State and National News

A bill passed by the Senate yesterday would help U.S. Postal Service keep post offices around the country open, NPR reports.

The Postal Service is not pleased.

The key issue: The Postal Service, which loses $25 million every single day, wants to save money by closing hundreds or thousands of post offices and shifting services to places like grocery stores.

More than 90 years ago, on April 29, 1922, Jean-Baptiste "Toots" Thielemans was born in Brussels. An organization formed to celebrate his landmark birthday, TOOTS90 is presenting a series of eight concerts, featuring Thielemans' quartet and special guests Kenny Werner on piano and Oscar Castro-Neves and Philip Catherine on guitar. All take place in Belgium, tracing a route from Antwerp to Gent, Brussels, Hasselt, Brugge, Liège and Dinant.

There's no language gene.

There's no innate language organ or module in the human brain dedicated to the production of grammatical language.

There are no meaningful human universals when it comes to how people construct sentences to communicate with each other. Across the languages of the world (estimated to number 6,000-8,000), nouns, verbs, and objects are arranged in sentences in different ways as people express their thoughts. The powerful force behind this variability is culture.

Eat right and exercise is about as basic as medical advice gets.

Follow it, and you'll benefit from better overall fitness, improved quality of life, and a reduced risk for chronic conditions, such as heart disease and diabetes.

The American Cancer Society now says the evidence has piled up that diet and exercise can help cancer survivors manage, beat, and stay free of their disease, too.

John Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com.

While conceding that "I failed" because some of his News Corp. tabloids in the U.K. were guilty of hacking into the phones of murder victims, celebrities and politicians, media mogul Rupert Murdoch also testified today that lower-level executives were the ones behind a "cover-up" that kept him from knowing about what had happened.