UK - Food was once seen as a source of sustenance and pleasure. Today, the dinner table can instead begin to feel like a minefield. Is the bacon on your plate culinary asbestos, and will the wheat in your toast give you “grain brain”? Even the bubbles of gas in your fizzy drinks have been considered a hazard.
USA - During a recent stay at the Holmes Student Center Hotel at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, atheist activists Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker ”discovered” a Bible inside of their guest room — something that they found both “inappropriate and unconstitutional.”
UK - For someone that is supposedly so “brilliant”, Stephen Hawking really doesn’t have a clue. In a recent interview with Spain’s El Mundo, Hawking publicly declared that God doesn’t exist, that he is an atheist, and that science provides a better explanation of where the universe came from than the Bible does. While I certainly respect much of the great work that Hawking has done throughout the years, I don’t think that he has thought through these issues very clearly.
MIDDLE EAST - The scope of the terror threat facing Western Europe became increasingly clear on Monday as French police uncovered an "arsenal" of weapons as part of 150 pre-dawn raids on suspected Islamists across the country, while France's prime minister warned that "terrorism could strike again in the days or weeks to come." The raids in the French cities of Toulouse, Grenoble, and Jeumont and the Parisian suburbs of Saint-Denis and Bobigny came hours after French jets struck the heart of ISIS-controlled territory on Sunday in the first direct retaliation for Friday’s terror attacks that killed at least 129 people in Paris.
GERMANY - German President Joachim Gauck said on Sunday the world is confronted with a "new type of war" perpetrated by terrorists bent on killing those who refuse to follow their "barbaric ideology". "We live in times when we are mourning victims of a new type of war. These are victims of malicious murderous gangs," said Gauck, after Friday's attacks in Paris which claimed 129 lives.
MIDDLE EAST - The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. The Islamic State awaits the army of “Rome,” whose defeat at Dabiq, Syria, will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse.
GERMANY - Bavarian allies cranked up pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday to reverse her "open-door" refugee policy, saying the deadly attacks in Paris underlined the need for tougher measures to control the influx of migrants. But Merkel is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
GERMANY - Following the terror attacks in Paris, the Bavarian Finance Minister Markus Soeder, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s sister party, has called for Germany to change its refugee policy and put an end to the mass influx of asylum seekers.
GERMANY - German police are scrambling to discover whether they inadvertently prevented another Islamist from joining the Paris massacre, after they arrested a man driving with a significant cache of weapons heading to Paris.
GERMANY - German Chancellor Angela Merkel responded to the Paris massacre by calling for “tolerance” towards migrants and respect for “the right of everyone to seek his fortune and live,” as her policy of allowing in hundreds of thousands of refugees came under fresh scrutiny.
GERMANY - As a local lawmaker in the east German city of Magdeburg who regularly speaks out against the far right, Soeren Herbst has endured years of animosity. But the sight that greeted him outside his home last week made the Green Party politician realize that the abuse had reached a new level.
EUROPE - In the aftermath of the slew of horrific terror attacks in Paris last night, European nations must come to admit that, with their continuous and blind support of US foreign policy, they are sowing the seeds of their own demise. For more than a year and a half, Washington, with little concern for consequences, has used Europe as a tool in its futile attempts to batter Russia into submission. First in Ukraine, now in Syria — and each time Europe has sided with Washington against its own interests, it has suffered for it.
VATICAN - The Pope has condemned last night's terror attacks in Paris – which killed at least 120 people – as "mad terrorist violence". A spokesman for the Vatican called for a decisive response to counter the spread of "homicidal hatred". He added: "We condemn it in the most radical way together with the Pope and all those who love peace." The statement was released just hours after the French capital was rocked by shootings and bombings.
USA - How has our public education system gotten so off track? High-stakes testing, obsessive data collection, and lofty promises of technology’s potential to “revolutionize” education are contributing to ever-increasing amounts of school-based screen-time.
INDONESIA - Thousands of men around the world are to be sterilised Friday in what organisers dubbed a global "vasectomy-athon", to encourage men to take a bigger role in family planning and combat resistance to the procedure. Some 750 doctors in 25 countries are to perform the procedure on more than 3,000 volunteers to mark World Vasectomy Day, with many operations being provided for free or at discounted rates.