Saturday, Dec 13th
Last update09:33:21 AM GMT
A once unimaginable movement is emerging from within Israel's insular Orthodox Jewish community: homosexuals demanding to be accepted and embraced, no matter what the Bible says.
Living alongside a secular majority that has largely embraced the Western gay rights movement, Israel's religious gays are increasingly rejecting age-old dictates to ignore their attraction, abstain from sex or undergo therapy that supposedly will make them straight.
It is the human tendency to deny the reality of "conspiracy", even though all of human interaction is by definition a "conspiracy". Conspirators rely on this habit of denial, because it makes their conspiracies possible. As long as people are denying that conspiring is possible, then conspiring is guaranteed to be successful.
"Nobody would do that. Nobody would even think of doing that."
The credo of the most successful conspirators is this: "Make what you do so far removed from normal thinking that normal thinkers would never even consider it possible."
The Vatican told bishops around the world Monday that it was important to cooperate with police in reporting priests who rape and molest children and said they should develop guidelines for preventing sex abuse by next May.
But the suggestions in the letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith are vague and nonbinding and fall far short of recommending the tough U.S.-style norms that bar a credibly accused priest from ministry while his case is investigated.
"This study shows that the presence of an active mobile phone disturbs bees -- and has a dramatic effect," Favre told the Daily Mail.
Favre believes this to be evidence of something other scientists have suggested: Signals from mobile phones are contributing to the decline of honeybees. Favre thinks more research could help confirm the link between cell signals and "colony collapse disorder" -- the sudden disappearance of entire colonies over winter -- which has halved the bee population, according to some estimates.
Every year for two decades, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has issued an annual report on the amount of pesticide residue it detects from samples of fresh fruits and vegetables around the country.
The Environmental Protection Agency uses the data to monitor exposure to pesticides and enforce federal standards designed to protect infants, children and other vulnerable people. But the 200-page annual report has become a target of an unusual lobbying campaign by the produce industry, which worries that the data are being misinterpreted by the public.
A belief that heaven or an afterlife awaits us is a "fairy story" for people afraid of death, Stephen Hawking has said. In a dismissal that underlines his firm rejection of religious comforts, Britain's most eminent scientist said there was nothing beyond the moment when the brain flickers for the final time.
Hawking, who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 21, shares his thoughts on death, human purpose and our chance existence in an exclusive interview with the Guardian today.
The changes cascading through the news media have made the old models of news delivery – like, say, an anchor reading the news at an appointed time – seem archaic.
And it is about more than just TV – newspapers, magazines, radio, all the "legacy" media are feeling the earth move beneath them. Journalists look out and see thousands of empty campus TV lounges and newsprint-less recycling bins and millions of iPads and smart phones and they wonder what's coming next.
A multimillion-shekel lawsuit recently filed in the Tel Aviv District Court by an employee of the Institute for Biological Research in Nes Tziona promises to provide a rare glimpse into what transpires behind the walls of one of Israel's most hush-hush institutions.
According to foreign reports, it also develops chemical and biological weapons. One of these reports said institute scientists had developed the poison that was meant to have eliminated Hamas political leader Khaled Meshal in the botched Mossad attack against him in Amman in 1996.
The military's premier crime lab has botched more of its evidence testing than has been previously known, raising broader questions about the quality of the forensic work relied on to convict soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.
Now, the Supreme Court could weigh in, while two senators want the Pentagon to open a full-blown investigation. If they start looking, Pentagon officials will find that the crime lab's problems extend beyond one discredited analyst.
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