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A Tennessee woman who said she wanted a relationship--and did not want to be just “a booty call”--allegedly stabbed a male suitor Tuesday night after he became irate when she put the brakes on his attempts to “touch her suggestively,” police report. Oh, did we mention that the two are first cousins?

One of the more controversial teachings of the Catholic church deals with the perpetual virginity of Mary. This doctrine maintains that Mary remained a virgin after the birth of Jesus and that biblical references suggesting Jesus had siblings are really references to cousins (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 510). As the veneration of Mary increased throughout the centuries, the vehicle of Sacred Tradition became the means of promoting new doctrines not explicitly taught in the Bible. The virginity of Mary is clearly taught in scripture when describing the birth of Jesus. But is the doctrine of her continued virginity...

The darkest hour is just before dawn. A huge swath of this planet, from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Philippine Sea, has been held in a synthetic,forced nightfall for nearly fourteen centuries. But the sunrise is coming, it is coming sooner rather than later, and this light will be the life of men. Everywhere in the western world, people look at the savage violence that is a daily occurrence in the Muslim world and shake their heads in stunned disbelief. A pastor of a very small Christian flock in Florida burns a Koran. Weeks later at literally the global...

TOLEDO, Ohio -- Two cousins from the Chicago area who admitted they wanted to kill American soldiers in Iraq as part of a plot centered in Ohio were sentenced to prison terms Monday. Both men apologized in federal court, saying they became misguided after the U.S.-led invasion overseas. "I was caught up with the fervor of world events," said Zubair Ahmed. "At that time, I was looking at U.S. troops as my enemy." U.S. District Judge James Carr sentenced Ahmed, of suburban North Chicago, to 10 years, and his cousin, Khaleel Ahmed, of Chicago, to eight years, four months. Both...

WALTER CRONKITE PROMOTES DEMOCRATIC FEDERAL WORLD GOVERNMENT (Received W.F.A.'s Norman Cousins Global Governance Award on 19 October 1999} I am greatly honored to receive this award for two reasons: first, I believe as Norman Cousins did that the first priority of humankind in this era is to establish an effective system of world law that will assure peace with justice among the peoples of the world; second, I feel sentimental about this award because half a century ago Norman offered me a job as spokesman and Washington lobbyist for the World Federalist organization, which was then in its infancy. I...

As if their White House bonding session over a few beers later today couldn't get any more bizarre, it has now emerged that the prominent US black academic and the white policeman who controversially arrested him may be distant cousins. Prof Henry Louis Gates and Sgt James Crowley are both descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages, a 4th century Irish warlord who was renowned for his prowess on the battlefield and the bedroom. In a television series on African-American ancestry which the Harvard academic hosted last year, Prof Gates discovered he was descended from an Irish immigrant and a...

Henry Louis Gates Jr., the black professor at the center of the racial story involving his arrest outside his Harvard University-owned house, has spoken proudly of his Irish roots. Strangely enough, he and the Cambridge, Mass., police officer who arrested him, Sgt. James Crowley, both trace their ancestry back to the legendary Niall of the Nine Hostages. In a PBS series on African-American ancestry that he hosted in 2008, Gates discovered his Irish roots when he found he was descended from an Irish immigrant and a slave girl. He went to Trinity College in Dublin to have his DNA analyzed....

AP's headline is "Cousins plead guilty in plot to kill US soldiers." But of course they didn't get involved in this plot because they were cousins. The Department of Homeland Security doesn't need to begin a Global War On Cousins. They did this because they wanted to wage jihad. They met the jihad recruiter at a Muslim convention. They were clearly inspired by Islamic teachings regarding the necessity to wage war against unbelievers. But since none of that is suitable for an AP headline, we get...cousins. An update on this story. "Cousins plead guilty in plot to kill US soldiers,"...

BAGHDAD — For many deployed Soldiers, the unit begins to feel like family after serving and fighting alongside each other day after day. But for two Soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 63rd Combined Arms Battalion, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, Multi-National Division- Baghdad currently deployed to Iraq, they already are. Spc. Rufo Lujan-Espinosa and Pfc. Andre Toves, both of whom are natives of the territory of Guam, are cousins and serve here together at Forward Operating Base Mahmudiyah. Both grew up in small towns only five miles apart on the southern part of the island of Guam. The...

"MELBOURNE: The belief that babies born to first-cousins will suffer from some kind of deformities is all a myth, say researchers in Australia. "

The inlaws would like a word to help us define our relationships. Is there a name for the relationship the parents have to each other? We are more like sisters than inlaws. Explaining the marriages makes your brain explode so we'd like to find a short name to tell the story more succinctly. My daughter is her brother's cousin in-law. My son is his sister's cousin in-law. My daughter's mother in law is her brother's aunt. My son's mother in-law is his sister's aunt.

Egypt shocked by 'foul-mouthed' Gaza cousins By Carolynne Wheeler in Cairo Last Updated: 11:59pm GMT 16/02/2008 Like many Egyptians, Mohammed Sayeed had always harboured sympathy for his Arab brothers in neighbouring Israeli-occupied Palestine. But that sympathy was tested last month when Hamas blew open the Gaza Strip's land crossing with Egypt and Palestinians crossed the border in droves. Palestinians cross the Rafah border into Egypt over a barrier destroyed by Palestinian militants "It wasn't nice at all," remembers Mr Sayeed, whose restaurant near the town of al-Arish, 30 miles from the border, was overrun by Gazans demanding food and service....

A government minister has warned that inbreeding among immigrants is causing a surge in birth defects - comments likely to spark a new row over the place of Muslims in British society. Phil Woolas, an environment minister, said the culture of arranged marriages between first cousins was the “elephant in the room”. Woolas, a former race relations minister, said: “If you have a child with your cousin the likelihood is there’ll be a genetic problem.” The minister, whose views were supported by medical experts this weekend, said: “The issue we need to debate is first cousin marriages, whereby a lot...

Third Cousins Have Greatest Number Of Offspring, Data From Iceland Shows ScienceDaily (Feb. 8, 2008) — DeCODE scientists have established a substantial and consistent positive correlation between the kinship of couples and the number of children and grandchildren they have. The study, which analyzes more than 200 years of deCODE's comprehensive define genealogical data on the population of Iceland, shows that couples related at the level of third cousins have the greatest number of offspring. For example, for women born between 1800 and 1824, those with a mate related at the level of a third cousin had an average of...

As police, social workers and community leaders meet in Preston, Lancashire, to discuss the issue of forced marriages and so-called honour killings, one woman tells the story of her own traumatic experience. In 1983, Gina's father arranged what she believed to be a holiday for her in Pakistan. She was 16 and had no idea of what she calls "the conspiracy" in the back of her father's mind. When she arrived there her uncle gave her a ring and some clothes to wear. As a teenager with little experience of life in Pakistan, Gina believed this was a welcoming custom....

2 Cousins Nabbed on Terror Charges Wednesday February 21, 2007 10:16 PM By MIKE ROBINSON Associated Press Writer CHICAGO (AP) - Two cousins were arrested Wednesday on charges of conspiring to commit ``jihad'' terrorist acts against Americans overseas, including U.S. military forces in Iraq. Zubair A. Ahmed, 27, of suburban North Chicago, and Khaleel Ahmed, 26, of Chicago, were arrested after a grand jury in Cleveland returned an indictment charging them and three other men who already had been facing terrorism charges. The indictment alleged that the conspiracy included finding fresh recruits to wage ``violent jihad'' against Americans and locating...

7/5/2006 - LAUGHLIN AIR FORCE BASE, Texas (AFPN) -- Jennifer Manibusan and her cousin Catherine Balolong have smiles big enough to light up a room. And the two senior airmen have had plenty to smile about since joining the Air Force in December 2002, mostly because they've had the good fortune to have served together since the day they joined. That has helped them adapt to Air Force life. Today, both are air traffic controllers with the 47th Operations Support Squadron at this busy pilot-training base near Del Rio, a town on the Texas-Mexico border. Squadron mates call the inseparable...

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Mike Slabaugh doesn't have a stomach. Neither do his 10 cousins. Growing up, they watched helplessly as a rare hereditary stomach cancer killed their grandmother and some of their parents, aunts and uncles. Determined to outsmart the cancer, they turned to genetic testing. Upon learning they had inherited grandmother Golda Bradfield's flawed gene, they had two options: Risk the odds that they might not develop cancer, with a 70 percent chance they would; or have their stomachs removed. The latter would mean a challenging life of eating very little, very often. All the cousins chose...

CAMP FALLUJAH, Iraq (Dec. 18, 2005) -- While growing up in the countryside, three cousins from Colfax, La., were inseparable; eventually these boys would grow closer as Marines. Staff Sergeants Marcus L. Allen, 35, Derrick D. Eddie, 32, and Adrian C. Bowie, 35, all on their first deployment in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, share a brotherhood deeper than the typical combat zone camaraderie. The three brothers-in-arms grew up only minutes from each other surrounded by their close-knit family. “We did everything together,” said Allen, security manager, II Marine Expeditionary Force , Headquarters Group, II MEF (FWD). “We played basketball,...

Ban Asian marriages of cousins, says MP By Marco Giannangeli (Filed: 16/11/2005) Marriages between cousins should be banned after research showed alarming rates in defective births among Asian communities in Britain, a Labour MP said last night. The report, commissioned by Ann Cryer, revealed that the Pakistani community accounted for 30 per cent of all births with recessive disorders, despite representing 3.4 per cent of the birth rate nationwide. "We address problems of smoking, drinking, obesity and we say it's a public health issue, therefore we have to get involved with persuading people to adopt a different lifestyle," the MP...

Kennewick Man, meet your distant cousins By Kate Riley Monday, November 7, 2005 - Page updated at 12:00 AM COLUMBIA, S.C. — Discerning the story of America's prehistoric past is a bit like groping through an unfamiliar room in the dark. One learned scientist's tattooing tool is another's piece of rock. Ask them to agree how long it has been there and you're bound to set off an argument that makes Seattle's whether-to-monorail conflict seem like a tea party. So it goes with evolving thought in archaeology. We all know the prevailing theory. Our children's high-school textbooks talk about the...

Massachusetts Republican Party officials, down to their last chance to find a credible candidate, are working to persuade Essex Sheriff Frank G. Cousins Jr. to run against US Senator Edward M. Kennedy next year. In a behind-the-scenes effort, state GOP leaders have spent over a month talking with Cousins about launching what most political observers say would very likely be a futile mission against Kennedy, who has talked of running a hard-edged campaign to retain the seat he has held since 1962. Cousins this week confirmed that he was in discussions with party officials, but he downplayed his interest in...

No one knows another's life. Certainly no child really knows all there is of a father's. But in broad strokes I will try to tell the things which I knew were meaningful to my father. He was born in a small village in Poland. I've seen the name spelled in a variety of ways, but phonetically spelled it was Ravitz. Once in an Isaac Bashevis Singer short story he related stopping there briefly in a train trip from Lublin to Russia. My father said it didn't even have wooden sidewalks or outdoor toilets. His father, Morris, was a master tailor....

<p>Love and Marriage: Pa. Cousins Try to Overcome Taboo of 'I Do'</p> <p>"ALTOONA, Pa.--Love comes in at the eye, the poet William Butler Yeats wrote, and so it was for Donald Andrews: One look, and he knew that he was in love, intensely in love.</p>

There was nothing about the appearance of the young woman who stood up to speak at Rahat's new community center that hinted at the heretical statement she was about to make. "I'm five months pregnant, with a daughter, and already they're trying to fix her up with husbands," she said. "But I won't have my daughter marry a cousin." Like most of the 150 women and teenage girls in the hall, the speaker's head was covered with a cloth and she wore a long dress. But her statement reflected a new state of mind that has been infiltrating Bedouin society...

Pedigree of Terrorism Discovered Half of all marriages in most Middle Eastern countries are between cousins. I think the pedigree of Islamic style terrorism has been discovered. When the Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty radio hosts made mention of the statistic, I didn’t believe it. So I did some research. In Dorothy C. Wertz’s, PhD, article (from GeneLetter, March 1st, 2000) “Kissing Cousins: The Genetic Fallout of Consanquinity”, the statistic was revealed that in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan, over half of all marriages are consanguineous, the common type being that of patrilateral first-cousins. This was...

<p>Heck, the two are related.</p> <p>According to a fully sourced ancestral history lineage-linked in the Family Forest Web page, Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry now are calculated to be at least 9th cousins twice removed. And as more of the pair's ancestral lines continue to grow, the relationship might become even closer, experts say.</p>