A video featuring young cancer patients, their nurses, doctors and parents lip-synching to Kelly Clarkson’s hit “Stronger” has gone viral! The awesomely uplifting video was filmed via Seattle Children’s Hospital art program, the idea of which came from 22 year old Chris Rumble, a leukemia patient who wanted to share something with his hockey team in his hometown of Wenatchee, Washington. “I’m everyone’s big brother and I have a lot of friends here at Seattle Children’s,” Rumble said on the Seattle hospital’s blog. According to Dr. Douglas Hawkins, the patients and staff at Seattle...

According to an overwhelmingly controversial ruling from the New York Court Of Appeals, the viewing of online child pornography is not a crime. “The purposeful viewing of child pornography on the internet is now legal in New York,” Senior Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick stated in a majority decision for the court. The ruling came in relation to the case regarding James Kent, a Marist College professor sentenced in 2009 after authorities discovered over 100 images of child porn had been viewed on his computer, the remnants of which were stored in his cache files. According to MSNBC, the ruling makes an effort to distinguish...

Family, friends, fans and activists are mourning the loss of Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch. Yauch passed away today after a several year battle with cancer. He is remembered both as a hip hop pioneer and as a preeminent activist for the Tibetan liberation movement. Youch, aka “MCA”, was propelled to hip hop stardom in 1984 with the release of the Beastie Boys hit record, License To Ill. The Beastie Boys went on to sell over 22 million albums in the U.S. and over 40 million worldwide in a career that spanned three decades. In 1994, Youch established the Milarepa Fund to help raise awareness and generate funds for the...

Web-based television and movie streaming service Netflix has found itself in a nice little flip-flopping situation. On April 5, the digital upstart filed paperwork with the Federal Elections Committee to create a new super-PAC dubbed FLIXPAC. Last week, RT reported that Netflix could use the funds relegated to that political action committee to support politicians who would in turn, help fund controversial bills like Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act (SOPA and PIPA, respectively). Soon thereafter, Netflix emailed RT with a response to the article that argued that FLIXPAC was not set up to financially support such bills. Joris...

Social Issues – According to U.N. envoy Kofi Annan, Syria has agreed to a UN sponsored peace plan. At this point though, for some, the idea of resolving the conflict through diplomacy undercuts the value of the lives lost. Along with the announcement, Syrian state television has broadcast a video of President Bashar al-Assad walking through the Baba Amr district Homs, a particularly bloody center of conflict during the rebellion and Assad’s crackdown. The peace plan “calls for a national dialogue but does not hinge on him leaving office.” It is not exactly a win for the rebels. Abu Jaffar, an opposition supporter summarized...

Social Issues – The United States’ Afghanistan exit strategy has taken another hit this week with a report from the International Crisis Group (ICG) concluding that U.S. attempts to negotiate with the Taliban have been a failure. The report comes after several turbulent months in U.S.-Afghan relations, with its findings likely dramatically affected by the recent killing of 17 Afghan civilians and the burning of Korans at an American military base. The ICG report represents a significant dent in hopes that a negotiated settlement would mark the end of the war. Candace Rondeaux, the report’s lead author, stated that...

Social Issues – If the Orwellian-TV Set weren’t enough to inspire privacy fears, the rising trend of prospective employers asking for social media log-in information should get you worked up—and maybe hunkered down. While many businesses have learned to research their potential hires’ Facebook pages, many, faced with the locked doors of private profiles, are asking for the “keys” to let themselves in. It’s a situation that Justin Bassett, a statistician in New York, ran into. As he should have, he promptly withdrew his application. The legal status of the practice is questionable, and in places such as...

Social Issues – Despite the increased awareness of the dangers of lead poisoning, many are more than a little displeased to hear that the funds for the CDC’s Lead Poisoning Prevention Program have been cut by staggering 93%, or from 29.2 million to 2 million dollars. This massive decrease in funding comes at an inconvenient time (if this could ever be convenient) as the CDC considers revising the threshold at which it determines lead poisoning in children. Under the newly proposed threshold, which is still being debated, the number of children with “elevated blood lead would nearly double to around 450,000.” If the...

Social Issues – Iran continues to insist that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only, and after searching for years for evidence showing otherwise, reports are coming in from Mossad, Israel’s Intelligence Service, and a source in U.S. Intelligence, that there is no proof that Tehran is working on a nuclear weapons program. In fact, it is believed that Iran’s program was shut down in 2003. “Mossad does not disagree with the U.S. on the [Iraninan] weapons program,” an unnamed former senior U.S. Intelligence official told the New York Times. “There is not a lot of dispute between the US and...

Social Issues – In the big business of cellphones, there are essentially two big players: AT&T and Verizon. Together they have 60% of the market. Expand that to include the next two largest service providers and 90% of the market is accounted for. It’s a level of market control that threatens, some believe, the very democracy we consider so vital to being an American. A panel discussion at the South by Southwest Interactive conference concluded that this market dominance is resulting in a gradual decrease in options for customers. One example cited was both AT&T and Verizon’s placement of data limits on smart...