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The New York Times has a consistent position on art that offends religions. 1. Mohammed cartoons will not appear 2. Works mocking Christianity and Judaism will Briefly New York Times editor Dean Baquet pretended after the Hebdo and Garland attacks that there was some consistent policy about not offending religious people. Then it began once again featuring materials that offend Catholics. After a lot of squirming, the New York Times offered these criteria A. It's impossible not to offend anyone, so we won't offend Muslims, but we will offend Catholics "There's no simple, unwavering formula we can apply in situations...

FULL TITLE: Black Chamber of Commerce: EPA Clean Air Plan Will Increase Black Poverty 23%, Strip 7,000,000 Black Jobs (CNSNews.com) - A study commissioned by the National Black Chamber of Commerce, which represents 2.1 million black-owned businesses in the United States, found that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Power Plan would increase black poverty by 23 percent and cause the loss of 7 million jobs for black Americans by 2035. The study also found that the EPA' plan would increase Hispanic poverty by 26 percent and cause the loss of 12 million jobs for Hispanic Americans by 2035. The...

Despite the economic effects of the oil slump, Houston is still among the top metropolitan areas to find a job, a new report says. The Bayou City was second only to Provo, Utah, according to new data compiled by Career Builder and summarized by Forbes. The list ranks the largest 150 U.S. metros based on multiple factors, including unemployment rates, job listings growth and the amount of high-paying new jobs. Raleigh, North Carolina; San Jose, California; and Salt Lake City, Utah, round out the top five. Two other Texas metros — McAllen at No. 6 and Austin at No. 9...

It’s official: Hispanics are now the largest ethnic group in California. About 15 million Hispanics lived in California on July 1, 2014, compared to roughly 14.9 million non-Hispanic whites, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates released late last week. The California Department of Finance predicted in 2013 that Hispanics would outnumber whites in 2014; the census figures confirm that prediction.

(Reuters) Vladimir Putin with Jose Maria Aznar, then Spain's prime minister, at Moncloa Palace on June 13, 2000. One of Russia's largest organized-crime syndicates allegedly operated out of Spain for more than a decade with the help of close allies of President Vladimir Putin, then the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Bloomberg reports. Prosecutors in Madrid have filed a 488-page petition to charge 27 people with money laundering and fraud in connection to the St. Petersburg-based Tambov crime syndicate's setting up shop in Spain in 1996. Vladislav Reznik, now the deputy head of the finance committee in Russia's lower house...

Rich countries are very, very far from raising the billions they promised to help poor countries fight climate change, jeopardising the prospects of reaching a global warming deal at Paris, the world’s rising economies warned. As a key United Nations meeting got underway, Brazil, China, India and South Africa said they were disappointed in rich countries’ failure to make good on a promise six years ago to mobilise $100bn a year by 2020 for climate finance. The funds, intended to help developing countries cut their greenhouse gas emissions and prepare for sea-level rises, extreme weather and other consequences of climate...

Last week, Pope Francis released his controversial environmental Encyclical, Praised Be, to the public. It is not simply a matter of global warming endangering the planet, he writes. The Pope has a comprehensively dark vision of the world. He writes that The Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filthÂ…beautiful landscapes are now covered with rubbishÂ…. Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years.In other words, the Industrial Revolution is to blame for covering the planet in rubbish. But if itÂ’s...

Multnomah County has the state's highest percentage of global warming believers, according to new figures from Yale University. According to the university's national climate change opinions map, 74 percent of residents believe global warming is happening, while 13 percent don't buy it. The newly released figures are based on a complex statistical analysis of public perceptions about climate change in every state, congressional district and county across the country. Washington, D.C. residents led the nation in climate change affirmation, with 81 percent of residents. Floridians' title as the nation's biggest climate change deniers. Curious what your neighbors think about global...

Sen. Chuck Schumer outlined a path Tuesday for Hillary Clinton to enact a carbon tax if the Democrats prevail in the 2016 elections. Schumer said that a Clinton presidency and the return of his party to the Senate majority in 2017 could pave the way for lawmakers to enact a carbon tax to help fund the government. The mere suggestion of a new fee on the emissions blamed for climate change, however, could become a political headache for Clinton and other Democrats, and it’s routinely dismissed by Republicans. Schumer also vowed that Democrats would successfully defend President Barack Obama’s landmark...

A Dutch court has ordered the government to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25% by 2020, in a case environmentalists hope will set a precedent for other countries. Campaigners brought the case on behalf of almost 900 Dutch citizens. They argued the government had a legal obligation to protect its citizens from the dangers of climate change. Jasper Teulings from Greenpeace called it a "landmark case". "It shifts the whole debate. Other cases are being brought in Belgium, the Philippines. This is the start of a wave of climate litigation."

Climate experts warn the amount of light and warmth released by the sun is nosediving to levels "not seen for centuries". They fear a repeat of the so-called 'Maunder Minimum' which triggered Arctic winter whiteouts and led to the River Thames freezing 300 years ago. The Met Office-led study warns although the effect will be offset by recent global warming, Britain faces years of unusually cold winters. A spokesman said: "A return to low solar activity not seen for centuries could increase the chances of cold winters in Europe and eastern parts of the United States but wouldn't halt global...

Pope Francis’s aversion to air conditioning may be red hot, but he himself is comfortably cool. In his encyclical Laudato Si’, published today, the pope lambasts wasteful consumerism and unchecked human economic activity as a root of climate change, singling out one product in particular for censure: the air conditioner. “A simple example [of harmful habits of consumption] is the increasing use and power of air-conditioning,” Francis writes. “The markets, which immediately benefit from sales, stimulate ever greater demand. An outsider looking at our world would be amazed at such behavior, which at times appears self-destructive.” But ironically, Francis probably...

Since my buddy Chris Ferrara has, perhaps before anyone else in the English speaking world, done a thorough examination of the pope’s environment encyclical, “Laudato Si,” I will confine myself here to some observations of a different sort and to proposing a few questions for consideration – to talking around it, so to speak. A great many people, long before the document was issued yesterday, have been asking whether it should have been written at all. Is this appropriate for a pope? Why was it necessary? Why, of all the possible topics, did Pope Francis choose this one? Has he...

Last week was a hard one to fully process for adult-ADD-addled news junkie like me. A momentous and arguably uplifting event -- Pope Francis' encyclical on climate change, a powerful document that folks may still be talking about in the year 2525, if Man (and Woman) are still alive -- was drowned out, at least in this country, by by the sound of gunfire and the manifestation of raw hate that occurred in Charleston. (And who exactly was Rachel Dolezal again?) The tragedy of Charleston and its "Mother Bethel" church absolutely needs to stay on the front burner of the...

One of the hottest areas of climate research these days is on the potential connections between human emissions, global warming, and extreme weather. Will global warming make extreme weather more common or less common? More severe or less severe? New research, just published today in Nature Climate Change helps to answer that question by approaching the problem in a novel way. In short yes, human emissions of greenhouse gases have made certain particular weather events more severe. In summary, human warming affects weather in two ways. It changes the odds that any given extreme event will occur. But more importantly...

The Cardinal couldn't have been more polite, but it didn't take much reading between the lines to get what he was asserting: that when it comes to the encyclical on the environment, Rush Limbaugh doesn't understand what the Pope was saying. On today's Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace played a clip of Rush saying that the encyclical "is suggesting is that everyone should vote for the Democrat party. How in the hell else do you interpret it when the Pope sounds like Al Gore on global warming and climate change?" Responded Cardinal Donald Wuerl: "one of the great blessings of...

A quasi-religious movement now has a genuinely religious leader. The pope’s encyclical on the environment is being hailed for its embrace of science, although it is about as scientific as the Catholic hymnal. Pope Francis writes that Sister Earth “now cries out because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her.” Really? Is that what the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says? I’m not Catholic, but I respect the pope’s humility and am moved by his love for the handicapped and his concern...

Before 1878, in a period with increased rate of ablation, a supraglacial lake formed in the centre of the glacier, this lake subsequently became covered by ice and snow. The collapse of the glacier tongue in 1892 finally released the accumulated water, a large cavity 40m in diameter and 20m high containing estimated 20.000 cubic meters water at the glacier terminus remained as testimony. From this lower cavity, an 85m long intraglacial conduit led to the upper cavity (the former lake) with an additional volume of 80.000 cubic meters. [History of Geology: Outburst flood from Glacier de Tete Rousse: A...

For millennia the Catholic Church has consistently opposed unnatural vice. Here is a brief sampling of useful quotes from Saints, Doctors of the Church, Church Fathers and Ecclesiastical Writers who condemn homosexual vice in their writings. Please share this post with all your Catholic friends. 1. Athenagoras of Athens (2nd Century) Athenagoras of Athens was a philosopher who converted to Christianity in the second century. He shows that the pagans, who were totally immoral, did not even refrain from sins against nature: "But though such is our character (Oh! why should I speak of things unfit to be uttered?), the...

Cardinal Juan Sandoval Iniguez, the retired archbishop of Guadalajara, has been made the subject of multiple criminal complaints by homosexual activists following a televised speech in which he denounced the Mexican Supreme Court’s recent declaration nullifying state laws restricting marriage to a man and a woman, according to Mexican media sources. “Anything outside of this divine institution [of marriage] is an attack against it and is an aberration, and cannot be acceptable to a Catholic,” said Sandoval. In response, a coalition of at least twelve homosexual organizations has filed criminal complaints with two government agencies claiming that the cardinal’s words...