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VATICAN CITY –  Pope Francis has expressed concern for Christians forced to flee Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, where Christians have resided for centuries. The pontiff in his traditional Angelus blessing on Sunday offered prayers for Iraqi Christians who "are persecuted, chased away, forced to leave their houses without out the possibility of taking anything" with them. Christians departed Mosul this week for the largely autonomous Kurdish region after they were issued an ultimatum to convert to Islam, pay a tax or face death.

Climate data show that global temperatures in 2013 continued their long-term rising trend. In fact, 2013 was somewhere between the second- and sixth-hottest year on record for the planet since record keeping began in 1880, according to the climate report, released Thursday (July 17) by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). (Four groups of scientists, who rely on slightly different methods to calculate global surface temperatures, ranked 2013 slightly differently compared with other years.) The annual State of the Climate report compiles climate and weather data from around the world and is reviewed by 425 climate scientists from 57...

Most TV series "jump the shark" or get bad long before they end. But there's always a few that you wish that went on at least another season. Which TV series or program(s) do you wish hadn't ended when it did but continued on at least another year?

A Florida jury has slammed a tobacco company with $23.6 billion in punitive damages in a lawsuit filed by the widow of a longtime smoker who died of lung cancer in 1996. The case is one of thousands filed in Florida after the state Supreme Court in 2006 tossed out a $145 billion class action verdict. That ruling also said smokers and their families need only prove addiction and that smoking caused their illnesses or deaths. "The jury wanted to send a statement that tobacco cannot continue to lie to the American people and the American government about the addictiveness...

Does anyone have any expertise on downloading XBMC to a Allwinner AS13 CPU? It's a Allwinner AS13 4 X A7 1G CPU SG*544 GPU*4

I would like to know of the largest list of patriotic blogs and websites out there...or even more than one!!! Thanks!

The leader of the youth arm of the British National Party has launched an attack on someone that he perceives to ‘challenge his principles’ – his own ‘gay’ dog. Jack Renshaw, a student at Manchester University and the head of the BNP Youth, wrote the Facebook post alongside a picture of Derek the dog, in which he criticised the mutt for ‘licking the (organ) of other male dogs’. ‘I wish my dog would stop licking the (organ) of other male dogs,’ he wrote. ‘I love you, Derek (my dog) – but – don’t challenge my principles because my principles will...

The widow of a Staten Island man who died after a police officer apparently used an unauthorized chokehold on him collapsed in tears into the arms of the Rev. Al Sharpton during a rally Saturday morning at his Harlem headquarters. Esaw Garner had to be ushered off the stage as Sharpton described how her husband, 43-year-old Eric Garner of Port Richmond, died Thursday following a confrontation with police after complaints that he was selling single untaxed cigarettes. Part of the confrontation was captured in video taken by a bystander.

In effect, that long-sought goal would reproduce the chemical reactions inside exploding nuclear bombs to create controlled and self-sustaining thermonuclear fusion. The NIF laser - the largest on Earth - is actually an array of 192 individual high-energy lasers that can be fired simultaneously and aimed with unparalleled precision to become a single laser hitting the central target. In the diamond experiments -an effort unrelated to nuclear weapons research - the scientists focused 176 of the laser beams simultaneously at a diamond contained inside a tiny gold cylinder called a hohlraum. In the hohlraum, the immensely bright laser light was...

Although there will be no religious privileges included in the order. an older executive order still applies to some groups: No further exemption for religious entities will be included in the executive order, but the update also won't repeal President George W. Bush's amendment to EO 11246, which allows religious-affiliated federal contractors to discriminate on the basis of religion, officials said. "You can use religion to only hire people who share your religion, but you can't discriminate against somebody who is of your faith who happens to be LGBT, unless they fall within the ministerial exemption," officials said. It's great...

One of the hottest strategies in corporate America right now is the use of so-called “tax-inversion” deals. A US company buys a company headquartered in a country with lower taxes and then re-incorporates the entire company in that country to reduce the corporate tax bill. A major tax inversion was announced yesterday, with Illinois-based pharmaceutical company AbbVie buying Irish-based Shire Pharmaceuticals. The entire company will be registered in Jersey, the island in the English Channel, which is famous for its low tax status.

Where will the human WMD in the White House do the most damage – the economy or national security? Since Obama became president, 27 million jobs bit the dust. The labor-force participation rate (the percentage of available workers who are actually working) is the lowest in 36 years. The National Council of La Raza's favorite gringo doesn't know or care how many thousands of "Dreamers" streaming across our border each month have communicable diseases or are criminals or terrorists traveling incognito. He's given up even the pretense of trying to control the border. It's all Congress's fault anyway for not...

Any former Girl or Boy Scout knows it’s dangerous to just pluck a berry off a bush or grab a random green and stuff it in your mouth (hello, poison ivy!) So proceed with caution and only sample something if you’re quite sure it’s safe: Brill’s app is a good starting point, but it, too features the caveat that there are some poisonous wild edibles out there! There’s also a whole world of tasty stuff. We asked Brill for his top five low-risk foraged finds (read: wild plants that don't have poisonous doppelgängers) around America, all of which are listed...

“With three work days a week, we would have more time to relax; for quality of life,” Slim said. “Having four days [off] would be very important to generate new entertainment activities and other ways of being occupied.” But there’s a catch: in exchange for working fewer days a week, we should work for more of our lives. Instead of retiring at 50 or 60, workers should work until the age of 70 or 75, the 74-year-old Slim said.

No foreign airlines dared flying to or over Afghanistan at the height of the war against Taliban insurgents following the 2001 United States-led invasion but in recent years business has boomed, with more airlines opening routes to the capital, Kabul, and numerous airliners crossing over the country every day. But security is deteriorating. Galvanised by the expected withdrawal of foreign forces this year, insurgents have been particularly active, attacking Kabul airport twice in just over a year and firing rockets at its facilities almost weekly. The Taliban were not immediately available for comment.

FULL TITLE: Duane Youngblood: Pastor Who Wrote Book About Overcoming Homosexuality Arrested For Molesting Teen Boy Duane Youngblood once wrote a book about how he was able to de-convert from homosexuality, but police say the Pittsburgh pastor was actually sexually abusing a teenage boy over the course of several years. Youngblood, who leads the Higher Call World Outreach Church, was arrested this week and charged with corrupting a minor. The boy, who has since turned 21, told police that Youngblood abused him over the course of nearly three years. The young man claimed that the sexual assaults took place inside...

Not so long ago the federal deficit was projected to destroy the country, our children’s future and just about everything else. Budget battles shut down the entire government for a couple weeks. How times change. A count by our colleague Alice Crites illustrates how the issue gained media traction – - especially after the Bush/Obama stimulus packages to mitigate Bush’s Great Recession – and how much it’s faded from the front pages. So what happened? Simple answer, of course, is that the deficit is way down and, for now, no longer a big problem.

Krauthammer’s Take: Obama ‘Practically Half Asleep’ in Airliner Speech By NRO Staff July 18, 2014 On Friday’s Special Report, Charles Krauthammer slammed Obama for the “unbelievable, passive nature” of his speech, which addressed the Malaysian airliner catastrophe in Eastern Ukraine. Reacting to yesterday’s news of the shooting down of the civilian plane – almost certainly at the hands of Russian-armed rebels – the president appeared disinterested, and ”practically half asleep.” That response makes sense only if Obama believes that the events will necessarily go badly for Russia. However, Krauthammer contended, there is no reason to think that is true in...

International AIDS Society president Francoise Barre-Sinoussi on Saturday said SIX COLLEAGUES heading for a global conference in Melbourne were on a Malaysian plane that crashed over Ukraine, NOT 100 as reports suggested.