Here's the full text of the email sent by Boston police officer Justin Barrett to Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham in response to her criticism of the arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The Toyota Prius hybrid car has been something of a success in the US market (helped, of course, by various tax and other incentives, such as the ability to use HOV lanes in Virginia), and other manufacturers have introduced or are working on hybrid and fully electric vehicles. The Network World web site has an article by Nick Barber, describing a student project at MIT that aim to develop an all-electric vehicle starting from first principles.

Last week's report on residential construction provided more evidence that housing may be beginning to bottom. The headline evidence, noted by most media and economic pundits, is the rebound in housing starts over the past two months.

With the looming prospect of mass immunization against influenza, it's important to understand how vaccines work. To do this we must have a good understanding of adaptive immune defenses.

I was one of seven Astronauts who stood up in today's EPW senate hearing to deliver an unmistakable message to our senators: "What can the US do in 10 years?" our first banner asked. "Put a man on the moon (check); cut co2 40% (dotted-line-check)" answered our second.

I wish that advocates for conceal carry laws would have the intellectual honesty to look at all the data, not just the studies that support their point of view. Maybe the media should look at some of this research as well, so that a reasonable and well informed debate on this issue could finally occur.

As we can see from this map from the Transportation Department, there is within the Obama administration a vision (and it's one that's broadly echoed by mass-transit advocates in Congress and elsewhere) of regional high-speed metro-systems (Pacific Northwest, California, Texas, Chicago/Midwest, New Orleans, the Raleigh Triangle, and the Northeast Corridor) that will eventually expand into a single, national high speed rail network.

When I read that an impact had been spotted on Jupiter, I figured it was somewhere other than the equator, which would be a bulls-eye. Even Shoemaker-Levy, a huge comet broken into a string of pieces, slammed like a series of machine gun bullets into Jupiter near its south pole. But this one was bigger. That black hole in the side of Jupiter is nearly as big as our whole planet. And nobody saw it coming.

Yesterday delivered a small piece of good news on the budget front. As reported by the Washington Post: The Senate voted Tuesday to kill the nation's premier fighter-jet program, embracing by a 58 to 40 margin the argument of President Obama and his top military advisers that more F-22s are not needed for the nation's defense and would be a costly drag on the Pentagon's budget in an era of small wars and counterinsurgency efforts.

Perhaps the biggest ongoing argument over the Gaza offensive that Israel launched at the start of this year has been willingness of Israel to allow injured Gazans to get treatment. Those who support Israel all know the line by heart; Israel has been happy to let injured civilians pass through the border into Israel and receive treatment in its hospitals. This misses two rather important facts.

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