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Raleigh, N.C. — Attorneys for a Raleigh police officer began making the case Monday that he should be compensated the burns, blisters and emotional damage he suffered when a hot cup of coffee spilled on his lap in January 2012. In the morning, a judge heard motions from representatives of Matthew Kohr, a lieutenant with Raleigh police's special operations division, and Starbucks.

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India will push ahead this week with plans to build a port in southeast Iran, two sources said, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi keen to develop trade ties with Central Asia and prepared to fend off U.S. pressure not to rush into any deals with Iran.

Inclusivity is a word the Roman Catholic Women Priests (RCWP) organization is built upon. The movement began in Germany in 2002 with seven women who were ordained on the Danube River by an Argentine Catholic bishop who cut his ties to Rome and began a church he believed would be more progressive. Those women chose ex-communication by Rome, which, simply put, is like leaving a club you were never allowed to join. So they started their own branch of the club and there are now 208 women priests worldwide, following Saturday's ordination. "We are obedient to the Holy Spirit and...

Eight murders and 12 shootings in the Maryland city that are completely unrelated to anything to do with the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray The Baltimore Sun reports in the week since protests turned into major riots, violent crime unrelated to the riots has gone up. Since last Tuesday, there have been eight murders and 12 shootings in the Maryland city that are completely unrelated to anything to do with the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray. During the same period of time last year, there was one homicide and five shootings.

Men and women think and act differently, and now that’s a government-approved fact. The National Institutes of Mental Health, a federal agency with a budget of just under $1.5 billion, paid for a study to determine if men’s brains and women’s brains are wired differently. They might well have also studied whether men can give birth, or women can father children. This study, while good for the researchers who got to look at nearly 1,000 brain scans of men and women, and write scholarly papers based on their observations, contributed to the sum total of human knowledge in this way:...

Terrorists assaulted a “Mohammed cartoon” event in Texas sponsored by activist Pamela Geller, and the response has been, in part, soul-searching over what’s wrong with Pamela Geller. Geller is an attention-hungry provocateur who will never be mistaken for Bernard Lewis, the venerable scholar of Islam. Her Texas gathering to award a cash prize for the best cartoon of Mohammed — depictions of whom are considered offensive by many Muslims — was deliberately offensive, but so what? Two armed Muslim men showed up intending to kill the participants, and were only thwarted when they were shot dead by a police...

Among the many painful ironies in the current racial turmoil is that communities scattered across the country were disrupted by riots and looting because of the demonstrable lie that Michael Brown was shot in the back by a white policeman in Missouri — but there was not nearly as much turmoil created by the demonstrable fact that a fleeing black man was shot dead by a white policeman in South Carolina. Totally ignored was the fact that a black policeman in Alabama fatally shot an unarmed white teenager, and was cleared of any charges, at about the same time that...

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is slated to announce Tuesday that he will make a second bid for the Republican nomination. The challenges are formidable for the man who won the 2008 Iowa caucuses. In that earlier race, Huckabee, 59, a former Baptist preacher, struggled to expand his reach beyond evangelical voters, and ran out of money in subsequent contests. Huckabee is a gifted communicator. Polls have consistently shown that he has relatively high name recognition and popularity among Republicans. Early this year, he quit his television show on Fox News, so that he could more deeply explore the possibility...

A pair of rebellious foreign policy hawks is on one side, and the party establishment is on the other. In the battle for Senate GOP hearts and minds on a carefully crafted Iran review bill, the establishment appears to be winning. Many Republicans are ready to rebuff freshman Sens. Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio, who have offered measures that could upturn a broadly popular Iran nuclear review bill. They say Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has no choice but to leave behind scores of other GOP amendments, which still frustrates many who wanted to add their voice to the process....

There is a myth which is endlessly repeated ... I groan every time I read it ... about the liturgical reforms of S Pius V. It goes like this: (1) He wished to standardise and centralise. So he ordered everybody to use his new edition of the Roman Missal (but he did permit those with rites more than 200 years old to keep them). This is pretty well the opposite of what his legislation ordered. He: (2) Ordered those with such old rites to keep them. But, if they positively wanted to adopt his new edition instead, he permitted them...

I get that the two were armed. Each carried a rifle, apparently. But why are they called heavily armed in "news" reports? What other weapons were they carrying?

A couple of years back, I had the pleasure of conducting a sit-down interview with filmmaker Joss Whedon for Newsweek magazine. The occasion was his post-Avengers passion project, Much Ado About Nothing—an impeccably staged and delightfully droll riff on the Shakespeare classic filmed with a cast of pals over 12 days at Whedon’s Santa Monica home. The experience was, according to Whedon, a spiritual cleansing of sorts; a respite from the drudgery of assembling a gazillion-dollar superhero epic that reminded him why he fell in love with visual storytelling in the first place. And, like many film and television projects...

WASHINGTON — As subpoenas fly, the cordial correspondence between lawmakers and VA Secretary Bob McDonald is turning ugly. A letter that House Committee on Veterans Affairs Chairman Jeff Miller, R-Fla., sent to McDonald on Friday and obtained by Stars and Stripes starts with a reminder of what happened to the secretary’s predecessor, Eric Shinseki. “This committee exposed the Department’s delays-in-care scandal at an April 9, 2014, congressional hearing, setting in motion a sequence of events that essentially forced the resignation of your predecessor and led to you becoming secretary,” Miller writes in response to a McDonald letter protesting a threat...

ANKENY, IA, May 4, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In a private e-mail exchange with a concerned parent, Republican state legislator Josh Byrnes of Iowa said there is “nothing worse than homeschool parents” making their views known on public school policy.The statement came as Jeff Moorman took exception to a pending bill allegedly dealing with “bullying,” the “Bully Free Iowa Act of 2015” (HSB 39).The proposal would allow school districts to monitor students outside of school hours and punish – or contact law enforcement officials and state bureaucratic agencies over – any communication it deems “bullying” – even if that behavior takes...

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Hillary Rodham Clinton intends to draw an early distinction with Republicans on illegal immigration, pointing to a pathway to citizenship as an essential part of any overhaul in Congress. Clinton was laying the foundation of her immigration agenda Tuesday in her first stop in Nevada since launching her presidential campaign. After years of delays in Congress, Latinos and immigration activists are watching Clinton's statements closely for signs of how she might break a legislative logjam on immigration and whether she would extend President Barack Obama's executive actions to shield millions of immigrants from deportation. "We hope...

Moscow, May 5, Interfax - The remains of Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolayevich Romanov and his spouse Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolayevna have been reburied in Moscow to the sound of funeral tunes and artillery gun firings. The remains of the princely couple arrived from France on April 27 and were reburied at the Chapel of the Transfiguration at a military cemetery in the Russian capital. "The Duke and the Duchess have returned to their Homeland, their names are acquiring a worthy place in the Russian public memory," State Duma Speaker Sergey Naryshkin, who chairs the Russian Historical Society, said at the...

Forget Elizabeth Warren, it's Tom Brady who should be running for president. Well, president might prove a bit of a stretch right now, given that Brady's appeal might not extend beyond New England, where he works, Michigan, where he went to college, and Southern California, where he grew up.

WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton has figured out a way to monetize Mother’s Day — inviting supporters to enter a contest where she’ll ring up Mom just in case you forget to send flowers. The Clinton camp tweeted out the contest Sunday, just when many Americans were scrambling for last-minute gifts and brunch reservations. Entering is free, but those who sign up get directed to a page where they get the chance to “increase your odds” by giving cash to Clinton’s presidential campaign. Contribution amounts are listed at amounts ranging from $5 to $2,700. There is no second prize listed —...

There has been a lot of talk recently about closing the foundation allowance gap between K-12 school districts in Michigan. This gap effectively ranges from $7,251 to $8,099 per pupil. But what about closing the funding disparity among Michigan public universities? The gap is huge: Funding for the state’s 15 public universities ranges from $2,747 to $11,561 per student. The bulk of federal funding universities in Michigan receive is in the form of Pell Grants, which are awarded to students based on their financial need which they use for the school that they wish. Other federal funding comes via grants...

It is unimaginable. The descent of the mainstream media into out-and-out pro-jihad agitation is complete. Two Islamic jihadists attempt to murder hundreds of people at our free speech event in Texas, and the Washington Post says that I “offer no apology.” I offer no apology? What apology exactly do I owe for almost being murdered? “Abraham Lincoln offers no apology after John Wilkes Booth lodges a bullet in his brain” “Julius Caesar offers no apology after Cassius and Brutus stab him to death” “Jews offer no apology after Nazis kill six million” “Event organizer offers no apology after thwarted attack...