An international team led by the University of Toronto and Hebrew University has identified the earliest known evidence of the use of fire by human ancestors. Microscopic traces of wood ash, alongside animal bones and stone tools, were found in a layer dated to one million years ago at the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa.

"The analysis pushes the timing for the human use of fire back by 300,000 years, suggesting that human ancestors as early as Homo erectus may have begun using fire as part of their way of life," said U of T anthropologist Michael Chazan, co-director of the project and director of U of T's Archaeology Centre.

The research will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on April 2.

Wonderwerk is a massive cave located near the edge of the Kalahari where earlier excavations by Peter Beaumont of the McGregor Museum in Kimberley, South Africa, had uncovered an extensive record of human occupation.

Brooklyn, NY - There's recently been an eruption in the United States over the question of birth control. The controversy was initially prompted by the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which mandates that employers provide insurance that covers birth control prescriptions. Earlier this year, right-wingers began to charge that that provision of the ACA threatens religious freedom - the freedom of employers, like universities and hospitals that are run by the Catholic Church, not to be compelled to pay for their employees' birth control. A compromise was quickly reached.

But that didn't stifle the controversy. It has continued to play a major role in the Republican primaries, and states like Arizona are now moving toward legislation that would not only exempt employers from having to provide birth control if they have religious or moral objections to it, but would also allow those employers to interrogate their employees about why they use birth control.

... This whole debate recently led Mike Konczal, a blogger at the Roosevelt Institute, back to Ludwig von Mises' classic 1922 text Socialism. Mises was a pioneering economist of the Austrian School, whose political writings have inspired multiple generations of libertarian activists in the US and elsewhere.

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 6, 2012 (IPS) - In his keynote address to the Global Colloquium of University Presidents at New York's Columbia University last week, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke of the growing power exercised by the world's younger generation in an age of high- speed technology and the information superhighway.

"To unleash the power of young people, we need to partner with them. This is what the United Nations is trying to do," he added, announcing his decision to appoint a U.N. Special Adviser on Youth.

"Some dictators in our world are more afraid of tweets than they are of opposing armies," he declared, pointing out the rising political clout of the younger generation.

The United States, which is holding the rotating presidency of the Security Council for the month of April, also has plans for the participation of youth in the U.N.'s most powerful political body.

At a press conference Tuesday, U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice said the United States wants to return to the theme of youth, and do it in a somewhat different way.

A new billboard unveiled Thursday by the group just blocks away from Mile High Stadium in Denver shows a smiling woman with her arms folded, next to the text: "For many reasons, I prefer... marijuana over alcohol. Does that make me a bad person? RegulateMarijuana.org."

"That's what we want to talk to Coloradans right now," Betty Aldworth, advocacy director for the campaign, told Raw Story on Friday. "We're trying to educate them about why it is that marijuana is safer than alcohol. If you look at every objective study comparing the safety of the two, you'll see that marijuana is clearly safer than alcohol."

"We have never medicated our troops to the extent we are doing now.... And I don't believe the current increase in suicides and homicides in the military is a coincidence," said Bart Billings, a former military psychologist who hosts an annual conference on combat stress.