(CNSNews.com) – (Updated) The Senate on Thursday evening voted 93-7 to approve a defense authorization bill that includes a provision which not only repeals the military law on sodomy, it also repeals the military ban on sex with animals--or bestiality.
On Nov. 15, the Senate Armed Services Committee had unanimously approved S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes a provision to repeal Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).
Article 125 of the UCMJ makes it illegal to engage in both sodomy with humans and sex with animals.
It states: "(a) Any person subject to this chapter who engages in unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex or with an animal is guilty of sodomy. Penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the offense. ( [a] Any person found guilty of sodomy shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.”
Family Research Council President Tony Perkins said the effort to remove sodomy from military law stems from liberal Senate Democrats' and President Obama’s support for removing the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy.
“It’s all about using the military to advance this administration’s radical social agenda,” Perkins told CNSNews.com. “Not only did they overturn Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, but they had another problem, and that is, under military law sodomy is illegal, just as adultery is illegal, so they had to remove that prohibition against sodomy.”
Perkins said removing the bestiality provision may have been intentional--or just “collateral damage”

Pyongyang urged people to rally behind Kim's youngest son Jong-un, describing him as "great successor" to the leader who presided over a famine that saw hundreds of thousands die, but still built an atomic arms arsenal.

South Korea put its military on emergency alert but urged its people to stay calm, and swiftly closed ranks with its close ally the United States. Analysts said there would likely be little turbulence in the North – at least for now.
Neighbouring China and Russia, both influential players in Pyongyang, sent their condolences and observers said Beijing would beef up its all-important patronage to prevent an implosion in the communist North.
There was wariness about where North Korea goes now under Kim Jong-il's son, but Britain, France and Germany voiced tentative hope for a new dawn at the end of a tumultuous year that has seen regimes topple across the Middle East.
The "Dear Leader", according to the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), "passed away from a great mental and physical strain" at 8:30am on Saturday (23.30 GMT Friday) while travelling by train on one of his field trips.
It urged people to support the Swiss-educated Kim Jong-Un, who is in his late 20s and was last year made a four-star general and given top ruling party posts despite having had no public profile.
"All party members, military men and the public should faithfully follow the leadership of comrade Kim Jong-Un and protect and further strengthen the unified front of the party, military and the public," the female announcer, clad in black, said on television.
KCNA said Kim died of a "severe myocardial infarction along with a heart attack". He suffered a stroke in August 2008 which triggered an acceleration in the succession plans.

Come New Year’s Day, he’ll have a few more coins in his pocket as San Francisco makes history by becoming the first city in the nation to scale a $10 minimum wage. The city’s hourly wage for its lowest-paid workers will hit $10.24, more than $2 above the California minimum wage and nearly $3 more than the working wage set by the federal government.
It won’t put much more in Frias’ wallet. But it gives him a sense of moving on up.
“It’s a psychological boost,” said Frias, who is a 34-year-old usher at a movie theater and a security guard for a crowd control firm. “It means that I’ll have more money in my wallet to pay my bills and money to spend in the city to help the economy.”
San Franciscans passed a proposition in 2003 that requires the city to increase the minimum wage each year, using a formula tied to inflation and the cost of living.
“It was really a forward way of approaching it,” said Gordon Mar, coordinator for Jobs With Justice in San Francisco, part of the coalition that worked on the minimum wage initiative in 2003.
The first year the increase went into effect, minimum wage in San Francisco jumped from $6.75 an hour to $8.50, a significant increase for the city’s 50,000 lowest paid workers. The increase put about $100 million into worker’s wallets.
It was news around the country this week that San Francisco’s minimum wage would break the $10 an hour barrier.
Mar and others cheer the news, but also note that $10.24 still far from a living wage for workers — especially workers with families — in a city like San Francisco, with its high cost of living.
However, the increase is definitely a help for the thousands of low wage workers trying to get by in difficult economic times, Mar added.
He said worker advocates in other California cities have expressed interest in a similar local minimum wage law, but none have been able to mount a successful campaign against business interests, including restaurant associations.
San Francisco, pushed by advocates including Jobs with Justice, has led the nation in progressive labor standards. San Francisco was the first city in the nation to require employers to provide paid sick days to workers. San Francisco also has a local universal health care law for all city residents.
“It was pretty ground-breaking in 2008,” Mar said of the health care law. “It is open to any resident of San Francisco.”
Contributions for the health care program come from employers.
“It has provided a decent level of health care access for low wage workers who didn’t previously have health insurance,” said Mar.
Jaron Browne, communications director for People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), also in San Francisco, said at $10.24 an hour, “We are finally starting to see the impact, where the floor is actually being raised for workers.”

The search site and advertising purveyor has talked to at least two private-equity firms about helping them bankroll a deal to buy Yahoo's core business, says The Wall Street Journal, which cites "a person familiar with the matter."
The talks are early-stage, no formal proposal has been worked out, Google may not wind up pursuing the buy, and it's not clear which private equity firms are involved, the Journal said. Still, the idea of the currently reigning search giant buying the deposed search giant is intriguing, as is the possibility of two of the Web's biggest companies coming together--a possibility that, as the Journal notes, would no doubt pique the interest of antitrust regulators.
Despite a little good news in its third-quarter earnings results, Yahoo has been in a muddle lately, with a stagnant stock price, high employee attrition rate, and withering product development efforts. The company's board sacked CEO Carol Bartz last month and Yahoo has apparently been shopping itself around to potential buyers.
Reported suitors include the previously spurned Microsoft, venture capitalist Andreessen Horowitz, China-based e-commerce company Alibaba, and fellow Web 1.0 grandee AOL.
According to the Journal's sources, Google likes the idea of selling ads on Yahoo's Web sites.

(Reuters) - A U.S. bill to pressure China into letting its currency rise in value, which has drawn warnings from Beijing of a possible trade war, ran into opposition from the top Republican in Congress on Tuesday.
The strong misgivings of House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner were the first clear sign the currency legislation might fizzle out, as similar bills have done since lawmakers began targeting China's yuan policy in 2005.

"I think it's pretty dangerous to be moving legislation through the United States Congress forcing someone to deal with the value of their currency," Boehner told reporters.

"While I've got concerns about how the Chinese have dealt with their currency, I'm not sure this is the way to fix it."

On Monday, the Senate voted to open debate on a bill that calls for U.S. tariffs on imports from countries with deliberately undervalued currencies, prompting an angry rebuke from China.

Many economists say China holds down the value of its yuan currency to give its exporters an edge in global markets. China says it is committed to gradual currency reform and notes that the yuan has risen 30 percent against the dollar since 2005.

House speakers normally get their way on legislation. But Boehner has to contend this time with signs of growing support from rank-and-file members of his own party for the currency bill and tough talk about China from a top Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney.

Democrats piled pressure on Boehner, urging him to keep a promise he made when he took office in January and let the House "work its will.

"For some inexplicable reason, the Republican leadership in the House is siding with the Chinese government. This is not the time to go soft on Beijing," said Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, a co-author of the currency bill.

"The Chinese only understand one thing: being tough," he said on the Senate floor, rejecting calls from other senators for multilateral talks.

In a compact lab space at Stanford University, Oscar Abilez, MD, trains a microscope on a small collection of cells in a petri dish. A video recorder projects what the microscope sees on a nearby monitor. The cells in the dish pulse rhythmically, about once a second. The cells are cardiomyocytes, which drive the force-producing and pacemaker functions of the human heart. They are programmed to pulse. They will beat this way until they die. Abilez holds up a finger as if to say, "Wait," and reaches for a small lever hidden behind the microscope. With the same finger, he flips the lever up. A pale, bluelight floods the petri dish. Abilez flicks the light off and then on; first fast and then slow. Each time his finger goes up, the heart cells contract in concert with the light. In a paper to be published Sept. 21 in the Biophysical Journal, lead author Abilez, a postdoctoral scholar and PhD candidate in bioengineering, and a multidisciplinary team from Stanford describe how they have for the first time engineered human heart cells that can be paced with light using a technology called optogenetics. In the near term, say the researchers, the advance will provide new insight intoheart function. In the long term, however, the development could lead to an era of novel, light-based pacemakers and genetically matched tissue patches that replace muscle damaged by a heart attack.

By Bob SullivanWith back-to-school buying just around the corner, smartphones cornering the teen-age market and word circulating that children may be learning to operate cellphones before they learn to tie their shoes, parents are facing an ever more complex decision:

What's the right age to give kids a cellphone?

Below, we'll ask you to share your policy, but first, here's a brief look at what some experts think.

In response to other stories we've run on msnbc.com, plenty of parents say they keep phones out of their kids' hands until they can drive or until they get to college. Perhaps. But study after study tells a different story. Here's one: Research firm IDC says seven out of 10 kids aged 10 to 14 have phones. Here's another: Pew says one out of three 12-year-olds frequently text their friends, while only one out of four frequently talk face to face.

That means the social pressure screws are turning really hard on those three in 10 families that are trying to hold out. Still, giving a kid a phone...