A Muslim Student Challenges Ravi Zacharias

Palestinian TV unveils teddy bear terrorist

by World Net Daily

A new character has been introduced on the Hamas children's television show "Pioneers of Tomorrow," the teddy bear Nassur, who immediately expressed a desire to be an Islamic "holy warrior" and carry a gun.

The brief program excerpt shows the teddy bear, Nassur, lounging on a chair in a room with children's toys.

"I have come today to the Gaza Strip. Saraa, Allah willing, I will be one of the mujahideen, one of the fighters," Nassur states. "I will join the ranks of the 'Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades,' and I will wage jihad among them and carry a gun."

Addressing Saraa, the child hostess of the program, he continues, "Do you know why?"

"Why," says Saraa.

"To defend the children of Palestine," Nassur says.



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Gay Marriage and the End of Christian Civilization

by Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer

Back in the 90s when Fr. Paul Marx, founder of Human Life International, was asked his opinion about the efforts to legalize "same-sex unions" he commented in his usual forthright fashion, "When they do that," he said, "it's the end." He meant "the end" of the Christian civilization whose values used to form the basis of American common life. Fr. Marx, in a prophetic sense, saw rightly that a society cannot survive the perverse manipulation of the very structure of reality that God Himself has revealed to us, one very fundamental element of which is the institution of marriage. When we allow that to be changed-"It's the end."

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Teacher Caught In Sexual Encounter With 16-Year Old Boy

Teacher who advises colleagues on how to avoid
affairs with students caught having sex with
16-year-old boy from her school

by Paul Thompson

A teacher who advises colleagues on how to avoid affairs with students was caught having sex with a teenager in the back of her car.

A partly consumed bottle of vodka was also found in the car with the couple.

Her student lover initially said he was 20 years old - but later admitted he was 16.

Bowles, 31, was employed at his school as a teacher's instructional coach. It was her job to train teachers on how to maintain a professional distance from students.

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Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood

Click here for your free copy of Sharia Law For The Non Muslim...

Reduced jail term for Jordan man who killed daughter

by AFP

AMMAN - A Jordanian was sentenced on Sunday to 10 years in prison for killing his daughter in 2007 over a love affair with a man she later married, a court official told AFP.

An initial sentence of 15 years passed on the 60-year-old father, who was not identified, was immediately cut by a third after the court found "mitigating circumstances," the official said.

The 25-year-old daughter, named by the official only as Hala and identified as a factory worker in Amman, was pregnant when her boyfriend asked her father for her hand in marriage, he said.

"The father agreed after the man gave him a cheque for $28,000. Following the marriage, the father kept pushing his daughter to abort the foetus, but she and her husband refused," the official said.

The father "became enraged, especially after her husband said he wanted to hold a wedding party," he added. "He went to their home when she was alone and shot her six times in the chest, head and stomach."

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Health Care Law Unlikely to Fulfill Promises

Medicare Actuary Doubts Health Care Law

Will Hold Down Costs

by The Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- Two of the central promises of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul law are unlikely to be fulfilled, Medicare's independent economic expert told Congress on Wednesday.

The landmark legislation probably won't hold costs down, and it won't let everybody keep their current health insurance if they like it, Chief Actuary Richard Foster told the House Budget Committee. His office is responsible for independent long-range cost estimates.

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Obama: Not Natural Born

Video: Planned Parenthood Assisting Underage Sex Trafficking

A Black Conservative's View of American History

Girl 'electrocuted' in the name of family honour

by Mohsin Ali

Islamabad: A 22-year old woman was allegedly electrocuted by her relatives on the orders of a ‘panchayat’ — a council of village elders — in the name of family honour in Pakistan’s province of Punjab, a newspaper reported yesterday.

Officials here said Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani had taken notice of the report and told the police to investigate and submit their findings urgently.

According to the report, Saima, of Basti Hakra village in Bahawalpur district, allegedly eloped with a man who worked in Karachi and her parents brought her back on Friday and electrocuted her at night after the ‘panchayat’ ordered her execution. It said police learnt of the incident on Saturday when she was about to be buried.

Saima’s relatives claimed she had committed suicide by taking pesticides, but a post-mortem examination arranged by the police suggested that the young woman was either electrocuted or burnt with boiling water or both, report said.

Global Warming Is Responsible For Extra Snowfall

Rush: If ObamaCare is so great, why all the waivers?

Corporate taxes are self-defeating

by Richard W. Rahn

If you were establishing a new business whose products would be produced and sold worldwide, would you set it up in the United States, which now has the world’s highest corporate-tax rate?

There is a growing realization that the U.S. is at an increasingly competitive disadvantage when it comes to taxing corporations. (See accompanying chart.) Even the Obama administration said it is open to a corporate-tax rate cut, and it is expected that President Obama will propose some rate reduction in his forthcoming State of the Union address.

From a purely economic standpoint, it makes no sense to tax corporations at all, because only people pay taxes, not legal entities. The corporate tax is paid by customers in terms of higher prices, by suppliers in terms of lower volumes of business, by employees in terms of lower wages and by stockholders in terms of lower returns. Many countries used to have higher corporate-tax rates than the United States, but, over time, they realized they were losing business - and jobs - to countries with lower rates; so most countries have been reducing their corporate-tax rates to attract new businesses and global firms.

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Chris Christie Takes On The NJ Police Unions

Estate Tax Often Hits Wrong Target

by Antony Davies

For as long as there have been politicians, politicians have hidden their true purposes by giving laws names that disguise what they actually do. One such law is the estate tax.

It should be called the "death tax." Just as a sales tax is paid when somebody sells you something, and an income tax is triggered when you earn income, the death tax comes when you die. So rather than conjure visions of IRS grave robbing, the politicians named it the estate tax.

When Congress at the end of last year voted to keep the Bush-era tax rates in place through 2012, it made one huge exception: It voted to increase the death tax from zero to 35 percent for the next two years. This will apply to all estates valued at more than $5 million. Beginning in 2013, the rate will increase again, to 55 percent, on estates valued at more than $1 million.

Many estates, however, consist of business assets. And this looms large when business owners make plans.

If, because of the death tax, the Internal Revenue Service will claim more than a third of what you own after you die, you will act differently than you would if there were no estate tax.

You might, for example, purchase life insurance to cover the cost of the tax. Or you might put your assets in a trust. Money that is spent this way, however, is money that isn't being used to grow your business.

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The Economic Stimulus That Wasn't

by IBD Editorials

Economy: Did the hundreds of billions spent to stimulate the economy do the job? And where did all that money go, anyway? A new report crunches the data and finds answers that are devastating for stimulus backers.

Done by Stanford University economists John Cogan and John Taylor and published in Commentary Magazine, the report is blunt in its assessment of President Obama's Keynesian stimulus package: "There was little if any net stimulus."

Worse, say the authors, the White House with its bevy of hip Keynesian-leaning economists should have known it wouldn't work. "The irony," they write, "is that basic economic theory and practical experience predicted this would happen." In other words, the Obama camp should have known better.

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France’s Solar Bubble Pops

by Carl Shockley

Two years ago, the National Assembly adopted one of those solar “feed-in tariffs” — a cute misnomer for a mandate that forces utilities to buy expensive renewable electricity at ridiculously high prices. Flush with visions for the solar future, the legislature set the price at 546 euros per megawatt-hour, almost ten times the market price of 55 euros that customers pay for electricity from other sources. Electricitie de France (EDF), the national utility, was obligated to buy from all comers, covering the costs with a special levy on other customers.

The result was an avalanche of expensive rooftop projects. Whereas EDF had received only 7,100 applications a year for such connections before 2008, by last December it was fielding 3,000 per day. “We didn’t see it coming,” French lawmaker Francois-Michel Gonnog told Bloomberg News. “What is in the pipeline this year is unimaginable. Farmers were being told they could put panels on hangars and get rid of their cows.” The government cut the price support twice last year but was finally forced to impose a three-month suspension in December.

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Rethinking Evaluations When Almost Every Teacher Gets an ‘A’

by Jennifer Gollan

Grade inflation — a term normally associated with students — is widespread among Bay Area teachers, who receive so many favorable evaluations that it is impossible to tell how well they are performing, some educators say.

For the 2009-10 school year, just 40 out of 1,924 teachers — or 2 percent — reviewed by the San Francisco Unified School District received below-satisfactory performance reviews, district records show. Those figures are consistent with recent years: an average of 2.7 percent of teachers evaluated over the past five years received marks of “unsatisfactory” or “needs improvement,” records show. And education scholars say that in a system where all teachers are winners, a crucial gauge of teacher quality is essentially lost.

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Chris Christie invites Illinois companies to move to New Jersey

Unexpected Text Message Blows Up Terrorist

by Andrew Osborn

A "Black Widow" suicide bomber planned a terrorist attack in central Moscow on New Year's Eve but was killed when an unexpected text message set off her bomb too early, according to Russian security sources.

The unnamed woman, who is thought to be part of the same group that struck Moscow's Domodedovo airport on Monday, intended to detonate a suicide belt near Red Square on New Year's Eve in an attack that could have killed hundreds.

Security sources believe a message from her mobile phone operator wishing her a happy new year received just hours before the planned attack triggered her suicide belt, killing her at a safe house.

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CNN: If you don’t want higher taxes, you’re “part of the problem”

The "Good News" of Gay Teens?

by Brent Bozell

If anyone doubts that our entertainment industry and our entertainment media are evangelists for a revolution of sexual immorality (or in their lingo, "progress"), he needs only to read the latest cover story in Entertainment Weekly magazine, a "special report" on gay teen characters on TV, and "How a bold new class of young gay characters on shows like 'Glee' is changing hearts, minds and Hollywood."

Gay "Glee" actor Chris Colfer and his boyfriend on the show, Darren Criss, lovingly put their heads together on the cover. Colfer just won a Golden Globe for his part, which is another way the Hollywood press rewards propagandizing the youth of America. In his acceptance speech, he lamented anyone who would say a discouraging word about teen homosexuality, somehow putting all of those words in mouths of bullies: "Screw that, kids!"

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The Unintended Consequences of Environmentalism

by Larry Bell

Just as everything humans have done in the name of industrial progress hasn't been kind to the environment, it shouldn't be assumed that everything is bad either. Yet the modern-day environmental activist movement tends not to see it that way.

[But the fact is] as civilizations have evolved, so have sanitary conditions. Life expectancies have more than doubled since times when raw sewage was heaped upon the streets of grand Greek and Roman empires and plagues and famines devastated rural populations.

There are big differences between the responsible environmental stewardship ideals that most of us subscribe to, and the moralistic, anti-development, obstructionist activism that exemplifies much of today's environmental zealotry. Often premised on pseudoscientific rationale, publicized through expensive ad campaigns and lawyered up for battle, private and public green activism is asserting ever-expanding, and sometimes hazardous, influences over broad aspects of our lives.

The beginning of the environmental movement is conventionally associated with a virtual flood of reaction to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring after it first appeared in 1963. The book called attention to the thinning of eggshells among certain bird species, which threatened their existence, along with alleged toxic problems throughout the food chain attributed to crop spraying of the pesticide DDT. These claims are clearly credited with a prohibition against DDT use in the U.S. since 1972, and a similar ban in Europe.

The U.S. DDT prohibition was issued in a decision by then EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus following a long hearing on risks and benefits of the material. But after calling 125 witnesses and reviewing 9,362 pages of testimony, Judge Edmund Sweeney, the appointed hearing examiner, had actually concluded that alarm was unwarranted: First, DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man; second, DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man; and third, the use of DDT under the registrations involved does not have a deleterious effect on fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife.

The World Health Organization pleaded at the EPA hearings that DDT was very beneficial in fighting malaria in many parts of the world and should not be banned, stating that withdrawal of its use would be "... a major tragedy in the chapter of human health." Still, due to threatened European trade restrictions against countries that used the chemical, African nations terminated use of the effective mosquito pesticide for malaria control.

Since that time death rates from the disease have increased dramatically, and are now estimated to be between 155,000 and 310,000 annually, according to data collected at 41 African sites from 1997 to 2002. The vast majority of these victims are desperately poor, including large numbers of young children and elderly who are especially vulnerable.

Read More about DDT, Acid Rain, Light Bulbs, Mercury, Nuclear Power, Oil & Gas...

Why I Left Islam - Kamran