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In May we reported that ABC News editor Don Ennis walked into his New York City office wearing a small black dress and a brunette wig and told his coworkers that he is legally changing his name to Dawn Stacey Ennis. Several months later, it turns out, Ennis has decided he no longer wants to be a woman. Back then, Ennis, 49, wrote to his colleagues: “This is not a game of dress-up, or make-believe. It is my affirmation of who I now am and what I must do to be happy, in response to a soul-crushing secret that my...

The Hollywood Reporter's Todd McCarthy shouldn't be surprised that director Neil Blokamp's "latest politically tinged sci-fi feature" falls apart during the third act. So did Blokamp's first politically tinged sci-fi feature, the overrated but promising "District 9." According to McCarthy's astute review, though, "Elysium" goes a step further into the arena of wild left-wing, Hollywood hypocrisy. Here is how McCarthy describes the world and plot of what is likely another box-office bomb from star Matt Damon: Blomkamp sets the dystopian juices flowing with images of future sprawling slums and urban ruin that one might initially take to be Mexico City...

If you’re a physician who sees children and adolescents on a regular basis, there is a lot you can do to encourage young patients and their families to view homosexuality as normal and healthy, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. The AAP recently issued an updated policy statement concerning homosexuality to its 60,000 members. The new guidelines say pediatricians should strive to “provide the context that being LGBTQ is normal, just different.” According to the AAP, homosexuality “should not be considered abnormal.” While the organization acknowledges that “LGBTQ” teens as a whole engage in riskier behaviors and report higher...

SEATTLE - An internal memo at Seattle City Hall is causing quite a stir. It suggests government workers no longer use the terms "citizen," or "brown bag."  According to the Office for Civil Rights, the terms are potentially offensive and other words should be used. "Luckily, we've got options," Elliott Bronstein of the Office for Civil Rights wrote in the memo. "For 'citizens,' how about 'residents?'" Bronstein wrote. The Office of Civil Rights says Seattle serves all residents, whether they're United States citizens or not. And while city leaders publicize "brown bag" lunch meetings as a way to designate...

The family rescued by George Zimmerman when they were trapped in an overturned SUV canceled a scheduled news conference today and is pleading for privacy.

I knew going into my 30-day experiment of living with a gun that I was putting my family and myself at risk. Only two days into my experiment I went to breakfast with my two kids and some friends. After eating and shopping, my gun with me the entire time, I was anxious to get home to enjoy the warm weather. I put my purse on the counter and then spent the next hour out on the back deck. Walking into the kitchen to refresh our drinks, I noticed my purse with the 9mm Glock still inside it. I’d forgotten...

In an emotional, fiery post on his blog, The Audacity of Despair, Simon denounced the verdict, saying he was "ashamed to call himself an American."

The system failed him when everyone in the courtroom raised racial bias in roundabout ways, but almost never directly — for example, when the defense held up a picture of a shirtless Martin and told the jurors that this was the person Zimmerman encountered the night he shot him. But in fact it was not the way Zimmerman had seen Martin. Consciously or subconsciously, the defense played on an old racial trope: asking the all-female jury — mostly white — to fear the image of the glistening black buck, as Zimmerman had.

BERLIN — IN May 2010, I received a brown envelope. In it was a CD with an encrypted file containing six months of my life. Six months of metadata, stored by my cellphone provider, T-Mobile. This list of metadata contained 35,830 records. That’s 35,830 times my phone company knew if, where and when I was surfing the Web, calling or texting. The truth is that phone companies have this data on every customer. I got mine because, in 2009, I filed a suit against T-Mobile for the release of all the data on me that had been gathered and stored....

What if McCain/Palin won, then McCain died -- and a terror attack followed. Apocalyptic fiction from a nightmare It is obvious in retrospect that only an external attack like that on 7/22 could have saved the Palin presidency. Without it, would any of what followed have happened? I doubt it. The Democrats would have recaptured both the White House and Senate that fall. The culture wars would have simmered on, but the evangelical movement’s momentum on the path toward political power would have been lost. I would be installed in my corner office downtown, practicing law. I would probably have...

I just want you to know: I am so proud of you. In you I see a fierce resistance that reminds me of ancestors past. Each time you open your mouth, look down, clench your cheeks in a fresh wave of pain, I see Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Fannie Lou Hamer joining their spirits and bonding their strength to yours. I see a survivor, a woman who has miraculously kept her mind and nurtured her sanity enough that she can sit, for hours, and recount such horror. You have a brilliance that flares out, only to be quickly veiled...

On Wednesday, Great Britain’s Girl Guides (their equivalent of U.S. Girl Scouts) and Brownies removed God from their 103-year-old oath. Instead of the passage where they used to promise to “love God,” they will now vow to be true to "myself" and develop "my beliefs." The organization said the move is intended to attract girls from secular families. Andrea Minichiello Williams, CEO of Christian Concern, condemned the move, saying, "These values have their roots in a Christian outlook. Taking ‘God’ out of the promise denies the history and foundations of the movement without offering anything in its place, with the...

Danielle Sheridan, age 8, was born a boy. Before she was 3, she began telling her parents she was a girl. It wasn't a phase. She was insistent. She identified with Cinderella. She wanted to grow up and marry a prince. She began dressing like a girl at home. “We kept it in our home only because of our fear of society. We wanted her to be happy, but we wanted her to be safe,” said her mom, Leah Sheridan, 35. Finally, her daughter said she didn’t want to live if she had to live as a boy. “She said...

Obama promised to “reset” the U.S. relationship with Russia, and he succeeded: Russia went from disliking, but respecting, America and President Bush, to loathing, and looking down upon, America and, especially, her president. The photograph of Obama and Russian President Putin sitting side-by-side radiating hatred spells it all out. One of the reasons given for Putin’s hostility, in addition to Obama’s decision to aid Syria’s Al Qaeda rebels, while Russia is aiding Bashar al Assad’s Iranian and Hezbollah fighters, is Edward Snowden’s revelation that the US is spying on Russia. That, of course, is ridiculous. The US has been spying...

<p>The Boy Scouts of America's National Council has voted to ease a long-standing ban and allow openly gay boys to be accepted as Scouts.</p>

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, May 11, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – This Sunday, children of all ages will celebrate the role mothers play in their lives. But Vogue model Christy Turlington Burns and a host of female celebrities are encouraging mothers across the nation to ignore their children as part of “No Mother’s Day,” a sign of their support for reducing maternal mortality by supporting family planning and global access to abortion. The campaign asks women to “disappear” on Mother’s Day to raise awareness of maternal mortality rates and underscore “just how much a mother is missed when she’s gone.” But amidst positive...

The California State Assembly passed a bill Thursday mandating schools permit boys to play on girls’ athletic teams and utilize the ladies’ locker room if they gender identify as girls – or vice-versa for girls identifying as boys. The bill’s author, openly homosexual San Francisco Democrat Tom Ammiano, has been an activist for lesbian, “gay,” bisexual and transgender, or LGBT, issues for decades and reportedly became in 1975 the first San Francisco public school teacher to make his homosexuality public. Ammiano later co-founded an LGBT organization with Harvey Milk, the homosexual activist about whom Hollywood made a recent feature film...

Patients who believe in God may experience better short-term treatment outcomes for psychiatric illness, according to a new study. Individuals who described themselves as having strong faith reported having a better overall response to treatment, said David Rosmarin, a clinician and instructor in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Boston. "We found that patients who had higher levels of belief in God had better treatment outcomes — better well-being, less depression and less anxiety," Rosmarin told LiveScience.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Russian authorities secretly recorded a telephone conversation in 2011 in which one of the Boston bombing suspects vaguely discussed jihad with his mother, officials said Saturday, days after the U.S. government finally received details about the call. In another conversation, the mother of now-dead bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was recorded talking to someone in southern Russia who is under FBI investigation in an unrelated case, officials said.