SANTA FE, N.M., June 4 (Reuters) – Wildfires raged across the western United States on Tuesday, including one that saw flames crest a New Mexico peak that is sacred to Native Americans, while firefighters were getting a handle on a blaze in California.

In New Mexico, flames have been spotted atop Redondo Peak, which is sacred to the Jemez Pueblo tribe and other Pueblo Indians, said Jan Bardwell, a spokeswoman for the incident management team handling …

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The announcement last month of a long-awaited breakthrough in stem-cell research — the creation of stem-cell lines from a cloned human embryo — has revived interest in using embryonic stem cells to treat disease. But US regulations mean that many researchers will be watching those efforts from the sidelines.

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH), which distributes the majority of federal funding for stem-cell research, prohibits research on cells taken from embryos created solely …

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Britain faces a “colossal bill” for child poverty with the cost of increasing rates of destitution calculated to reach £35bn a year by 2020, according to a report.

Donald Hirsch, an academic at Loughborough University, says that one-in-four children in Britain – 3.4 million – is forecast to be in relative poverty by the end of the decade.

At those levels about 3% of the country’s GDP would be consumed, as well as the longer term losses …

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Mexico City residents fear the nation’s vicious drug violence has seriously set up shop in town after the mysterious disappearance of 11 young people in broad daylight from a bar in the Zona Rosa district. Relatives believe they were kidnapped, and witnesses have reported seeing a group of armed men enter the bar. More than 26,000 people have gone missing in Mexico over the past six years.

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Connecticut is poised to become the first state to require labeling of genetically engineered food — in theory, at least.

On Monday, the state House of Representatives passed an amended version of a labeling bill that the state Senate approved two weeks ago, and Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) has said he’ll sign it. The bipartisan bill passed unanimously in the Senate and 134-to-3 in the House, with little debate in either chamber — a major contrast …

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Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of the biggest intelligence leak in US history, came face-to-face on Tuesday with the man who turned him in to military authorities.

Adrian Lamo, a former computer hacker, was giving evidence at the court martial of Manning, whom he had never met but whose life he changed dramatically by informing on him to counter-intelligence officers.

Manning’s defence lawyer used the cross-examination of Lamo to explore the soldier’s motivations and state of mind …

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On May 24 the news broke that Detroit’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, was considering whether the city could or should sell off the art collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts(DIA) to help pay back its debts. In the roughly week and a half since then, loud reactions have been heard from many corners of the art world, as well as writers in various media outlets and Michigan politicians themselves. The reactions pretty much range …

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Greek villagers brought their region’s fierce battle against Vancouver-based Eldorado Gold to the firm’s headquarters Friday, marking the end of the activists’ cross-Canada tour opposing open-pit gold mining in their homeland.

Over the past year, a growing conflict in Greece’s Halkidiki region — birthplace of the philosopher Aristotle — has seen thousands of residents blockade roads, raid mine sites, and skirmish with police they say are corrupt and beholden to the company. Another demonstration brought 20,000 …

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Sex worker activists (who want the sex trade to be treated like any other work) and prostitution abolitionists (who want to see it disappear entirely) don’t agree on much, but they do on this: Giving people charged with prostitution a felony also gives them a criminal record that makes other work almost impossible to find, thus trapping them into selling sex in perpetuity.

And now, with eight states handing down felony charges for prostitution — where …

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WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service spent $4.1 million on a single conference in Southern California in 2010, paying top dollar for luxury suites, $27,500 for a keynote speaker and tens of thousands of dollars for gifts to the 2,600 people who attended, according to a newly released Treasury Department audit.

But the audit also shows that such expenditures fell dramatically when the Obama White House clamped down on travel and conferences as budgets tightened …

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