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A cleric read the verdict before the truck came and dumped a large pile of stones near the municipal garden. Jihadi fighters then brought in the woman, clad head to toe in black, and put her in a small hole in the ground. When residents gathered, the fighters told them to carry out the sentence: Stoning to death for the alleged adulteress. None in the crowd stepped forward, said a witness to the event in a northern Syrian city. So the jihadi fighters, mostly foreign extremists, did it themselves, pelting Faddah Ahmad with stones until her body was dragged away....

Shortly before taking leave of this world, Sir Winston Churchill, who had lived a very long and illustrious life, was reportedly asked about the state of his soul: “I am perfectly ready,” he said, “to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.” Only someone of the stature of Sir Winston could pull off a piece of effrontery that egregious. And, thank God, there’s probably not much of him in most mortal men. I doubt that there was any at all in my brother Michael. He was far too humble to...

The day we learned of the two American aid workers stricken with Ebola in Liberia, I started hearing from talk show listeners with a variety of views. Here in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area, there was particular attention to the Fort Worth church community of Dr. Kent Brantly, who has earned appropriate praise for his selflessness in traveling across an ocean to care for people in a cauldron of poverty no American has ever experienced. His colleague, Nancy Writebol, is no less honorable for her devotion to the cause. But as the story broke, a common sentiment began to attach itself...

Do I as a living, breathing, conscious person have a concrete hope for my future? What do I have to look forward to? At times, when I discover that my own spirit is sagging and a sense of heaviness intrudes on me, I sometimes wonder why the gloomy cloud is perched above my head. Biblical eschatology gives us solid reasons for expecting a personal continuity of life. Eternal life for the individual is not an empty human aspiration built on myth, but an assurance promised us by Christ Himself. His own triumph over the grave is the church’s hope for...

To judge from the ghastly details of “The Wichita Massacre” that I relayed in a recent article, it is difficult not to think that this abomination of a crime supplies us with as blatant an expression of unmitigated evil as any that we’re likely to encounter. Indeed, Reginald Carr and his brother Jonathan are in fact the “soulless monsters” that one of their two surviving victims described them as being, and if they were white and their victims were black—rather than the other way around—there isn’t a person in America who wouldn’t have long known this. Yet as a...

Kevin LoriaAugust. 4, 2014 Both of the Ebola-infected U.S. citizens in Liberia received a rare dose of what news reports called a "secret serum" to treat the virus before being transported to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, according to a CNN report. And while some people do fight off the disease on their own, in the case of the two Americans, that experimental serum may have saved their lives. As Dr. Kent Brantly and missionary Nancy Writebol waited in a Liberian hospital, someone from the National Institutes of Health reached out to Samaritan's Purse, one of the two North Carolina-based...

Tyler Durden 07/30/2014 As Ebola spreads mercilessly across the world, it appears Florida has a problem that sounds just as awful. As CBS reports, Florida health officials are warning beachgoers about a seawater bacterium that can invade cuts and scrapes to cause flesh-eating disease. At least 11 Floridians have contracted Vibrio vulnificus so far this year and two have died, according to the most recent state data. Not exactly great news for Florida beach season... Vibrio vulnificus –- a cousin of the bacterium that causes Cholera –- thrives in warm saltwater, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and...

Two women were caught in the middle of a railway bridge in Monroe County as a train was coming their way earlier this month on July 10. It was an 80-foot drop down into the water.

Today is my youngest brother's birthday. He died a week before his 51st birthday. In his honor, and to show what kind of person he was, I thought I'd share something he wrote for our Mother's Day in 2010 for her, while she was dying of esophageal cancer. "Promises (Between a Mother and a Son)" Dear Mother, When I was conceived, you promised to bring me into this world healthy. And you did. When I was young, you promised to love me and nurture me. And you did. When things got rough, and you were all alone, you promised to...

Wichita police say a 10-month-old baby was left alone in a hot car for two to two and a half hours Thursday afternoon. The girl was found dead at around 6:40 pm in the 1500 block of S. Topeka. Police say the girl's 29-year-old foster father picked her up from a babysitter at around 4:00 in the afternoon. They returned to the home along with a five-year-old child. Police say, somehow, the child was left behind in the car as the 29-year-old and the 5-year-old went inside. The foster father's partner, a 26-year-old man who is also a foster parent,...

Dan Borislow, the inventor of magicJack and a pioneer in developing phone calls over the Internet, died Monday, officials at the company he founded said. He was 52. A spokeswoman for MagicJack Vocaltec Ltd., said he died of a heart attack. In a statement, MagicJack CEO Gerald Vento praised Borislow as a visionary.

First, Howard Dean wanted to ship all Republicans to the Ukraine or Russia. Now, unions and at least one elected official are calling for the GOP’s death. As The Colorado Statesman reports, state Rep. Crisanta Duran marched with a Latino group and the Service Employees International Union as they chanted “Death to the Colorado GOP.” At a rally on Tuesday in downtown Denver led by the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, Latino leaders and community groups held a mock funeral procession in which they declared, “Death to the Colorado GOP for killing immigration reform.” Joining the demonstration was state...

The hunt for a perfect contraceptive has gone on for millennia. A new candidate is now on the horizon: a wireless implant that can be turned on and off with a remote control and that is designed to last up to 16 years. If it passes safety and efficacy tests, the device would be more convenient for many women because, unlike existing contraceptive implants, it can be deactivated without a trip to the clinic and an outpatient procedure, and it would last nearly half their reproductive life. Developed by MicroCHIPS of Lexington, Massachusetts, the device will begin pre-clinical testing next...

EUTHANASIA guru Dr Philip Nitschke is furious the ABC has finally pinged him for actually helping the healthy to kill themselves. “Attacked by rabid Christians & journalist jackals!” he tweeted last week. But you don’t need to be rabid or even Christian to consider Nitschke dangerous. For 20 years Nitschke, founder of Exit International, has had largely positive coverage from a media which too often assumed he’s just helping the dying and the suffering. Only now does he seem in trouble, with the Black Dog Institute, the Australian Medical Association and beyondblue publicly denouncing him. This follows the ABC’s revelations...

A Michigan man accused of shooting a 2-year-old girl dead at point-blank range as she sat on a porch with her father has been charged with torture as well as first degree murder. Police say the torture charge is because Raymone Bernard Jackson, 24, wanted to torment Kamiya French's father with his daughter's death, making it the last thing he ever saw, the Detroit Free Press reports. Jackson was in court yesterday and another suspect in the killing in the Detroit suburb of Inkster is being questioned. "The first coward's in custody," a police spokesman says. "Anybody that feels that...

After a brief holiday last week, I returned to some heavy reading courtesy of the federal government. Some of the materials that I read were gratifying, and one was terrifying. In one week, the Supreme Court told the police that if they want to examine the contents of our cellphones, whether at traffic stops or serious crime scenes, they need to get a warrant. The court told small-business owners that they needn't pay for government-mandated insurance policies that provide for abortions for their employees, because the government is without authority to command them to do so. It told the president...

World leaders were unanimous Wednesday in condemning the killing of Mohammad Abu Khdeir, a 16-year-old Palestinian who was most likely kidnapped and murdered in revenge for the death of three Israeli teens that were abducted and recently found dead in the West Bank. In a series of posts on Twitter, National Security Adviser Susan Rice said the US is paying close attention to the investigation into the death of 17-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir. She also offered condolences to his family and the Palestinian people. US Secretary of State John Kerry also condemned the murder, calling the act "sickening" and saying,...

By a mixture of ideology and fiscal and social policies, the family has been systematically fractured and destroyed in England, at least in the lowest part of the society that, unfortunately, needs family solidarity the most. Certainly the notions of dependence and independence have changed. I remember a population that was terrified of falling into dependence on the state, because such dependence, apart from being unpleasant in itself, signified personal failure and humiliation. But there has been an astonishing gestalt switch in my lifetime. Independence has now come to mean independence of the people to whom one is related and...

The world lost not only one of the greatest baseball players of all-time this week, but one of the finest representatives for baseball, sports and humans of all kinds. The death of this wonderful man at the early age of 54-years-old was a loss for all of us. My first awareness of Tony Gwynn came early as he followed me by just one year after I graduated from San Diego State University. Fascinatingly, he came to the Aztecs as a highly-heralded basketball point guard and did not even play baseball at SDSU his first year. He became such a...

Back in 2006, after the second US invasion of Iraq culminated if not with the discovery of the WMDs (which were the pretext for the invasion in the first place), but the unearthing (literally) and kangaroo court trial of Saddam Hussein, the US was quick to announce "mission accomplished." Recent events have made a mockery of that claim, however what is truly the straw that broke the back of poetic justice, to mix metaphors, are reports from local media that as part of its blitz-campaign to take over northern Iraq, ISIS found and the promptly executed Rauf Rashid Abd al-Rahman,...