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CS Lewis was baptised at St Mark's Church off the Holywood Road in east Belfast and attended it as a child. The old rectory beside it would also have been familiar territory to the author as it was once home to his grandfather, the Rev Thomas Hamilton, who was the first rector at St Mark's. A distinctive lion's head-shaped door knob on the rectory is even believed to have inspired the key character of Aslan ...

Madeleine Sherwood performed Tennessee Williams dramas on stage and screen, and worked with legendary film director Elia Kazan. Her Broadway roles included The Crucible, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Camelot — roles that any actor would envy. However, the Quebec native is perhaps best known for running a convent of nuns in Puerto Rico on television. For three seasons, Sherwood portrayed Reverend Mother Superior Placido on The Flying Nun, the charming, quirky 1960s sitcom that sent Sally Field soaring to a new level of stardom. As reported in The Hollywood Reporter, Sherwood has died at the age of...

Islamisation is banned by the constitution in HungaryApril 25, 2016 7:27 PM At a ceremony on the fifth anniversary of the promulgation of the Fundamental Law, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated that Islamisation is banned by the constitution in Hungary. The Hungarian government cannot support any mass migration movements which could lead to results conflicting with the National Avowal contained within the Fundamental Law. “Neither the legislature nor the government of the day may pursue such a policy within constitutional boundaries”, he said. He said that in drafting the “Schengen 2.0” action plan, the Hungarian government is fulfilling its constitutional...

It should ensure successful mixed marriages with Arabic-speaking kids The Marriage Fund which was created by the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan more than two decades ago to finance local marriages must not be a mere “cashier” as it should work to ensure successful mixed marriages. The remarks by a member of the Federal National Council (FNC), the country’s parliament, coincided with figures showing more than a quarter of the marriages over the past two years were between Emirati men and foreign women. In Abu Dhabi, marriages totalled 3,034 during that period, including 874 mixed-marriages. Marriages totalled...

Chinese President Xi Jinping says that China must be on guard against nefarious religious influences from abroad. His comments over the weekend follow a tightening of religious space that has seen bans on the wearing of veils and beards in the predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang and the removal of church crosses in eastern China. “We must resolutely guard against overseas infiltrations via religious means and prevent ideological infringement by extremists,” Xi said at a Beijing conference on religions attended by top leaders, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. …

Paul Weston CPAC Live Stream March 3, 2016 "Sweden is literally a lost country."

"It's a fun, lively way to retell the story of Passover," Rabbi Nechemia Coopersmith said.There are many Uptown Funk parodies. A website called GeekDad even listed 10 of them. But what didn't get notice (and should!) is a Passover-themed Bruno Mars parody released by the Jerusalem-based Aish.com site, that begins, "Pesach, Four cups cold, Holy Moses, Egyptian gold." Passover begins Friday at sundown. Since the real Uptown Funk was such a hit, Aish.com's Rabbi Nechemia Coopersmith and his colleagues decided to play off the song, Passover-style. "It's a fun, lively way to retell the story of Passover," Coopersmith said in...

As a Latina who married into a Jewish family, I've long lobbied my in-laws to include beans and rice on the Passover menu. The holiday is a time when Jews avoid leavened foods in commemoration of their biblical exodus from Egypt — when they had to flee so fast, they couldn't even let the bread rise. But beans and rice aren't leavened, I've argued, so why not include them in the Seder meal? The answer I've long gotten from my mother-in-law: tradition. You see, like many American Jews, my mother-in-law is of European ancestry, or Ashkenazi. And by tradition, Ashkenazi...

News 18 April 2016: the same day Discover Ministries posted this video about "The Donald", TruNews also posted an audio recording about a prophecy in 2011 that Donald Trump is God's anointed. The Church is divided because it lacks discernment and makes judgments based on personal feelings for a person. But much like Cyrus and Nebuchadnezzar, whom the believers could NOT believe and could NOT accept that God would use, Trump is sent by the Lord to expose the corrupt establishment. God will raise up the leader whom He wills. He is not beholden to the Church's earthly opinion. This...

Norway's minister of migration and integration has sparked outrage after floating in the Mediterranean Sea in an orange survival suit to experience being rescued from a refugee's "perspective." Sylvi Listhaug, a Progress Party member known for her hard-line stance on immigration, travelled to the Greek island of Lesbos to familiarise herself with the rescue work carried out by Norwegian vessel Peter Henry von Koss.

A 22-year-old man tried to commit suicide by slitting his throat at a temple in northwest Delhi's Bharat Nagar on Saturday morning. Police said the man, Shankar Chaudhary, claimed to have been directed by Goddess Kali to make the "sacrifice". Chaudhary, who belongs to Bihar's Gaya district, is a labourer. According to the police, the incident took place around 9.30am, when the temple was packed. The man was immediately taken to a hospital and was said to be out of danger by late evening. "Eyewitnesses said Chaudhary had a coconut in one hand and a knife in the other. He...

All it does is force trans men and women to use bathrooms based on the sex that they were born in, considering that many trans men and women simply look like regular men and women, it does the opposite of the intended effect. It gives the pretext for straight perverted men to pretend to be transgender to enter women's bathrooms while dressing normally. They don't even need to wear a dress to enter the bathroom, they can just look like normal straight men and enter (because many trans men simply look like men) do you realize how ridiculous this law...

Those Saudi connections continued while Bill Clinton was president. As Breitbart News detailed in an exhaustive two-part piece recently, the White House tradition of holding a Muslim Eid dinner began with the Clintons and the events were hosted by Hillary Clinton herself. Hillary Clinton’s closest aide and advisor on Islamic issues, Huma Abedin, was raised in Saudi Arabia and as Breitbart reporting showed, came into Mrs. Clinton’s life midway through the Clinton administration in 1996.

The gates of a school in Malaysia's state of Kelantan, where students have been plauged by "mass hysteria", were closed to reporters on Sunday (April 17) - the day the school was set to reopen - but screams were heard coming from the classrooms. SMK Pengkalan Chepa 2 was shut down for three days last Thursday to allow bomohs, ustaz and Islamic traditional practitioners to rid the place of bad spirits. It does not seem to be working. ... The school administration has conducted a two-hour recital of Quranic verses and held prayers together with the students. It is learnt...

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It is quite tempting to draw parallels between the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders movements in America and the populist movements that have been rocking European politics for many years. There seems indeed to be, on both sides of the Atlantic, a growing discontent about traditional politics and a feeling among ordinary citizens of being betrayed by a complacent and pathetically incompetent Establishment. As a result, we are seeing a swing to both right-wing and left-wing demagogues. The parallel between Trump and the French Far Right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the French National Front and passed it to...

BRISTOL, Conn. — ESPN announced that it has fired network analyst and former Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling following his comments on Facebook about transgender people. In a statement released Wednesday, ESPN said "Curt Schilling has been advised that his conduct was unacceptable and his employment with ESPN has been terminated." This week, Schilling reposted an image of an overweight man wearing a long blond wig and revealing women's clothing. It included the phrase: "Let him in! To the restroom with your daughter or else you're a narrow minded, judgmental, unloving, racist bigot who needs to die!!!" Schilling added...

When Zion Shaver's high school wrestling career ended last month, he hugged his coach as the crowd rose to its feet. It's a moment that could very well be the final scene in a movie someday -- that's how miraculous Shaver's life has been to this point. Shaver was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1997 -- without legs. He had caudal regression syndrome, a condition that affects the development of the lower half of the body. He was given up for adoption as a baby, moving from foster home to foster home, from school to school, and he doesn't like...

Ending the drought in the West will require rain—not too much rain—and smarter ways to collect and store that water. But something else that can keep things moist? Believe it or not: Beavers. According to a story in Water Deeply, a group of ecologists have a plan to help repopulate the Central Coast of California with Castor canadensis, the large beavers which once roamed the state in great numbers. (Not to be confused with their ancestors, giant beavers that were seven feet long.) The idea is that beavers are nature’s hydrologists, engineering the way that water travels through the landscape:

Switzerland has suspended the citizenship process for the family of two teenage Muslim brothers who refused to shake hands with female teachers. The brothers aged 14 and 15 said physical contact with women who were not family members was against their faith. Some Swiss Muslim groups said there was no religious justification for refusing to shake a female teacher's hand and urged the Swiss not to give in to extremist demands. But one Islamic organisation said a handshake between men and women was prohibited.