The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay welcomed Thursday's judgement by the Special Court for Sierra Leone in the Charles Taylor case, and said the guilty verdict against the former Liberian President for planning, aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity marked a major milestone in the development of international justice.

“It is important to recognise that Taylor may appeal the verdict, and that his guilt is not fully established until the end of the judicial process,” Pillay said. “Nevertheless, whatever the final outcome, this is undoubtedly a historic moment in the development of international justice. A former President, who once wielded immense influence in a neighbouring country where tens of thousands of people were killed, mutilated, raped, robbed and repeatedly displaced for years on end, has been arrested, tried in a fair and thorough international procedure, and has now been convicted of very serious crimes.”

Today is World Malaria Day, and the World Health Organization has launched a new initiative, dubbed T3: Test, Treat, Track. It urges countries where malaria is endemic to test every suspected malaria case, treat every confirmed case with anti-malarial medicine, and track the disease with "timely and accurate surveillance systems." The good news is that scaled-up malaria prevention and control efforts -- including delivery of 145 million insecticidal bed nets in 2010 alone -- have saved a million lives over the past decade. But, the WHO points out, there's still a long way to go in combating this disease...

Days after he signed a law that would effectively shut down his state’s only remaining abortion-performing clinic, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant accused Democrats of having one mission in life: “to abort children.”

“The hypocrisy of the left that now tried to kill this bill, that says that I should have never signed it, the true hypocrisy is that their one mission in life is to abort children, is to kill children in the womb,” Bryant told conservative radio host Tony Perkins on Tuesday.

Once upon a time, in early 2004, I attended one of hundreds of "Parties for the President" organized nationwide for grassroots volunteers who wanted to help reelected George W. Bush, at a modest middle class home in Portland, Oregon. At one point, a nice old lady politely pressed into my hand a grubby little self-published pamphlet she had come upon, purporting to prove that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry had faked the heroics that had won him three purple hearts in Vietnam. I added it to my mental store of the night's absurdities that I expected to hear rattling across the wingnutosphere the entire fall: "I still believe there are weapons of mass destruction"; "There is an agenda—to get rid of God in this country"; "John Kerry attended a party in which there was bad language!" What I didn't expect was to see Kerry's war-hero cred earnestly debated night after night on CNN. Then came August and "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" — and that little old lady's fever dream began dominating the media discussion of the campaign, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Last week, Wisconsin Planned Parenthood announced it would no longer provide medical abortion, or abortion using medicines, due to new state regulations that make the procedure onerous.

At a time when the pool of abortion providers is shrinking and abortion clinics are closing, medical abortion can truly increase women's access, particularly to those in underserved areas. For legislators who want to end access to abortion under any circumstances, medical abortion is an obvious target. We've seen in the past year a growth in efforts to specifically restrict medical abortion and target abortion providers. Oklahoma, North Dakota and Missouri have all passed laws (some blocked by injunction currently) that either restrict or ban medical abortion altogether.

Governments are falling badly behind on low-carbon energy, putting carbon reduction targets out of reach and pushing the world to the brink of catastrophic climate change, the world's leading independent energy authority will warn on Wednesday.

The stark judgment is being given at a key meeting of energy ministers from the world's biggest economies and emitters taking place in London on Wednesday – a meeting already overshadowed by David Cameron's last-minute withdrawal from a keynote speech planned for Thursday.

"The biosphere seems to contain a reflection of the sky, in that the evolution of life mirrors the evolution of the Galaxy," according to new research by Henrik Svensmark of the Technical University of Denmark. The new findings suggests that supernovae near the Solar System has strongly influenced the development of life. When the most massive stars exhaust their available fuel and reach the end of their lives, they explode as supernovae, tremendously powerful explosions that are briefly brighter than an entire galaxy of normal stars.

The remnants of these dramatic events also release vast numbers of high-energy charged particles known as galactic cosmic rays (GCR). If a supernova is close enough to the Solar System, the enhanced GCR levels can have a direct impact on the atmosphere of the Earth.

As the years tick by, college is becoming increasingly unaffordable. Financial aid information site Finaid.org reports that the average college tuition is rising at nearly three times the rate of inflation. However, the percentage of college costs that federal Pell grants cover is diminishing. Lauren Asher, president of Institute for College Access & Success, an Oakland, Calif.-based advocacy group dedicated to increasing college access, says the financial burden of higher education is enough to turn off some students from it entirely. With student loan default rates up and employment opportunities down, is educational debt still worth it?