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Russia's Vladimir Putin took to the Internet to present the platform he would persue should he be elected president on March 4.

It was a bold platform, considering that it would walk back policies he helped institute. As The Telegraph puts it, it was Putin remaking himself into a "liberal reformer."

The U.S. military says it's investigating a video that appears to show Marines desecrating the corpses of Taliban fighters killed in Afghanistan. Regardless of those findings, the outrage in the Islamic world is likely to be severe, as with other disturbing images that have surfaced during U.S. wars in Muslim countries over the past decade.

The already shaky case for the anti-aging powers of resveratrol, a substance in red wine, is looking a little shakier.

After a three-year investigation, the University of Connecticut Health Center has told 11 scientific journals that studies they published by resveratrol researcher Dipak K. Das may not be trustworthy.

A new study in the journal Health Affairs estimates that a penny-per-ounce tax on soft drinks and other sugary beverages could prevent about 240,000 cases of diabetes, 8,000 strokes, and 26,000 premature deaths per year.

Yes, death by soda.

So the analysis got me thinking: Our behavior is hard to predict, right? I know mine is.

Scientists are facing a riddle. For two years, researchers at Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama have been studying the diets of Tiger Sharks in the Gulf of Mexico and they found that the sharks not only eat sea creatures, but also make a habit of eating land birds. Yep that's right woodpeckers, catbirds, kingbirds and swallows have all been found in their bellies.

Today, World Cafe kicks off the new series Latin Roots, with Latin music expert Aaron Luis Levinson. Levinson visits host David Dye in WXPN's studios to share his take on all things salsa: the music, the beat and the culture. Levinson, a member of the Latin Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, is a Grammy-winning producer, musician, composer and owner of Range Recording Studios in Ardmore, Penn.

So you know how on Monday the federal government reported that the $2.6 trillion the nation spent on health care in 2010 translated into just over $8,400 per person?

Well, a different study just released by a separate federal agency shows that second number doesn't actually mean very much.

When someone dies, the eulogies roll in, the higher the stature of the departed, the more stately the praise.

And that's certainly somewhat true for Bill Janklow, South Dakota's former congressman and governor who died Thursday from his brain cancer.

An Alabama judge signed an order that declares Natalee Holloway, the teenager who went missing in Aruba while on a high school graduation trip, legally dead. Holloway was last seen in 2005.

The AP reports:

In Port-au-Prince, a radio blares from speakers in front of a guy selling pirated CDs on Delmas, a main street in the Haitian capital. Women sitting along the side of the road hawk everything from vegetables to cigarettes to pharmaceuticals. Overloaded tap-taps, the pickup trucks that serve as the main form of public transportation here, chug up the hill.

The scene is one that's remarkable for being unremarkable: Though it occurred this week, it could just as easily have been Port-au-Prince two years ago, before a massive earthquake destroyed much of the capital.

Earlier this month, a group Chinese workers at Foxxconn spent two days on the roof of one of the companies factories in central China. As The Telegraph reported, the workers were threatening to commit suicide to protest their working conditions.

Earlier this week, we were surprised to learn that food manufacturers increasingly X-ray foods to screen for foreign objects that can break a tooth. That sounds like a good idea.

But the notion of X-rayed food also sparked a lively debate in The Salt's comments section on whether this poses a health threat. After all, we do know that some X-rays can damage DNA in the human body. So what does radiation mean for food?

An investigating officer has recommended that Army private Bradley Manning face court martial on multiple criminal charges related to the downloading of nearly 1 million war logs and secret diplomatic cables. Manning is accused of taking the files and them passing them on to WikiLeaks.

If he does face a court martial and is convicted, he could be sentenced to life in prison.

I admit I was biased against the Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady. Not, you understand, against Thatcher and her Tory politics. Against Meryl Streep and her accents. Which are great, no doubt. But I went in resolved not to fall for her pyrotechnics yet again. I wanted realism.

Well, it didn't take long to realize that I was watching not only one of the greatest impersonations I'd ever seen — but one that was also emotionally real.

More than half a million people are still living in tent camps in Haiti, and tons of quake rubble has yet to be cleared away. But two years after a massive earthquake leveled Haiti's capital and killed hundreds of thousands of people, optimism is beginning to bloom. The nation remains fragile, but reconstruction is picking up and the new government of President Michel Martelly has created a sense of relative stability.

Melissa Block talks to David Walton of the nonprofit group Partners in Health about the two-year anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti.

For the first time, organizations can apply for an Internet address all their own, marking the start of a new era in the growth of the Internet.

For example, ".com" and ".org" could be replaced by ".starbucks" or ".newyork."

The expansion was planned by the one organization empowered to regulate the global Internet — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN.

Debate over the new policy has highlighted the key issue of who, if anyone, should control the Internet.

A bell tolled Thursday at the Old South Meeting House in Boston for the first time since 1876. The meeting house was a Puritan gathering place where the Boston Tea Party was planned. Ben Franklin was baptized there. Thursday Bostonians heard a historic new bell — one cast by silversmith Paul Revere.

Politically, climate change is off this year's campaign agenda. Jobs, the economy and social issues are front and center.

But scientists are working as hard as ever to figure out how much the Earth is warming and what to do about it. Some now say it's time for a new strategy, one that gets faster results.

Talk to Durwood Zaelke, for example. Zaelke is a grizzled veteran of the climate wars: He was in Kyoto in 1997 when the world's nations drafted a treaty promising to curb warming, and he has watched that promise fizzle while the planet's temperature continues to rise.