Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Sunday suggested that Susan G. Komen for the Cure shouldn’t provide grants to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screenings because abortions cause breast cancer, a false claim that has been repeatedly debunked.

The candidate told Fox News host Chris Wallace that he didn’t agree with the Komen Foundation reversing itself last week and making Planned Parenthood eligible for future grants.

“I’ve taken the position as a presidential candidate and someone in Congress that Planned Parenthood funds and does abortions,” Santorum explained. “They’re a private organization they stand up and support what ever they want.”

“I don’t believe that breast cancer research is advanced by funding an organization where you’ve seen ties to cancer and abortion,” he added. “So, I don’t think it’s a particularly healthy way of contributing money to further cause of breast cancer, but that’s for a private organization like Susan B. Komen to make that decision.”

According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the several small flawed studies that suggested a link between abortion and breast cancer have been disproven.

“Since then, better-designed studies have been conducted,” the institute’s website said. “These newer studies examined large numbers of women, collected data before breast cancer was found, and gathered medical history information from medical records rather than simply from self-reports, thereby generating more reliable findings. The newer studies consistently showed no association between induced and spontaneous abortions and breast cancer risk.”

In 2002, the Bush administration temporarily altered NCI’s website to say that scientific evidence supported a possible link between abortion and breast cancer. After an outcry from the scientific community, NCI corrected its website with an accurate fact sheet.

A study released by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) in 2006 found that the Bush administration also used pregnancy resource centers — commonly known as “crisis pregnancy centers” — to falsely inform pregnant teens that the risk of breast cancer increased by 80 percent after an abortion.

“This tactic may be effective in frightening pregnant teenagers and women and discouraging abortion,” the study concluded (PDF). “But it denies the teenagers and women vital health information, prevents them from making an informed decision, and is not an accepted public health practice.”

Watch this video from Fox’s Fox News Sunday, broadcast Feb. 5, 2012.

Arizona State University announced Saturday that it would no longer block the popular online petition website Change.org after receiving a flood of complaints from students and others.

“The university acknowledges and understands the expression of concern from some members of the community who desire access to change.org from university computing resources,” said a statement from the school. “The university has removed the restriction against site access from university computing resources.”

The university blocked the site in December for allegedly sending out unsolicited spam emails, according to the university newspaper State Press.

“ASU began blocking messages from the Change.org server in December after it was discovered as the source of such a spamming action,” ASU spokeswoman Julie Newberg said.

“Although the individual who sent the email may not consider himself a spammer, he acquired a significant number of ASU email addresses which he used to send unsolicited, unwanted email.”

After news that Change.org was blocked began circulating on social media outlets, the group Free Press set up a petition on Friday urging the university to allow students to access the petition site.

“The university needs to stop indiscriminately blocking sites and to find ways to differentiate spam from legitimate and lawful sites,” said Free Press Internet Campaign Director Josh Levy. “This kind of problem likely isn’t limited to ASU. As Internet censorship becomes a growing problem in the United States and abroad, America’s educational institutions should be setting an example by defending the open Internet and the First Amendment.”

Locked Internet image via Shutterstock.com

You’re not allowed to light a cigarette in New York bars, but there’s nothing to stop a bartender from setting your cocktail on fire with a 815 degrees Celsius (1,500 degrees Fahrenheit) poker.

In fact, the red hot rod is just the tip of the mad scientist treatment meted out to drinks at Booker & Dax, a new Manhattan drinking hole that’s taking cocktail trends to extremes.

Dave Arnold, culinary technology director at the French Culinary Institute, has brought molecular gastronomy techniques to the liquid meal, calling on his background in science and art for extra inspiration.

The 30cm (one foot) long poker delivers instant, fierce heat. Liquid nitrogen, at minus 200 degrees Celsius (minus 328 Fahrenheit), chills and produces a lot of weird mist around the glass. A centrifuge and an impressive machine called a rotary evaporator transform ordinary herbs and fruits into pure, clear juices and essences.

Arnold, 40, is widely recognized as one of the leaders of a national revival of the cocktail culture in which old favorites get creative makeovers and the likes of bottled vodka-tonics get tipped down the drain.

Yet Arnold insists that his bar, which opened this month, has only one aim: to serve delicious drinks.

“We don’t have anything on the menu that’s challenging you or pushing out of your comfort zone,” he said. “We’re not mixing flavors that you would think bizarre. The less customers know the better: we don’t want them thinking we’re doing a bunch of gimmicks.”

Maybe so, but Arnold and his acolytes grapple with some eye-popping procedures.

As he speaks, Arnold demonstrates the hot poker technique, whipping something called a French Colombian — Pernod, lemon juice, brown sugar, cinnamon — into flaming froth.

The poker, which heats electrically to a fierce red glow, is Arnold’s own design and, he admits, “one of the most unpredictable” tools in the bar.

Not that the other tools are for amateurs. The carbonation system requires “a little bit of an art,” while liquid nitrogen, although “pretty consistent,” must be watched for potential burns. As for the fragile and expensive, laboratory-style rotary evaporator, Arnold is adamant: “I don’t let anyone else use it.”

Serving on a busy Friday evening, mixologist Claire Needham, 24, said she’d been trained for three weeks on the gizmos, which, if handled wrongly, could give new meaning to the dangers of drinking.

“We have to remain very, very calm, however busy we get. Otherwise it’s dangerous,” she said. “Everyone’s being very careful, very smart. We’ve had a lot of cautionary tales told to us.”

Apart from the fire-and-ice challenges, bartenders at Booker & Dax have to memorize the contents of all the little pharmacist-style bottles containing juices clarified downstairs in the big centrifuge machine. The bottles are not labeled and from time to time Needham sniffed at one, or tasted a drop, to double check.

Sother Teague, another barman, said he likes “all these toys we’re playing with.” But although “people want to see the spectacle, at the end it’s not worth the drink if it’s not worth drinking.”

Watching intently from his stool, customer Bob Ciabocchi, a 57-year-old executive recruiter, asked Teague to prepare him a Manhattan, a classic whisky, vermouth and bitters drink.

“I’m a true connoisseur of cocktails,” Ciabocchi warned. “I’m a lifelong Manhattan drinker. I can’t tell you how many I’ve sent back in New York. It can take me five minutes to order one: if the cherry is wrong I send it back; if the colors are wrong, I’m sending it back.”

Then, taking his liquid-nitrogen cooled glass, Ciabocchi sipped, and said, simply: “Wow.”

Arnold’s wizardry is cutting-edge, but to some extent cocktail bars everywhere are tooling up to compete in a sphere that wants to be taken almost as seriously as cuisine.

Derek Brown, who owns the Columbia Room in Washington, DC, and other bars, and writes about drink for The Atlantic, said Booker & Dax are “trailblazers.” However, technology is always advancing and becoming more accessible, especially for bars that are in restaurants.

“Bar tending today, it’s successfully grown into this branch of the culinary arts, and the knowledge you need to have as a barman is pretty immense,” he said.

There’s no telling where the bartender of the future will go — or if there will even be bartenders, Brown said. One of the weirder experiments has been the use of ultrasound machines, a device usually found in hospitals, to age drinks like wine or whiskey.

“It’s a little bit of an arms race,” Brown said. “What do you next?”

In reality, there will always be room for that mythical, white-jacketed server pouring the drinks our grandfathers knew, cocktail aficionados say.

“I do think having an understanding of the classics — drinks like a Manhattan, a Negroni, an Old Fashioned — is important, no matter what your ultimate approach is to making drinks,” said Karen Foley at Imbibe, one of many publications devoted to drink.

“There’s a reason why those cocktails are so enduring,” she said. “They’re perfect in their simplicity, they’re accessible and, made well, they’ll always make people happy.”

A 100-year-old British Indian man who claims to be the world’s oldest marathoner was all smiles after completing a 10-kilometre run at the Hong Kong marathon on Sunday.

Born in 1911 and affectionately nicknamed the “Turbaned Torpedo”, Fauja Singh finished the race in just over one hour and 34 minutes, organisers told AFP, raising HK$200,000 ($25,800) for the charity Seeing Is Believing.

“The weather was very pleasant, I enjoyed the race very much,” he was quoted by local media as saying, as he crossed the finishing line, arms in the air.

The centenarian attributed his physical fitness to his healthy lifestyle, including abstaining from smoking and alcohol and to following a vegetarian diet, according to local reports.

The Guinness World Records has reportedly refused to accept him as the world’s oldest marathon runner because he could not provide them with a birth certificate.

Singh claimed to be the first centenarian to complete a marathon after finishing the Toronto Waterfront event last October.

A record number of 70,000 runners took part in this year’s Hong Kong marathon, which includes the full 42-kilometre marathon race, a half marathon and a 10 kilometre race.

A 26-year-old male runner collapsed after crossing the finishing line of the half-marathon race, and was certified dead after being sent to hospital.

Astrid Silva came to the United States aged four with her parents from Mexico in search of “the American dream.” She’s 23 now and fears being deported every day.

She is one reason Republicans are struggling to woo Latinos — key voters in heavily Hispanic states like Nevada, Colorado and Arizona — despite the economic downturn, experts say.

Ahead of Saturday’s caucuses in Nevada, Republicans trumpeted how the economic crisis — which has hit the western state worst than most — has convinced Latinos to abandon President Barack Obama’s Democrats.

But one expert said the reality is that, even if Republicans have made some progress in “outreach” into the Latino community, the majority of Hispanics will still vote Democrat come the November presidential elections.

“All the numbers show that they don’t love Obama. But they like him a lot better than they do any of the Republican candidates here,” said David Damore, associate professor of politics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“The most important issue for Latino voters is immigration and you’ve already had Mitt Romney come out and say he’d veto the DREAM Act… and that sort of ends the conversation really quickly,” he told AFP.

That’s where Silva comes in — she was among a small group of young Latinos who staged a protest outside Republican frontrunner Romney’s Las Vegas campaign headquarters to protest his stance on the DREAM Act.

The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which Obama supports, would allow 55,000 youngsters who came to the United States illegally to go to university after completing high school here.

Silva, whose mother was born in the Mexican state of Veracruz but who has lived in Las Vegas for 19 or her 23 years, is part of those undocumented masses left in limbo — but who would be out if a president Romney vetoed the Act.

“At this moment I’m up for deportation at any moment. If they were to come right now and arrest us. At any moment it’s a risk, but there would be a bigger risk if he were to veto it,” she said.

“We came for the American dream,” she said, explaining how her father is still fighting against deportation, and how she does “odd jobs” to cover the bills, while hoping that one day she will be able to graduate from college.

Speaking in the parking lot outside Romney’s suburban campaign offices with the red desert mountains surrounding Las Vegas looming in the distance, she added: “Even if I did graduate … I could never apply for a job.”

Rival presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has sharply criticized Romney’s plan for illegal immigrations to go back to their countries of origin voluntarily and re-apply for legal entry — a move which could break up families here.

Republicans did “recognize that there are human beings involved,” Gingrich told the select group of 40 or so Latinos at a Vegas restaurant.

But he said a key part of the immigration problem was the complexity of getting visas.

“In many places it’s easier to come here illegally than it is to go to the State Dept to try to get a visa,” he said, saying if elected he would launch a guest worker program.

“I would have American Express, Visa or Mastercard run it, because they know how to run card programs with minimum fraud, and the federal government’s just a failure,” he said.

One member of his audience was physician Annette Teijeiro, who is herself running for a state Senate seat as a Republican. She said more Latinos are realizing that the Republican Party is more for them.

In the past, “Hispanics were somewhat misled… as to what party was representing them the best… Now as they get their wake up call (they are) starting to realize that the Republican Party has more solutions.”

The Nevada State Democratic Party does not agree, said communications director Zach Hudson.

“When Nevada Latinos go to the polls this November they will have a clear choice between President Obama’s commitment to creating jobs and passing comprehensive immigration reform and the DREAM Act,” he said.

The alternative was “a Republican like Mitt Romney who continues to insult the Hispanic community by not only saying he’d veto the DREAM Act as President, but actually derides it as a ‘handout.’”

Latinos constitute 26 percent of Nevada’s population and will comprise 15 percent of its registered voters in November, according to immigration reform group America’s Voice.

“If the past two election cycles… are any guide, the Latino vote and the issue of immigration reform will once again prove decisive in the 2012 general election,” it said.

Four years ago 76 percent of Nevada’s Latino voters backed Obama, helping him regain the swing state from the Republicans, who had taken it in 2000 and 2004.

“Mitt Romney has already seared his image as an anti-immigrant candidate into the minds of Latino voters,” said America’s Voice.

“Romney’s vow to veto the DREAM Act and his continued calls for self-deportation of undocumented immigrants are reverberating in the Latino community — and will continue through November.”

The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) is emerging as a hot issue in preparations for June’s Rio conference, styled as a once-in-a-generation chance to restore a sick planet to good health.

The US is fighting a proposal, backed according to France by least 100 countries, for transforming UNEP from a poorly noticed, second-string unit into a planetary super-agency.

Environmentalists have long complained that Nairobi-based UNEP, set up in 1972 as an office of the UN and with a membership of only 58 nations, lacks clout to deal with the globe’s worsening ills.

These range from climate change, water stress and over-fishing to species loss, deforestation and ozone-layer depletion.

But the environmental mess also coincides with the crisis of capitalism, which greens say is blind to the cost for Nature in its relentless quest for growth.

The fateful intertwining of these problems points to a unique chance of a solution at the June 20-22 “Rio+20″ conference, they argue.

With possibly scores of leaders in attendance, the 20-year follow-up to the famous Earth Summit has the declared aim of making growth both greener and sustainable.

“The new capitalism which emerges from the crisis has to be environmental, or it won’t be new,” French Ecology Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet said on Tuesday.

The key vehicle would be UNEP, which according to the vaguely-worded French proposal would be changed into the World Environment Organisation.

It would become the UN’s 16th “specialised” agency alongside the World Health Organisation (WHO), Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and so on.

To the outsider, this may sound at best like a bit of terminological tinkering — at worst, just another bureaucracy-breeding machine.

Experts, though, say status change could be surprisingly far-reaching.

Specialised UN agencies have high degrees of autonomy, enabling them to set agendas, frame international norms, stir up interest in dormant issues and sometimes poke their noses into areas of national sovereignty.

At its most ambitious, a World Environment Organisation would embrace not just the member-states which fund it but also business, green and social groups, becoming a very loud voice indeed.

It could intrude into sensitive areas such as trans-border use of water resources, fishery quotas and habitat use — and even monitor environmental standards for trade in goods and services.

According to Kosciusko-Morizet’s ministry, more than 30 European countries back the French proposal, along with 54 countries in Africa, plus Thailand, Malaysia, Nepal, Chile, Uruguay and others.

But in a US presidential election year where green issues — especially foreign ones — are easily trumped by domestic politics, Washington has set down a marker.

“We do not believe that international efforts on the environment and sustainable development would be improved by creating a new specialised agency on the environment,” a State Department official told AFP.

“We prefer to work towards a strengthened role for UNEP, as well as better coordination across the UN system in integrating environment into development, and in working towards sustainable development.”

Canada, like the US, says it prefers a smarter, better-connected UNEP.

Tensions over this are now emerging at preparatory talks on the “zero draft,” a document that will be finessed into June’s all-important summit communique.

“The Americans have come out guns blazing,” said Farooq Ullah, head of policy and advocacy at a London-based NGO called Stakeholder Forum.

“The risk, of course, is not necessarily that they would veto it (a super-UNEP) but that they would pull out their funding for it. A big part of UNEP’s funding comes from the Americans, so it would be a major blow,” he stressed.

Could the dispute rip Rio apart? Or could it doom it to dismal compromise, as many view the outcome of 2009 Copenhagen climate summit?

“The biggest risk with these things that have a lot of interest is that if you push too far too quickly and it becomes too contentious, it will just be negotiated out,” warned Ullah.

Lucien Chabason of a French thinktank, the Institute of Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI), said the outcome did not have to be dramatic.

“One can imagine a mixture of the two ideas, in which Rio adopts a position in principle to beef up UNEP and launch a negotiation process,” he said.

Grappling with a decisive loss to Mitt Romney in the GOP’s Nevada Caucus last night, Newt Gingrich unleashed one of his sharpest attacks ever on the front-runner. “If you can’t tell the truth as a candidate for president, how can the country possibly expect you to lead as president?” Gingrich asked a Vegas ballroom full of reporters, referring to Romney’s performance in the most recent debate, in Jacksonville on January 26th. He added: “I have never seen a person running for president be that untruthful.”

Romney surprised nobody with his victory in Nevada; he was holding a pair of aces: a strong on-the-ground operation and the fact that about a quarter of Nevada caucus voters share his Mormon faith. Still, Nevada was a painful bust for Gingrich. Coming after a loss in Florida, his battle with Texas Congressman Ron Paul for a distant second establishes a pattern of declining support for his campaign and hurts his status as standard bearer for the GOP’s conservative base.

In a state where a housing and tourism slump is fueling one of the nation’s highest rates of unemployment, Romney bested his opponents despite sounding like an out-of-touch rich guy for most of the week. On Wednesday, he’d told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien that he was “not concerned about the very poor” because “there is a safety net there.” The next day, billionaire Donald Trump didn’t much help things when he popped into (where else?) a Trump-branded casino to endorse the former governor. Still, it was Gingrich who emerged from the affair looking clueless. His campaign staff had misled reporters at the New York Times and other major outlets into reporting that the Trump endorsement would go Newt’s way, only to see Trump play a different card.

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Watch live as the remaining candidates in the GOP primary react to former Governor Mitt Romney’s (R-MA) decisive Nevada caucus win, courtesy of MSNBC:

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Former governor Mitt Romney (R-MA) scored his most decisive win to date in the Nevada Republican caucus tonight, winning the race by more than 15 percent and leaving former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) to battle for second place again with former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) again a distant fourth.

But despite Paul’s expectation that the caucus format would benefit his campaign, Paul looked to place a significant distance behind Gingrich.

Romney took the stage just before 10:40 ET, introduced again by his wife, Ann, to thank supporters and slam Obama, reminding voters that Obama encouraged people to avoid coming to Nevada for conventions and meetings. Romney then took aim at Friday’s encouraging unemployment statistics, suggesting that the “real” unemployment rate was closer to 15 percent, a nod to the underemployment rate, which is down from 17.2 percent in January 2010.

In what is now a frequent refrain, Romney told his audience, “This president began his presidency by apologizing for America, now he should apologize to America” adding that the president should stop making excuses for the ongoing economic crisis. “Our vision for the future could not be more different from his,” Romney said, promising to cut government, reduce the government’s share of the total economy and balance the federal budget without raising taxes. In another statement common to his speeches, Romney said that Obama “demonizes and denigrates” entrepreneurs that his Administration would promote. And, of course, he promised to repeal “Obamacare” and rescind the recent Obama Administration ruling that forces employer insurance to provide coverage for birth control, which has been under fire from religious employers and religious groups — a point Romney made in his Tuesday night speech after the Florida primary. He then asked people to remember that their ancestors came to American “for the pursuit of happiness, not the pursuit of hand-outs,” and asked them to vote for him in November, making this one of his shortest speeches to date.

Gingrich took his small, press conference stage at the Venetian alone at 11:17 ET, promising the assembled reporters to go to Republican National Convention in Tampa in August as a candidate for President to honor his donors. He then slammed Romney for his comments earlier this week about the poor, saying that he wanted to “turn the social safety net into a trampoline.” He then followed it by saying that he thought indexing the minimum wage to inflation was a terrible idea which would “kill jobs and stop access for young people.” Following that, he called Romney a “Massachusetts moderate” that didn’t represent the views of the GOP.

He then said, “Tonight he will probably do reasonably well, this is a heaving Mormon state,” ignoring the fact that the race had already been called for Romney and indicating that he didn’t yet know whether he or Paul had taken second place. He said he expected to be “at parity” with Romney after the Texas primary on April 4, almost a month after Super Tuesday.

In more odd answers, Gingrich called Romney a “Soros-backed” candidate and dismissed reports that his largest backer, Sheldon Adelson — whose money reportedly paid for the anti-Romney documentary that solidified his win in South Carolina — would eventually back Romney after Gingrich backed out. Adelson, Romney said, was solely interested in a nuclear Iran and its existential threat to Israel and Adelson’s statements about Romney as unimportant.

“I’m not going to defend the outcome in a state where I was outspent 5-to-1,” Gingrich told another reporter when he was asked whether it was possible that voters just weren’t “buying what you’re selling.” Gingrich stated that “I don’t think the American people will support a campaign that suppresses turn-out,” he said, and stated that he expected to be atop Gallup polls again by April. But despite saying that he didn’t like negative campaigning and felt he did better while the campaign was positive, Gingrich refused to “unilaterally disarm” and stop his negative campaigning against Romney. Instead, he promised to bring “new tactics” to the next debate with Romney to counter what Gingrich termed his blatant lies.

[This post was updated after results came in.]

[Image via Gage Skidmore on Flickr, Creative Commons licensed]