Forget gambling, loan-sharking and labor racketeering. New York organized crime figures bilked millions of unsuspecting consumers out of more than $200 million over five years by piggybacking bogus charges on their telephone bills, federal authorities said yesterday.

A previously-unknown software flaw in a widely-deployed General Electric energy management system contributed to the devastating scope of the August 14th northeastern U.S. blackout, industry officials revealed this week.

Smoking damages almost all aspects of sexual, reproductive and child health, reveals a “shocking” new report.

The Bush administration plans to ask the Federal Communications Commission to order Net telephony providers to comply with a law that would permit police to wiretap conversations carried over the Internet.

A group of experts Tuesday called for an overhaul of the FBI’s process of analyzing the chemical makeup of bullets to try to link them to specific crimes, citing, in part, broad overstatements examiners have made in criminal cases that had no scientific basis.

South Korean and U.S. researchers said on Wednesday they had cloned a human embryo and extracted from it sought-after cells called embryonic stem cells.
The experiment, the first published report of cloned human stem cells, means so-called therapeutic cloning is no longer a theory but a reality.