China Accused of Anti-Christian Campaign as Church Demolition Begins

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Photo Credit: Telegraph

Photo Credit: Telegraph

Demolition teams began destroying parts of a Chinese church that has become a symbol of resistance to the Communist Party’s draconian clutch on religion, activists and witnesses said on Monday.

Sanjiang church in Wenzhou, a wealthy coastal city known as the “Jerusalem of the East”, made headlines earlier this month when thousands of Christians formed a human shield around its entrance after plans for its demolition were announced.

Church members accused Communist leaders in Zhejiang province of ordering an anti-church crackdown and claimed there were plans to completely or partially demolish at least 10 places of worship.

Officials rejected those accusations, alleging the church had violated building codes.

After mounting their high-profile occupation in early April, many protesters withdrew from Sanjiang church after its leaders appeared to have negotiated a compromise with the government.

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Study: 1 in 25 Death Cases Likely Innocent

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Photo Credit: Ken Piorkowski / Creative Commons

Photo Credit: Ken Piorkowski / Creative Commons

Science and law have led to the exoneration of hundreds of criminal defendants in recent decades, but big questions remain: How many other innocent defendants are locked up? How many are wrongly executed?

About one in 25 people imprisoned under a death sentence is likely innocent, according to a new statistical study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And that means it is all but certain that at least several of the 1,320 defendants executed since 1977 were innocent, the study says.

From 1973 to 2004, 1.6 percent of those sentenced to death in the U.S. — 138 prisoners — were exonerated and released because of innocence.

But the great majority of innocent people who are sentenced to death are never identified and freed, says professor Samuel Gross of the University of Michigan Law School, the study’s lead author.

The difficulty in identifying innocent inmates stems from the fact that more than 60 percent of prisoners in death penalty cases ultimately are removed from death row and resentenced to life imprisonment. Once that happens, their cases no longer receive the exhaustive reviews that the legal system provides for those on death row.

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Obama’s Fading Dream of a Foreign Policy Legacy

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

President Barack Obama envisioned building a foreign-policy legacy in his second term: a nuclear deal with sanction-strapped Iran, an end to U.S. involvement in conflicts overseas, and a successful pivot to Asia, including a trans-Pacific trade pact.

Fifteen months after his second inaugural, those goals look more problematic, and Syria’s Bashar Assad and Russia’s Vladimir Putin have created new crises. Dashed foreign-policy dreams aren’t unique to this second-term president: Dwight D. Eisenhower had to contend with the downing of a spy plane by the Soviet Union, the Iran-contra scandal bedeviled Ronald Reagan, and the Iraq War turned into a nightmare in George W. Bush’s second term.

Obama’s woes are complicated by a sense — denied by the White House — of American disengagement. “The perception of American withdrawal is palpable,” says Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser to George W. Bush.

“The Europeans and the Gulf states think that we’re leaving,” says Bill Cohen, who served as defense secretary under President Bill Clinton. “The Asian countries think we’re not coming.”

Moreover, the president is caught in a contradictory, and unfair, squeeze. On issues such as Syria and Russia, he’s depicted as insufficiently aggressive or tough. At the same time, the American public, turned off by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, wants no part of more aggressive foreign entanglements. Even some Republicans are taking cues from Senator Rand Paul’s quasi-isolationists stance.

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Ukraine Falls Further into Chaos…

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Photo Credit: Interdependent

Photo Credit: Interdependent

The day began with the police station and administration building in Kostiantynivka being overrun; next the airport at Kramatorsk was attacked with rocket propelled grenades and then the mayor of Kharkiv was shot in the back. While America and the European Union impose new sanctions on Russia, violence and turmoil continues unabated in eastern Ukraine.

The attempted murder of Gennady Kernes, the mayor of the country’s second-largest city, raised fears that prominent public figures were being targeted for assassination. On Monday night he was “fighting for his life” after surgery, said his spokesman. The blame was levelled at both the Kremlin and extreme right-wing groups.

Mr Kernes was gunned down while he was out cycling, jogging, or swimming, according to differing accounts. Valeriy Boyko, the director of the Institute of Surgery in Kiev, said the mayor had “suffered a very serious wound with a number of organs damaged”.

The 64-year-old billionaire businessman had been a fervent supporter of Viktor Yanukovych, the overthrown President, and a fierce critic of Kiev’s Maidan protest, banning similar protests in Kharkiv. Since then he had spoken out against those who want to take the region under Moscow’s rule.

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Tornadoes kill 16 in Arkansas, 1 in Oklahoma

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Photo Credit: AP / The Joplin Globe, Roger Nomer

Photo Credit: AP / The Joplin Globe, Roger Nomer

Emergency officials were searching for survivors Monday in the debris left by a powerful tornado that carved an 80-mile path of destruction through suburban Little Rock, killing at least 16 people.

The tornado that slammed into Vilonia, about 10 miles west of the state capital, on Sunday evening grew to about half a mile wide and was among a rash of tornadoes and heavy storms that rumbled across the center and south of the country overnight. The National Weather Service warned that more tornadoes, damaging winds and very large hail would strike in parts of Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana on Monday.

“We’ve got a powerful storm system affecting the eastern two-thirds of the United States over the next few days,” said Russell Schneider, director of the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla.

Brandon Morris, spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management, said crews were sifting through the rubble in the hope of uncovering survivors and to assess the full extent of the destruction.

“Right now, the main focus is life safety,” Morris said. “We’re trying to make sure everyone is accounted for.”

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Painful Video: Watch Americans Fail on Answers To Basic Citizenship Questions

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The Immigrant Archive Project just released this painful-to-watch video of Americans answering the questions asked on the naturalization test. Every applicant for U.S. citizenship must pass a civics exam that “covers important U.S. history and government topics.”

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High Doses of Antidepressants Appear to Increase Risk of Self-Harm in Young Adults

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Photo Credit: Steve Snodgrass / Creative Commons

Photo Credit: Steve Snodgrass / Creative Commons

Children and young adults who start antidepressant therapy at high doses, rather than the “modal” [average or typical] prescribed doses, appear to be at greater risk for suicidal behavior during the first 90 days of treatment.

A previous meta-analysis by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of antidepressant trials suggested that children who received antidepressants had twice the rate of suicidal ideation and behavior than children who were given a placebo. The authors of the current study sought to examine suicidal behavior and antidepressant dose, and whether risk depended on a patient’s age.

The study used data from 162,625 people (between the ages of 10 to 64 years) with depression who started antidepressant treatment with a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor at modal (the most prescribed doses on average) or at higher than modal doses from 1998 through 2010.

The rate of suicidal behavior (deliberate self-harm or DSH) among children and adults (24 years or younger) who started antidepressant therapy at high doses was about twice as high compared with a matched group of patients who received generally prescribed doses. The authors suggest this corresponds to about one additional event of DSH for every 150 patients treated with high-dose therapy. For adults 25 to 64 years old, the difference in risk for suicidal behavior was null. The study does not address why higher doses might lead to higher suicide risk.

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WATCH: John Oliver was Tougher On Former NSA Director Keith Alexander than Most Other Journalists

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Photo Credit: YouTube

Photo Credit: YouTube

Former “Daily Show” reporter John Oliver interviewed former National Security Agency director Gen. Keith Alexander on Sunday night, and it was a much tougher interview than Alexander has been subjected to in the past.

Oliver conducted the interview on his new HBO show “Last Week Tonight,” a weekly news wrap-up show structured similarly to “The Daily Show,” and managed to tweak the former NSA director over the agency’s spy programs.

Oliver began the segment by asking Alexander whether he had any regrets from his time at the NSA and whether the former NSA director believed the agency had a perception problem.

“Absolutely,” Alexander responded.

Alexander then explained that the negative perception was that the American people believed they were having their information collected, but “the reality is the target is not the American people.”

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Baggy Pants Ban Taking Effect On Wildwood Boardwalk (+video)

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Photo Credit: myfoxphilly

Photo Credit: myfoxphilly

Those Wildwood days will have a bit of a different look beginning Tuesday.

That’s right, if you’re heading to the boardwalk there, make sure you hike up your pants!

The ban on overly saggy pants is taking effect.

Philadelphia News, Weather and Sports from WTXF FOX 29

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One-Third of Americans Haven’t Visited Dentist in Past Year

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About one in three U.S. adults say they did not visit the dentist at some point in the past 12 months. The 64.7% in 2013 who said they did visit the dentist at least once in the previous year is essentially unchanged from the rate found in 2008. Women are more likely than men to report visiting the dentist annually.

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These findings are based on interviews with 178,072 American adults conducted during 2013 and with 354,645 adults conducted during 2008 as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. Respondents were asked whether they had visited the dentist in the previous 12 months. Results for all years between 2008 and 2013 are similar.

The American Dental Association recommends that adults develop a plan for dental visits with their dentist, but say even those at low risk of oral disease benefit from at least annual cleanings. Thus, one in three American adults do not meet this minimum level of dental care.

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