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A senior Saudi cleric said the Prophet Mohammed's marriage to a nine-year-old girl some 14 centuries ago cannot be used to justify child marriages today, a Saudi newspaper reported Thursday. The comments by Sheikh Abdullah al-Manie, a member of the Council of Senior Ulema (scholars), followed the marriage of a 11-year-old girl to a man 68 years her senior. [...] According to a report last week in Al-Riyadh newspaper, the girl was given in marriage by her father against both her and her mother's wishes. The newspaper reported that the marriage was sealed by a dowry payment and had been...

On "Fox and Friends" this morning, they were talking about T Boone Pickens new ad, which talks about our dependence on oil imported from hostile Arab countries. I The video can be seen here (Ignore the bashing text, and scroll down to the video)

Glenn Beck, in a commercial for hi show this morning, announced he was going to spend an hour with Sarah Palin on his show tonight, 5pm EST.

The status of Mayon Volcano is maintained at Alert Level 4. PHIVOLCS-DOST reiterates that the Extended Danger Zone (EDZ) from the summit of 8-km on the southern sector of the volcano and 7-km on the northern sector should be free from human activity. Areas just outside of this EDZ should prepare for evacuation in the event hazardous eruptions intensify. Active river channels and those perennially identified as lahar prone in the southern sector should also be avoided especially during bad weather conditions or when there is heavy and prolonged rainfall. In addition, Civil Aviation Authorities must advise pilots to avoid...

Part 1Part 2 Summary: Lord Monckton explains what's going on behind the scenes at Copenhagen. The visible show is just show. The real decisions have already been made. The objective is to set up a world government using hundreds of interlocking bureaucracies.

[...] The draft Copenhagen Framework Convention on Climate Change establishes an international oversight body simply called “the government.” As the Convention draft states: “The government will be ruled by the COP [Conference of the Parties],” which will execute “public policies . . . to which the market rules and related dynamics should be subordinate.” Like most big-government schemes, the Copenhagen Convention unleashes new agencies, panels, and other bureaucracies bearing such acronyms as EBFTA, TPRDA, TPRDM, and UNFCCC. The treaty even invokes “the NAMAs and the NAPAs” — sadly, not a reference to a nearly homonymous ’60s pop group. The Executive...

The United Nations, which has been telling the world that it must cut back dramatically on its greenhouse gas emissions, has finally decided to practice what it preaches. But the world body isn't coming clean on the full costs of its self-greening effort with the member states who foot the bill. After Fox News began asking questions about a pilot project that aims to start that process, the documentation concerning the greening effort abruptly disappeared from the U.N. Web site where it had been stored. [...] The U.N. pilot project has another purpose: it involves a low-profile, grass-roots campaign to...

President Barack Obama ... ... is slated to deliver a prime-time address on Tuesday night in which he'll lay out his plans for the American war in Afghanistan. The address before the United States Military Academy at West Point on Tuesday night will not only be used to announce the immediate order to deploy roughly 30,000 more troops, but the administration will also use the occasion to convey how it intends to turn the fight over to the Kabul government, the New York Times reported. But the administration may also face an unforeseen enemy as it lays out its long-awaited...

Hardcover Nonfiction Top 5 at a Glance1. GOING ROGUE, by Sarah Palin2. OPEN, by Andre Agassi3. HAVE A LITTLE FAITH, by Mitch Albom4. ARGUING WITH IDIOTS, written and edited by Glenn Beck, Kevin Balfe and others5. A SIMPLE CHRISTMAS, by Mike Huckabee

Like the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal, this is the gift that goes on giving. It won’t, unfortunately, derail Copenhagen (too many vested interests involved) or cause any of our many political parties to start talking sense on “Climate change”. But what it does demonstrate is the growing level of public scepticism towards Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. That’s why, for example, this story is the single most read item on today’s Telegraph website. [...] But in the case of “Climate Change”, the MSM has been caught with its trousers down. The reason it has been so ill-equipped to report...

Hundreds of private e-mails and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.

Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Republican voters say former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin shares the values of most GOP voters throughout the nation. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 21% of Republican voters disagree and think the 2008 vice presidential candidate does not share their values. Twenty percent (20%) are undecided. By contrast, 74% of Republicans say their party’s representatives in Congress have lost touch with GOP voters nationwide over the past several years. Only 18% of Republican voters believe their elected officials have done a good job representing the base.

• Party claims biggest ever recruitment night • BBC feared far-right victory in high court • Griffin attacks capital as 'no longer British' The British National party will receive a pre-general election boost in the opinion polls, ministers fear, after more than 8 million people watched the far-right leader Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time on Thursday evening. As the party claimed that a record 3,000 people had registered to join its ranks in the biggest recruitment night in its history, Lord Mandelson warned that Griffin's exposure would produce "a bubble in the opinion polls for the BNP". He reflected...

Investigators have discovered a "Jihadi village" of white German al-Qaeda insurgents, including Muslim converts, in Pakistan's tribal areas close to the Afghan border. The village, in Taliban-controlled Waziristan, is run by the notorious al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which plots raids on Nato forces in Afghanistan. ... Khalid Khawaja, a former Pakistan intelligence officer, who describes himself as a friend of Osama bin Laden, said he was aware of a German contingent and that there were a number of Swedish converts too who had arrived in Pakistan "for Jihad". "The Europeans are there [in Waziristan]. The most dedicated people there...

President Obama's political outfit, Organizing for America, is now trying to entice supporters to show up at health care events in order to make sure tea party protesters are outnumbered. Today, Vice President Joe Biden will be speaking in Michigan, and OFA wants to make sure he can. "Organized mobs across the country are intimidating lawmakers, disrupting events, and silencing discussions about the change our country needs," reads a letter from OFA's Michigan State Director to Obama allies. "The challenges our country faces are simply too great to let these debates be overrun by those angrily shouting down change" You...

(CNN) -- A group of black Philadelphia police officers filed a federal lawsuit Thursday against their department, alleging an online forum geared toward city police is "infested with racist, white supremacist and anti-African-American content." The suit alleges white officers post on and moderate the privately operated site, Domelights.com, both on and off the job. [snip] Ideally, Mildenberg said, his clients would like to see the site shut down. Failing that, they want Philadelphia police officers to be prohibited from posting comments on the site, particularly during working hours. The plaintiffs in the class-action suit also are seeking unspecified financial damages...

[This article in "The Lancet" describes the system under which Obama's health-care system would allocate medical resources] Because none of the currently used systems satisfy all ethical requirements for just allocation, we propose an alternative: the complete lives system. This system incorporates five principles (table 2): youngest-first, prognosis, save the most lives, lottery, and instrumental value.5 As such, it prioritises younger people who have not yet lived a complete life and will be unlikely to do so without aid. Many thinkers have accepted complete lives as the appropriate focus of distributive justice: “individual human lives, rather than individual experiences, [are]...

Two European companies — a major contractor to the U.S. government and a top cell-phone equipment maker — last year installed an electronic surveillance system for Iran that human rights advocates and intelligence experts say can help Iran target dissidents. Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), a joint venture between the Finnish cell-phone giant Nokia and German powerhouse Siemens, delivered what is known as a monitoring center to Irantelecom, Iran's state-owned telephone company.

A place to collect news about today's Iran protest

“I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow. Maybe they will turn violent. Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to get killed. I’m listening to all my favorite music. I even want to dance to a few songs. I always wanted to have very narrow eyebrows. Yes, maybe I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow! There are a few great movie scenes that I also have to see. I should drop by the library, too. It’s worth to read the poems of Forough and Shamloo again. All family pictures have to be reviewed,...