right to a speedy trial has been ignored. Under the Constitution that should have occurred within six months of his detention on...

It seemed there was nothing the Obama administration wouldn't do to shut down WikiLeaks and shut up Julian Assange.

Today we found out there is. In a somewhat curious move, the Treasury Department declined a right-wing congressman's request to blacklist WikiLeaks.

There already is a grand jury investigating Assange and...