Palin for president?   Poll, 8 Feb 2010: Sarah Palin has been rapturously received by the tea party movement. If she runs for the Republican nomination, could she beat Obama for the presidency in 2012?  

Email Picture
  Gregory Cochran in his home office in Albuquerque, N.M. Cochran, a physicist and genetics buff, and geneticist Henry Harpending have developed a controversial theory that the presence of many lethal genetic diseases affecting the brain among Ashkenazi Jews may also be responsible for increased intelligence in the population. Jewish legacy inscribed on genes? Ashkenazi Jews have a higher rate of some deadly genetic diseases -- and of high IQs. Scientists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending say that's no coincidence. By Karen Kaplan

April 18, 2009

Gregory Cochran has always been drawn to puzzles. This one had been gnawing at him for several years: Why are European Jews prone to so many deadly genetic diseases?

Tay-Sachs disease. Canavan disease. More than a dozen more.

It offended Cochran's sense of logic. Natural selection, the self-taught genetics buff knew, should flush dangerous DNA from the gene pool. Perhaps the mutations causing these diseases had some other, beneficial purpose. But what?

At 3:17 one morning, after a long night searching a database of scientific journals from his disheveled home office in Albuquerque, Cochran fired off an e-mail to his collaborator Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

"I've figured it out, I think," Cochran typed. "Pardon my crazed excitement."

The "faulty" genes, Cochran concluded, make Jews smarter.

That provocative -- some would say inflammatory -- hypothesis has landed Cochran and Harpending in the middle of a charged debate about the link between IQ and DNA.

They have been sneered at by colleagues and excoriated on Internet forums. They have been…

 French arrest cyber-crime suspect for U.S.
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 12, 2010 A founder of one of the world's most sophisticated Internet sites for trafficking stolen credit card information has been arrested by French police based on a U.S. criminal indictment unsealed Wednesday, the U.S. Secret Service and Justice Department announced. Vladislav Anatolieviech Horohorin, 27, was seized at the Nice airport Saturday en route from the Mediterranean principality of Monaco to Moscow, where he resides, authorities said. Horohorin, a citizen of Israel and Ukraine, where he was born, was indicted in November by a federal grand jury in the District on charges of credit card fraud and aggravated identity theft. The Secret Service called Horohorin, known online as "BadB," one of its five most wanted cyber-criminals in the world. He is part of a "network that has been repeatedly linked to nearly every major intrusion of financial information reported" to international authorities, said Michael Merritt, the Secret Service's assistant director for investigations. Horohorin allegedly used online criminal forums such as CarderPlanet, carder.su, and badb.biz to sell stolen credit card data, known as "dumps," and helped create the first and only fully automated site available to buyers worldwide, according to court documents. Badb.biz welcomes visitors with a ribald cartoon portraying Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin awarding gold medals to cyber-criminals. The Web site claims credit for stealing information from 1 million Americans and seeks recruits. "Carders needs you!" says the cartoon, which features "Star Wars" storm troopers, buxom women and cigar-chomping rogues wearing red star-emblazoned caps. "We awaiting you to fight the imperialism of the USA. That way we invest US funds in Russian economy and make it grow bigger." Horohorin allegedly advertised the availability of stolen account information and directed undercover Secret Service purchasers to…

  Obama mania in China Doughbama, Obamao and a sculpture of Obama made of human hair.