George Tiller, Abortion Doctor Gunned Down In Church

A suspect in the fatal shooting today of Wichita abortion provider George Tiller was arrested in Johnson County and is being returned to Wichita to face charges.

The 51-year-old male suspect was arrested about three hours after the shooting without incident near Gardner on Interstate 35.

Tiller, 67, was shot just after 10 a.m. in the lobby of Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, where he was a member of the congregation.

Tiller was serving as an usher at the church, one of six ushers listed in the church bulletin. He was handing out bulletins to people going into the sanctuary minutes before being shot.

Tiller’s family issued a statement through Wichita attorneys Dan Monnat and Lee Thompson.

“Today we mourn the loss of our husband, father and grandfather. Today’s event is an unspeakable tragedy for all of us and for George’s friends and patients.

“This is particularly heart wrenching because George was shot down in his house of worship, a place of peace.”

Police had said they were looking for a white male who was driving a 1990s powder blue Ford Taurus with Kansas license plate 225 BAB. The vehicle is registered to an owner in Merriam.

The car was spotted shortly before 2 p.m. just south of Gardner by two Johnson County Sheriff’s deputies. They were quickly joined by three other sheriff’s patrol cars.

Lt. Mike Pfannenstiel of the sheriff’s office said officers pulled the car over just south of the main Gardner exit and got out with guns drawn. The man then got out of his car with his hands up.

via Suspect in George Tiller shooting in custody in Johnson County – Kansas City Star.

Mandatory Census Questions Gets Personal

The federal government is forcing 3 million Americans to disclose sensitive, personal information about finances, health and lifestyle in a 14-page survey – including questions about availability of household flush toilets and difficulty with undressing and bathing.

The 2009 American Community Survey, an annual supplement to the decennial Census, asks about residents’ personal relationships and whether a home has hot and cold running water, a flush toilet, bathing facilities, appliances and phone services. It also asks how many rooms are in a home and what vehicles are used at each household.

The new questionnaire asks respondents what they pay for electricity, gas, water and sewer every month and whether residents receive food stamps.

Question 16 asks, “About how much do you think this house and lot, apartment, or mobile home would sell for if it were for sale?”

Respondents are required to disclose costs associated with rent or mortgage, annual real estate taxes on and fire, hazard and flood insurance expenses.

For each person in the household, the questionnaire asks for citizenship status, education level, whether that person attends private or public schools. It also features questions about health coverage, hearing and vision impairment and physical, mental or emotional conditions.

It asks if residents “have difficulty dressing or bathing” or “doing errands alone such as visiting a doctor’s office or shopping” or whether they have difficulty making decisions. Respondents must indicate if they have served in the military, their current marital status and whether they have been married or given birth to children in the last 12 months. The Census Bureau claims its question is used as a “measure of fertility” and is used to “carry out various programs required by statute, including … conducting research for voluntary family planning programs.”

Read Full Article At WND

U.S. Inflation to Approach Zimbabwe Level

The U.S. economy will enter “hyperinflation” approaching the levels in Zimbabwe because the Federal Reserve will be reluctant to raise interest rates, investor Marc Faber said.

Prices may increase at rates “close to” Zimbabwe’s gains, Faber said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Hong Kong. Zimbabwe’s inflation rate reached 231 million percent in July, the last annual rate published by the statistics office.

“I am 100 percent sure that the U.S. will go into hyperinflation,” Faber said. “The problem with government debt growing so much is that when the time will come and the Fed should increase interest rates, they will be very reluctant to do so and so inflation will start to accelerate.”

Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia President Charles Plosser said on May 21 inflation may rise to 2.5 percent in 2011. That exceeds the central bank officials’ long-run preferred range of 1.7 percent to 2 percent and contrasts with the concerns of some officials and economists that the economic slump may provoke a broad decline in prices.

“There are some concerns of a risk from inflation from all the liquidity injected into the banking system but it’s not an immediate threat right now given all the excess capacity in the U.S. economy,” said David Cohen, head of Asian economic forecasting at Action Economics in Singapore. “I have a little more confidence that the Fed has an exit strategy for draining all the liquidity at the appropriate time.”

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Gay Teen Receives Prom Queen Crown

When an openly gay high school senior was voted prom queen at his Los Angeles high school last weekend, the school’s students and officials not only accepted it, they basked with pride in being one of the most diverse and tolerant schools in the nation.
An openly gay high school senior was voted prom queen at his L.A. school.

“Tears were almost falling down my face,” said Sergio Garcia, 18, of the moment he was named prom queen at Fairfax Senior High School in Hollywood Saturday night, where he beat out eight girls for the crown.

“It was a really emotional moment,” Garcia told ABCNews.com.

When asked what he thinks his award says about his school, Garcia did not hesitate to attribute his new title to the tolerance his school has for what might seem out of place to others.

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Deadly “Lujo’ Virus Discovered In Africa

Scientists have identified a lethal new virus in Africa that causes bleeding like the dreaded Ebola virus. The so-called “Lujo” virus infected five people in Zambia and South Africa last fall. Four of them died, but a fifth survived, perhaps helped by a medicine recommended by the scientists.

It’s not clear how the first person became infected, but the bug comes from a family of viruses found in rodents, said Dr. Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University epidemiologist involved in the discovery.

“This one is really, really aggressive” he said of the virus.

A paper on the virus by Lipkin and his collaborators was published online Thursday on in PLoS Pathogens.

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Giant Blob Found Deep Beneath Nevada

Hidden beneath the U.S. West’s Great Basin, scientists have spied a giant blob of rocky material dripping like honey.

The Great Basin consists of small mountain ranges separated by valleys and includes most of Nevada, the western half of Utah and portions of other nearby states.

While studying the area, John West of Arizona State University (ASU) and his colleagues found evidence of a large cylindrical blob of cold material far below the surface of central Nevada. Comparison of the results with CAT scans of the inside of Earth taken by ASU’s Jeff Roth suggested they had found a so-called lithospheric drip. (Earth’s lithosphere comprises the crust or outer layer of Earth and the uppermost mantle.)

Here’s how it works: “The Earth’s mantle, which lies below the thin outer crust we live on, consists of rock which deforms plastically on very long time scales due to the heat and pressure at depth,” West said. “In any material which can flow (including the mantle), a heavy object will tend to sink through lighter material.”

And this is what the scientists think is happening with the lithospheric drip. A region of heavier material trapped in the lithosphere gets warmed up and begins to sink into the lighter, less dense mantle beneath, pulling a long tail of material after it.

“Honey dripping off of a spoon is a visual aid to what we think the drip looks like,” West told LiveScience. “Dripping honey tends to lead with a large blob of honey, with a long tail of material following the initial blob.”

He said the blob is between about 30 miles and 60 miles in diameter and extends from a depth of about 47 miles to at least 310 miles beneath Earth’s surface.

The team thinks this drip started some 15 million to 20 million years ago and probably detached from the overlying plate only recently.

At first, it was hard for the team to reconcile their discovery with what scientists knew about the region. Over the past tens of millions of years, the Earth’s crust in the Great Basin has undergone extension, or stretching.

via Giant Blob Found Deep Beneath Nevada – Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News – FOXNews.com.

ACLU Sues Schools Over Homosexual Website Access

The American Civil Liberties Union has made good on a promise to sue two Tennessee school districts.

Knox County Schools and Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools are blocking certain pro-homosexual websites from access, but also websites that oppose the lifestyle (see earlier story). The ACLU has filed a lawsuit, but Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel tells OneNewsNow the school district policies are good.

“These websites, whether pro or con, should not be in public schools. Public schools are not the place to have this debate,” he contends. “This is an environment to educate and train children, but not to indoctrinate them in homosexuality.”

Matt StaverStaver believes the ACLU is using the courts to try to force the homosexual agenda on the students. “This is the essence of the ACLU. They want to push a radical, anti-family, anti-religious agenda down the throats of Americans, and they want to do it through the public school system because they know if they capture the youth, they will literally own the future,” he says.

Liberty Counsel has offered to represent the school districts for free.

via ACLU sues schools over homosexual website access (OneNewsNow.com).

American Marriage – Prepare For Polygamy & Triad Marriages

Some Americans are now pushing for threesome marriages, also called “triads.”

Polyamorous marriages would involve two women and a man, or vice versa. However, many Americans do not know that those relationships are already occurring.

Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel tells OneNewsNow the existence of triad relationships exonerates those who have been warning that polyamorous and polygamous marriages would be the next step if homosexual “marriage” is legalized.

“Proponents of same-sex marriage have screamed and yelled and said that we were lying, but here we have proof positive that in fact once you radically redefine [what marriage is], once you break marriage, then anything and everything becomes marriage,” he contends.

Matt BarberBarber adds the true motive is to destroy the institution of marriage. “Because that is an institution that was given to mankind from God — so this all boils down to rebellion against God. And they will rebel in any way that they can,” he says. “They will create new ways of doing evil — and polyamorous, triad marriages are just an example of that.”

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Atheists Roll Out New Advertising Campaign

Campaign Slogan – In The Beginning Man Created God

This provocative twist on the Bible’s opening line was plastered on the side of 25 Chicago buses this week as part of an advertising crusade by the Indiana Atheist Bus Campaign.

The ads have been cruising between downtown and the city’s North and South sides, including the No. 56 Milwaukee route, since the beginning of the week and will run through June.

“The intent of the campaign is to stimulate discussion of religion and its place in our society,” said Charlie Sitzes, a spokesman for the Indiana group who with help from the American Humanist Association has collected more than $10,000 in private donations to buy the ad space in Indiana and Illinois.

The group brought its message to Chicago after a similar campaign in Indiana – to post the slogan “You can be good without God” – was rejected by transit authorities in Bloomington and stalled by officials in South Bend, who didn’t want the ads posted in time for President Barack Obama’s speech at Notre Dame.

Indiana’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has sued the Bloomington Public Transportation Corporation on the atheist group’s behalf. Bloomington Mayor Mark Kruzan has denounced his own transit system, saying he does not condone government censorship.

“It would appear that where there is more opposition to the message that maybe that would be the place where we needed dialogue more,” Sitzes said, maintaining that the slogan is a simple fact.

“All non-believers believe God is a creation of man,” he said. “We used to have thousands of gods. Now we’re down to one. We’re getting closer to the true number.”

Among the guidelines for determining if an advertisement can run on the CTA is a requirement that the ad be truthful and is “not directed at inciting imminent lawless action.”

via Atheists roll out ad campaign | The Seeker.

Senate Letter Calls For Filibuster Of Hate Crimes Bill

A Texas pastor has written an open letter to the U.S. Senate, asking someone, anyone, to filibuster pending “hate crimes” legislation and stop what he calls a “maddening march to the destruction of our First Amendment right to freely practice our religion.”

As WND has reported, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 would provide special protections to homosexual people but leave Christian ministers open to prosecution should their teachings be linked to any subsequent offense, by anyone, against a homosexual person.

A hearing on the act, already approved by the U.S. House as H.R. 1913 and pending in the Senate as S. 909, is expected in the Senate Judiciary Committee soon.

Concerned individuals may contact elected officials, sign a petition against hate crimes legislation and participate in WND’s FedEx campaign to send thousands of letters to senators by overnight delivery.

“The legislation pending before you will make me an ‘inducer’ to hate crimes if I preach Romans 1:18-32 and someone who hears me then commits a criminal act against a protected class,” writes Rev. Rick Scarborough of Harvest Point Church in Nacogdoches, Texas, and founder of Vision America. “It is clear that this bill will criminalize biblical preaching and will prevent me and thousands of other clergymen from practicing our faith without threat of penalty from our own federal government.”

Romans 1:18-32 is particularly inflammatory, labeling homosexual acts in various translations as against nature, indecent, unseemly and perversion.

Under a comparable law in Sweden, a minister was sentenced to 30 days in jail for preaching from Leviticus, which labels male homosexual acts as detestable. Similar state laws have resulted in similar results. In Philadelphia several years ago, a 73-year-old grandmother was reported to have been jailed for trying to share Christian tracts with people at a homosexual festival.

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NK Detonates Underground Nuclear Bomb

North Korea’s state media has confirmed the communist state has conducted a nuclear weapons test.

It is believed the blast was much stronger than Pyongyang’s first test in 2006.

South Korea says weather agency officials detected what they called an artificial earthquake in the communist North this morning.

The government in Seoul immediately accused North Korea of conducting a nuclear weapons test.

It has called an emergency security meeting of its cabinet in response to the announcement.

Two hours later the secretive communist regime confirmed via its state media that it had detonated a nuclear device, saying the underground test was successful and was part of the country’s nuclear deterrent policy.

In response, South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak called an emergency national security council meeting, while Japan’s government said it had set up a crisis task force.

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Wash. State Woman 1st Death Under New Suicide Law

Linda Fleming was diagnosed with terminal cancer and feared her last days would be filled with pain and ever-stronger doses of medication that would erode her mind.

The 66-year-old woman with late-stage pancreatic cancer wanted to be clear-headed at death, so she became the first person to kill herself under Washington state’s new assisted suicide law, known as “death with dignity.”

“I am a very spiritual person, and it was very important to me to be conscious, clear-minded and alert at the time of my death,” Fleming said in a statement released Friday. “The powerful pain medications were making it difficult to maintain the state of mind I wanted to have at my death. And I knew I would have to increase them.”

With family members, her physician and her dog at her side, Fleming took a deadly dose of prescription barbiturates and died Thursday night at her home in Sequim, Wash.

Chris Carlson, who campaigned against the new law with the Coalition Against Assisted Suicide, called the death unfortunate.

“Any premature death is a sad occasion and it diminishes us all,” he said.

Compassion & Choices of Washington, an advocacy group that aids people who seek to use the law, announced her death.

Last November, Washington became the second state to have a voter-approved assisted suicide law. It is based on a law adopted by Oregon voters in 1997. Since then, about 400 people have used the Oregon law to end their lives.

via My Way News – Wash. state woman 1st death under new suicide law.

Half of Israelis Back Immediate Strike on Iran

Just over half of Israelis back an immediate attack on the nuclear facilities of arch-foe Iran but the rest want to wait and see the results of US diplomacy, according to a poll released on Sunday.

Fifty-one percent support an immediate Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites, while 49 percent believe the Jewish state should await the outcome of efforts by the US administration to engage with the Islamic republic, said the survey published by Tel Aviv University.

But 74 percent of those questioned said they believe that new US President Barack Obama’s efforts will not stop the Islamic republic from acquiring atomic weapons.

Israel, widely considered to be the Middle East’s sole if undeclared nuclear armed state, considers Iran its arch-foe after repeated statements by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for the Jewish state to be “wiped off the map.”

Israel and Washington accuse Iran of trying to develop atomic weapons under the guise of a civilian nuclear programme, a charge Tehran has repeatedly denied.

via Half of Israelis back immediate strike on Iran.

LGBT Teaching Material Chosen For California Schools

We’d all love to see the plans,” the Beatles once sang about revolution. Some Alamedans have borrowed that sentiment about the Alameda Unified School District’s proposed LGBT curriculum, saying instead, “We’d all love to see the books.”

The school district’s Web site mentions the titles of the books it intends to use for the program tentatively scheduled to start in the fall, but delivers little else in the way of information. Here’s a look at some of the books and material.

* For kindergarten, The New Girl and Me: According to one reviewer the book is a “gentle story about Shakeeta, a new girl at school, and Mia, the classmate who befriends her… A stellar choice for any ‘new kid in the classroom’ situation, as well as for children who may be hesitant in making new friends. The author is a former elementary school teacher, which is obvious by her style of writing.”

* For first grade, Who’s in A Family: “This equal opportunity, open-minded picture book has no preconceptions about what makes a family a family,” says Random House, the publisher. “There’s even equal time given to some of children’s favorite animal families. With warm and inviting jewel-tone illustrations, this is a great book for that long talk with a little person on your lap.”

* For second grade, And Tango Makes Three: The book is based on the true story of Roy and Silo, two male Chinstrap Penguins in New York’s Central Park Zoo who for six years formed a couple. The book follows part of this time in the penguins’ lives. The pair was observed trying to hatch a rock that resembled an egg. When zookeepers realized that Roy and Silo were both male, it occurred to them to give them the second egg of a mixed-sex penguin couple, a couple which had previously been unable to successfully hatch two eggs at once. Roy and Silo hatched and raised the healthy young chick, a female named “Tango” by keepers, together as a family.

* For third grade, a video called “That’s a Family”: This is how the filmmakers describe their work: “With blunt and sometimes hilarious candor, children from over 50 diverse families open the door to their homes, and explain things like divorce, mixed race, gay and lesbian, birth mom, single parent, guardian and stepdad — and get right to the point of what they wish other people would understand about their families.”

* For fourth grade, an essay written by an 11-year-old named Robert called “My School Is Accepting — But Things Could Be Better.” Among Robert’s thoughts: “When kids learn that I have two moms, they are normally OK with it. Sometimes I’ll come across someone who says it is weird but that doesn’t bother me because I’m fine with my family. I tend to not be very good friends with the kids who say it is weird to have LGBT parents.” The essay can be read in its entirety on the AUSD Web site.

* For fifth grade, a handout that list famous LGBT personalities: The list includes author James Baldwin, singer Elton John and poet Walt Whitman. Like the fourth-grade essay, the list can be read in its entirety on the AUSD Web site.

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