Saturday 18 June 2016

Ex-teacher who says Noah's Ark killed dinosaurs loses board of education bid


Martha Lou Bruner lost the woman Republican primary runoff for a seat on the powerful Texas state panel of education on Thursday night, just two a few months following a near-outright victory that would have put the girl on the brink of having a say in what more than five million schoolchildren learn in classrooms and read in textbooks.
The 69-year-old Bruner has posted on Myspace claims that Barack Obama is a gay prostitute, climate change is a hoax concocted by Karl Marx and that Obama's healthcare overhaul was an orchestrated plot to wash 200 million people from the US population. The lady also wrote that the flood from the biblical story of Noah's Ark is what destroyed the dinosaurs, not a meteor as "concocted" by atheists.
In March, Bruner arrived within two percentage points of avoiding a runoff altogether. But Republican voters relocated this time to Keven Ellis, a local college board president in Lufkin who ran a popular campaign.
"I honestly believe in the primary - that was during the usa president primary, too - our race just got hidden, " said Ellis, who wouldn't criticize Bruner subsequent his victory and instead thanked her for the woman career as a teacher.
"Voters just may have selected a name, " Ellis said.
Ellis easily won with practically 60% of the vote. Bruner's fade was perhaps attached not only to increasing attention surrounding her since-deleted Facebook posts but also to an influential Teas Party group recently pulling out its endorsement. Grassroots The united states did not cite Bruner's conspiracy theories and perimeter political screeds on interpersonal media in taking again its support but rather her making inaccurate college data claims.
Bruner do not reply to an email seeking comment Tuesday night.
In an interview with Dallas tv set station WFAA in the weekend ahead of the runoff, she did not disavow her Facebook articles.
"When I wrote those things, I wasn't even intending to run for the state board of education. I had no idea that I would, " the lady said.
Ellis will be heavily favored to defeat his Democratic opponent, a college or university professor, in The fall of because the East Tx district is so staunchly conservative.
A few of Bruner's Facebooks posts were several years old and were saved by the Texas Freedom Network, a left-leaning watchdog of the state schooling board, before disappearing from her page.
"Texas escaped an education train damage tonight, " the group's president, Kathy Miller, said.
Bruner's election would have been stunning, even given that the Texas express board of education was chaired until 2011 by a creationist who attempted weakening evolution lessons in science classrooms. The 15-member panel next year is scheduled to take upward divisive revisions which could change what Texas student learn about science and sociable studies.
Curriculum battles on the Texas education board are often closely viewed over worries that the state's textbook buying strength influences what winds up in classrooms across the US. But publishing experts say technology now allows the industry to more readily customize textbooks for personal markets.

D.C. police framed man imprisoned 27 years for 1981 murder, U.S. jury finds

A federal jury on Wednesday found that D.C. police framed an innocent man for a 1981 rape and murder, making the District liable for damages after he was imprisoned for 27 years.
Jurors found that two D.C. homicide detectives fabricated all or part of a confession purportedly made by the wrongly accused Donald E. Gates to a police informant. The detectives also withheld other evidence from Gates before he was convicted in the fatal attack on a 21-year-old Georgetown University student in Rock Creek Park, jurors found.
Gates, now 64, was exonerated in the June 1981 killing and released from prison in 2009 after DNA testing.
Following Wednesday’s verdict, Gates’s attorneys said the detectives’ conduct warranted investigation into their handling of other cases. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District declined to comment on the verdict or whether the decision exposes the detectives to criminal investigation for perjury.
“It feels like the God of the King James Bible is real, and he answered my prayers,” Gates, who lives in Knoxville, Tenn., said as he left the courtroom. “Justice is on the way to being fulfilled. . . . It’s one of the happiest days of my life.”
The verdict opens a new round of accountability for Gates’s wrongful conviction, which earlier triggered reviews by the U.S. attorney’s office, the Justice Department and the FBI. The jury’s decision means the District could be ordered to pay millions of dollars for misconduct by homicide detectives Ronald S. Taylor and Norman Brooks, now retired.
A third defendant — now-retired­ lieutenant John Harlow — was cleared by the jury.
Gates’s case was the first federal civil rights claim for damages involving a wrongful conviction in the District.
By law, jurors face no limit on how much money they can award Gates in compensatory damages. The dollar figure will be set as the civil trial continues before Chief Judge Richard W. Roberts of U.S. District Court.
The possibility of a sizable sum for Gates clearly weighed on District attorneys who addressed the jury.
“We know that given the verdict Mr. Gates is entitled to compensation, but we ask in reaching your decision that you continue to exercise common sense in determining damages that are rationally related,” said Joseph A. Gonzalez of the D.C. Attorney General’s office, which represented the detectives.
D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D) is expected to review both the verdict and any damage award for appeal but did not immediately comment. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) also declined to comment.
Harlow, a Vietnam veteran who retired to serve as a bank executive in South Carolina, said he was pleased to be cleared.
“The Metropolitan Police Department is an outstanding police department known nationally and worldwide for its professionalism,” Harlow said. He added that his co-defendants “are the highest-quality, professional detectives that I have ever worked with, and if I were the victim of a homicide, those are the first two detectives I would want involved in my case.”
Brooks, who worked 17 years in homicide and is now a security officer for the Federal Reserve Bank, declined to comment through his attorneys, Robert A. DeBerardinis Jr. and Gonzalez. Taylor, who retired after 20 years with the police department to provide security to entertainers, left the courthouse Tuesday and was not present for the verdict. Both are District natives and Vietnam War veterans.
Gates received nearly $1.4 million from the U.S. government under a federal law that grants $50,000 per year of wrongful imprisonment to innocent individuals who waive claims against federal officials.
Roberts is separately weighing whether the D.C. government is liable for damages to be awarded to Gates under the city’s Unjust Imprisonment Act. Such awards are uncapped and set by a judge.
In the only previous trial under that law in the past 30 years, a D.C. Superior Court judge in February awarded $9.2 million, including $350,000 per year of incarceration, to Kirk L. Odom, a District man wrongfully imprisoned for more than 22 years for a 1981 rape and robbery. The city has appealed that award.
Gates was sentenced to life in prison in 1982 for the death of Catherine T. Schilling of Locust, N.J.
At Gates’s criminal trial, a D.C. Superior Court jury was told that Gates had confessed to an informant, Gerald Max “Bear” Smith; that an FBI forensic expert had matched Gates’s hairs to ones found on the victim; and that Gates had committed a drunken purse-snatching weeks earlier in the same area.
Gates maintained his innocence, and his DNA exoneration decades later prompted the D.C. Public Defender Service and U.S. prosecutors to re-investigate and uncover wrongful convictions of four other District men who had served long sentences for rape or murder based on flawed FBI hair matches.
The FBI this spring acknowledged after its own review of more than 2,000 cases that its forensic hair examiners for more than two decades overstated testimony regarding the near-certainty of matches.
U.S. prosecutors in 2012 traced genetic evidence left at the Schilling scene to the true culprit, who died a year earlier. Prosecutors said he was a convicted offender and temporary janitor who had worked in the same building as Schilling. But the U.S. attorney’s office has not identified him by name, arguing that his privacy interests continued beyond his death.
This month’s federal trial in the Gates case focused on the original police investigation of Gates, including detectives’ dealings with the informant, Smith, the suppression of warnings about the identity of the actual killer, and the reliability of Smith and his incentives to incriminate Gates.
Jurors deliberated less than seven hours before finding that Taylor, the lead detective, had violated Gates’s right to a fair trial by feeding Gates’s name and other details to the informant, and that both detectives had conspired and withheld information.
For example, jurors found Taylor ignored warnings by a junior homicide investigator, W. Louis Hennessy, now a Calvert County, Md., judge, that Smith was “treacherous” and totally unreliable.
Gates’s trial defense attorney, Hamilton “Phil” Fox, also testified that he never learned that Smith’s story prompted authorities to drop a charge that he stole $400 from police, which put him at risk of an extended prison term because of his own criminal record.
Peter Neufeld, one of Gates’s attorneys and a member of the Neufeld Scheck & Brustin law firm of New York, said the conduct of police — particularly Taylor, who was one of two detectives who oversaw the 40-member homicide unit — was troubling given that the jurors’ verdict Wednesday meant they had concluded that police lied in the past and at this month’s trial.

“The fact that he would so brazenly lie under oath as well as fabricate evidence and suppress exculpatory evidence will certainly warrant appropriate investigations,” Neufeld said.

Atheist Endows Chair for Study of Atheism; Look What He’s Got Cradled in His Hands

Atheist Endows Chair for Study of Atheism; Look What He's Got Cradled in His Hands
Theistic evolutionists are at pains to assure everyone that evolutionary thinking -- the idea that all life arose by an unguided process of blind churning -- poses no challenge to theism. Well, see this from the New York Times about anatheist businesman who's endowed a chair for the study of atheism at the University of Miami:
The chair has been established after years of discussion with a $2.2 million donation from Louis J. Appignani, a retired businessman and former president and chairman of the modeling school Barbizon International, who has given grants to many humanist and secular causes -- though this is his largest so far....
"I'm trying to eliminate discrimination against atheists," said Mr. Appignani, who is 83 and lives in Florida. "So this is a step in that direction, to make atheism legitimate."
Religion departments and professors of religious studies are a standard feature at most colleges and universities, many originally founded by ministers and churches. The study of atheism and secularism is only now starting to emerge as an accepted academic field, scholars say, with its own journal, conferences, course offerings and, now, an endowed chair.
Dawkins is excited:
"I think it's a very bold step of the University of Miami, and I hope there will be others," said Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and atheist luminary who is the author of "The God Delusion."
"It's enormously important to shake off the shackles of religion from the study of morality," Mr. Dawkins said in a telephone interview from his home in Britain.
What struck me is the accompanying photo of Mr. Appignani; find here it at theNY Times page. Look what he's cradling in his hands. It is this, shown in more detail in the Wikipedia article:
That's a famous statuette designed by 19th-century sculptor Hugo Rheinhold and endlessly reproduced, showing a chimp contemplating a human skull. The ape sits atop a pile of books, one of which is prominently labeled "DARWIN." Famously, Lenin had such a statue displayed on his desk in the Kremlin. I've commented on it before ("Darwinism & Communism, Part II").
Here's a copy a friend of ours owns, a slight variation on the original. His wife found it at a garage sale and gave it to him as a joke.
But it's no joke, really. Besides the tribute to Darwin, note this, again fromWikipedia:
The book open at the [chimp's] feet and facing the viewer has a single inscription on the right hand page: "eritis sicut deus" fromGenesis 3.5 when the serpent is enticing Eve to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden against the Lord's command, promising "And ye shall be as God [knowing good and evil]"), however the second half of this quote is missing, ripped from the lower half of the page.
Obviously, I don't know what if any message Mr. Appignani sought to convey by posing for the photographer with this particular artwork in hand. But it was certainly an apt gesture, crystalizing some of the beliefs he'll help share with students at the University of Miami.
See here for the most recent survey data from Discovery Institute on the corrosive impact of the evolutionary style of thought on ideas about humanity's place in the universe. Our theistic evolutionary friends can say what they like about the benign influence of Darwinism, but atheists know better.
Photos: University of Miami, via Wikicommons; "Ape with Skull," by Derry, J.F.

Jeremy Jordan Is Trying to Save His Cousin Sent to 'Pray Away the Gay' Facility Source: Jeremy Jordan Is Trying to Save His Cousin Sent to ‘Pray Away the Gay’ Facility



Supergirl star Jeremy Jordan is on a mission to free his 17-year-old gay cousin Sarah from an East Texas Christian boarding facility where she was sent against her will to “pray away the gay.”
When Sarah‘s parents found out that she wanted to go to the prom with her girlfriend, they sent her away for a full year. She is not allowed to have any contact with the outside world and she is forced to do labor and Bible-based therapy every day.
Sarah is also not allowed to have visitors and cannot leave the property. She tried to escape once and was caught by the staff and returned to the facility.
Jeremy and his family have started a Gofundme campaign to raise money for the legal costs of trying to win Sarah‘s release from the facility.
So far over $21,000 has been raised, including a generous $5,000 donation from Colton Haynes. “This absolutely breaks my heart. Pls help Jeremy Jordan’s cousin be her true self,” he tweeted.




Source: Jeremy Jordan Is Trying to Save His Cousin Sent to ‘Pray Away the Gay’ Facility | Jeremy Jordan : Just Jared | http://www.justjared.com/2016/06/06/jeremy-jordan-is-trying-to-save-his-cousin-sent-to-pray-away-the-gay-facility/?trackback=tsmclip

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