Competitive Senate Race Shaping Up In North Dakota

The number of US girls with the sexually transmitted disease HPV has dropped by about half even though relatively few youths are getting the vaccine, research showed on Wednesday. Human papillomavirus is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the United States and has been linked to cervical cancer in women as well as in oral, head and neck cancers, particularly among men, health officials said. Since a vaccine against HPV was introduced in 2006, 56 percent fewer girls age 14-19 have become infected, said the research announced by the US Centers for Disease Control and published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. CDC Director Tom Frieden described the findings as a “wake-up call” that the vaccine works and should be more widely used.

World number one Serena Williams, a 16-time Grand Slam singles champion preparing to defend her title at Wimbledon, made an apology on Wednesday for comments in Rolling Stone magazine about a rape case. Williams was quoted regarding a case in Steubenville, Ohio, in a story about her posted online on Tuesday by Rolling Stone. In the case, two players from a high school American football team were convicted last March of raping a drunk 16-year-old girl, with the way other students gossiped about the incident making the attack a topic nationwide. “I’m not blaming the girl, but if you’re a 16-year-old and you’re drunk like that, your parents should teach you — don’t take drinks from other people,” the magazine quoted Williams as saying. “She’s 16, why was she that drunk where she doesn’t remember?

The US government’s secret seizure of Associated Press phone records had a “chilling effect” on newsgathering by the agency and other news organizations, AP’s top executive said Wednesday. “Some longtime trusted sources have become nervous and anxious about talking with us,” AP president and chief executive Gary Pruitt said in a speech to the National Press Club. “In some cases, government employees we once checked in with regularly will no longer speak to us by phone.

Many of the cost-saving measures of the Affordable Care Act were modeled after the Swedish health care system, which has proven itself to be efficient and cost-effective. Robert H. Frank wrote a great NYT column outlining how these provisions could streamline and ultimately reign in our out-of-control health spending here, if it scales properly.

Since its inception back in 2010, critics of the tea party have claimed the conservative movement was motivated wholly or in part by racial animus towards President Barack Obama. Former NAACP chairman Julian Bond, for instance, recently described the tea party as an “admittedly racist” movement “who’ve tried as best they can to harm President Obama in every way they can.” New research published online in Race and Social Problems suggests the racial politics surrounding the tea party movement are highly nuanced.