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A judge in Afghanistan said today that Abdul Rahman, the man charged with converting to Christianity, would face the death penalty, or worse, if convicted of the crime. “We could behead him and then throw the book at him,” said the judge presiding over the case, raising the specter that the punishment could include intentional abuse and damage to Mr. Rahman’s copy of the Bible. The threat to the Bible comes as retribution for reported incidents of Koran desecration last year by Americans at the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention facility. Those allegations sparked deadly Muslim riots worldwide. Meanwhile, state governors...

The breakup of giant icebergs may have forced minor evolutionary changes in penguins over the past 6,000 years, a new study suggests. The Antarctic iceberg chunks, which break off the continent now and then, are thought to have blocked the swim paths of Adelie penguins returning home to their colonies. Some of the penguins were forced to become immigrants in other colonies, where they established new homes and interbred with the locals. As a result, genetic changes that might otherwise have remained isolated became widespread among the different colonies. The result is what scientist call microevolution. Other examples Microevolution involves...

Defendant faced life in prison NEWARK — Facing life in prison, Kevin Walters cried with joy and hugged his family after a jury returned innocent verdicts on 12 sex-abuse charges. Walters, 33, had been accused of four counts of rape, first-degree felonies, and eight counts of gross sexual imposition, fourth-degree felonies. Because of the accuser’s age, the rape counts carried mandatory life imprisonment if he had been found guilty. The charges alleged that Walters forcibly engaged in sexual conduct with a female family member over a two-year period beginning in 2002 when the girl was 11 years old. Without physical...

Dad Claims He Was Trying To Help CLEVELAND -- The father suspected of keeping some of 11 special-needs adopted children in cages says he and his wife were trying to help children that nobody else wanted. ... "We took kids that nobody else wanted," said Gravelle. He and his wife, Sharen, have not been charged, but their children were removed from their home six weeks ago and were placed in foster homes. The Gravelles, who are white, adopted black youngsters with ailments such as autism, fetal alcohol syndrome, HIV and pica, an eating disorder in which children compulsively eat nonfood...

WASHINGTON - U.S. teen pregnancy and birth rates have plummeted to all-time lows as more teenagers delay sex, abstain from it, use contraception and use it more effectively. Abortions also are down. ADVERTISEMENT The decline, to the lowest teen birth rates since national tallies began in 1940, is a remarkable personal health reform, sharper than U.S. declines in smoking or increases in seat-belt use. Counselors who work with teens cite many factors but give much credit to more cautious and assertive girls. "A lot more of us are making our own sexual decisions. That way, you don't get pushed around...

(2005-08-15) -- A new multi-million dollar Harvard University effort to study the origins of life in the universe seeks to prove that life did not begin with "a major grant" from an intelligent source, but rather sprang up spontaneously and entirely without purpose. The university will fund the research with $1 million per year in a number of multi-million dollar facilities, employing some of the best minds in science to establish that the complexity of life started with no plan, no design, no forethought and no intelligent creative agent. "Harvard University has proven over the years that the more complex...

How do we get attention over the Supreme Court decisions? The justices aren't elected and could careless about their mail and email. Ten thousand calls to the White-House aren't going to impact anything other than their phone bill. Our representatives, if they haven't spoken by now, are in on the rewording of our constitution (it's a whole lot easier than going through that darn amendment process). Proposing amendments or signing a petition for the impeachment of justices will have the same impact as trying to repeal the 16th and/or 17th amendments. Lots of people talk about their gun collection and...

MILAN/ROME (Reuters) - An Italian judge has ordered the arrest of 13 people linked to the CIA for "kidnapping" an Egyptian terrorism suspect in Milan and flying him to Egypt where he said he was tortured, judicial sources said on Friday. "In the judge's order, it (the abduction) is clearly attributed to the CIA," a source said. Confirming the arrest warrant without mentioning the U.S. intelligence agency, the prosecutors office said the 13 suspects were believed to be behind the abduction of imam Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, who was grabbed off a Milan street on...

I am not the vanity posting type, nor am I usually an alarmist but this latest USSC ruling taking away our private property rights for increasted tax revenue... it is impossible to put into words the impact this is going to have on our country. One area I'm interested in getting feedback on is that of Religious organizations and property tax. Obvouisly states can choose on their own to tax religious organizations if that is what they really wanted -- but that would probably not go over well as a state wide issue. But now, with eminent domain expanded, local...

Joan Majer is an agent for a small real estate company, and like millions of Americans working for small firms, she doesn't get health insurance from her employer. She pays for it herself. [..] Some lawmakers think the solution is to form what they call "Association health plans (search)" — programs that serve groups of small businesses that otherwise wouldn't be able to cover their employees as well. But state insurance commissioners say these health plans are risky business, because of rampant opportunities for fraud. Other critics fear companies would give their best deals only to those firms with the...

(2005-06-04) -- Friday's release of a Pentagon study on mishandling of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay detention center has sparked Saudi Arabia's leader to call for similar probes of Bible handling in detention facilities throughout the Muslim world. Since May, the Pentagon has examined thousands of pages of documentation, finding five confirmed cases of Koran mishandling by U.S. personnel, and 15 cases in which Muslim prisoners desecrated their own complimentary copies of the book that they had received from the U.S. government. The Pentagon has distributed some 1,600 taxpayer-funded copies of the Muslim Holy Book to suspected terrorists detained at...

The tragic soon death of Terri Schiavo is being blamed on the courts, the husband, the lawyers, or any other institution we collectively think bears some responsibility. The truth is, it is the people of the state of Florida and in a bigger picture all of us, who are letting her be killed. This is true in two ways: a) The Florida legislature, elected by the people of Florida, created and passed the law quite some time ago letting hearsay be used in place of a living will. Let this be an example of the result of such a law....

With current projections: Assuming Kerry takes the NE and west coast plus MN, IA, IL, MN Assuming Bush takes the rest with these up in the air: NV, NM, WI, and OH That puts them both at 249 electoral votes. NV 5 NM 5 WI 10 OH 20 If the first three go one way and Ohio goes the other then we are at an Electoral tie at 269 each.

(2004-09-17) -- John Forbes Kerry, the Democrat presidential candidate, today denied allegations by President George Bush that Mr. Kerry has a plan for a "huge" government-controlled health care system. "George W. Bush can only wish that I had a plan so he could have something to attack," said Mr. Kerry, who is also a U.S. Senator. "But if I had a health care plan, don't you think I would have introduced it during my 19 years in the Senate? After all, the legislative branch is where legislation starts, not the executive. I could have written a health care bill, rallied...

(2004-07-12) -- U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge today announced that the November presidential election will go on as scheduled despite his recent warning of terrorist threats to disrupt it, and news that a postponement plan may be in the works. "Central Intelligence misread the threat," said Mr. Ridge. "They started with the presumption that terrorists want to terrorize us, and then they intercepted chatter which sounded like a threat to our constitutional Republic from the enemies of freedom." As it turns out, the intercepted communications came from the headquarters of the Democrat National Committee, during a discussion about the...

WASHINGTON (BP)--Ten years ago 30 percent, or three out of every 10 people in the country of Uganda, were infected with HIV or AIDS. Today, that number has dropped to 6 percent of the population, or six out of every 100. It’s a significant statistic that the first lady of Uganda credits largely to faith-based abstinence programs for slowing the spread of the fatal disease in her country. Janet Museveni spoke June 17 to a crowded room at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., during The Medical Institute for Sexual Health’s annual meeting. The institute presented Museveni with the...

ROCKVILLE, Md. - A second northern snakehead has been caught by a fisherman in the Potomac River, Maryland officials said, a sign that the destructive alien species may have invaded the Washington area's largest river. The 12-inch immature female was found in the river Wednesday just south of Fort Washington by an angler who turned it over the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. The agency confirmed that the fish was a northern snakehead, a nonnative species imported from China. The discovery comes nearly a week after a fisherman caught a similar sized snakehead May 7 in a small tidal creek...

Samantha Sheppard, 28, from Plymouth, a soldier with the 2nd Light Tank Regiment, smiles as she receives a flower from an Iraqi man during a patrol on the streets of east Basra, southern Iraq, April 2003. (AP Photo/Jon Mills/Pool)

To Website Fans, Browsers, ClientsFrom: Jude WanniskiRe: Answers to Yesterday’s Quiz We posted the quiz yesterday, the day the United Nations weapons inspectors made their first report to the United Nations Security Council on their progress to date. Today we post the correct answers, correct at least according to our best sources and analysis. If you got all the answers correct, you are a certified dove. And vice versa. There is, though, some room for quibbling. 1. Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. True or False. False. The U.S. Armed Forces only consider a nuclear weapon a...

Sometimes Right-Wing Doesn't Mean Conservative NEW YORK--On the surface, the main political story appears to be "Clueless Democratic Party Beaten to Pulp by Vibrant if Unscrupulous Republicans." But the bigger, weirder story is that liberals have won the culture wars--and have corrupted the GOP with the worst aspects of their beliefs. Incredibly, the hard-right Bush Administration has turned out to be composed of old-fashioned tax-and-spend, welfare-coddling, big-government liberals. Before the 1980s the Republican base was conservatives who, as the word's etymology suggests, defended the status quo. Because most conservatives were wealthy (or at least comfortable enough to believe they might...