Columbia University Is Spending Millions Of Tax Dollars On Fake Climate-Change Death Voicemails

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller Columbia University in New York City is spending a $5.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation to produce projects that show several conjectural scenarios that promoters of global-warming science swear will happen soon if the developed world doesn’t mend its evil ways.

One of the taxpayer-funded creations is a large series of fictitious voicemails in which people complain and gasp for breath, reports Campus Reform.

For example, in one of the pretend voicemails, set in 2065, a man tells his mother that he is really worried about dying from either rising temperatures or a huge tsunami.

“If the tsunami doesn’t get us, the heat might,” the man says. “I’m just calling to say I love you and I miss you and it might be the last time you hear my voice. Bye.”

In another fake voicemail, a woman struggles frantically for breath because she is “out of CO2 credits,” according to Campus Reform.

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Pregnant Pakistani Woman Stoned to Death by Family

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Photo Credit: K.M. ChaudaryA pregnant woman was stoned to death by her own family in front of a Pakistani high court on Tuesday for marrying the man she loved.

Nearly 20 members of the woman’s family, including her father and brothers, attacked her and her husband with batons and bricks in broad daylight before a crowd of onlookers in front of the high court of Lahore, police investigator Rana Mujahid said.

Hundreds of women are murdered every year in Muslim-majority Pakistan in so-called “honor killings” carried out by husbands or relatives as a punishment for alleged adultery or other illicit sexual behavior, but public stoning is extremely rare.

Mujahid said the woman’s father has been arrested for murder and that police were working to apprehend all those who participated in the “heinous crime.”

Another police officer, Naseem Butt, identified the slain woman as Farzana Parveen, 25, and said she had married Mohammad Iqbal against her family’s wishes after being engaged to him for years.

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Raises All Around? Federal Agency Scraps Employee Rating System

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Photo Credit: REUTERSAmerica’s new consumer watchdog agency has come up with a unique solution for its troubled employee-rating system: Give almost everyone a gold star.

The independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — created under the 2010 “Dodd-Frank” financial industry overhaul to serve as a consumer watchdog — says it’s scrapping its system of employee ratings in response to concerns that it was discriminatory.

That rating system assigned workers a score of between one and five. Due to concerns with the system, everyone who scored a three or above, regardless of performance, will now be getting the top rating of five — along with the corresponding retroactive pay raises that the top rating brings.

Those raises will likely cost more than $5 million, according to the American Banker, which first reported on the ratings troubles in a March 6 article.

Going forward, the bureau is looking at using a new two-tiered rating system for at least two years while officials evaluate the old system.

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Mom of Fallen Soldier Turns Combat Fatigues into Something Extra Special (+video)

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Photo Credit: CNNLisa Freeman of Richmond Hill, Ga., lost her son, Matthew, after he had been serving in Afghanistan for only nine days. To keep the memory of the young Marine captain alive, she has turned the fabric that was once his combat uniform into a lovable keepsake — a teddy bear, according to a CNN report.

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Greenwald’s Finale: Naming Victims of Surveillance

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Photo Credit: Real Clear PoliticsThe man who helped bring about the most significant leak in American intelligence history is to reveal names of US citizens targeted by their own government in what he promises will be the “biggest” revelation from nearly 2m classified files.

Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who received the trove of documents from Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, told The Sunday Times that Snowden’s legacy would be “shaped in large part” by this “finishing piece” still to come.

His plan to publish names will further unnerve an American intelligence establishment already reeling from 11 months of revelations about US government surveillance activities.

Greenwald, who is promoting his book No Place To Hide and is trailed by a documentary crew wherever he goes, was speaking in a boutique hotel near Harvard, where he was to appear with Noam Chomsky, the octogenarian leftist academic.

“One of the big questions when it comes to domestic spying is, ‘Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?’,” he said.

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WATCH: After VA Scandal, Even Dems Call Obama ‘Detached, ‘Incompetent’

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Referring to Barack Obama’s “wait and see” statement last week on the growing VA scandal as a “breaking point,” CNN’s John King said Sunday that in addition to Republican criticism, even Democrats are now calling Obama incompetent and detached.

“More and more Democrats in key 2014 races are calling for the president to get a spine, they say, and fire his Veterans Affairs secretary.

And what more and more Democrats are saying privately is scathing, calling the president and his team detached, flat footed, even incompetent.”

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Is America Starting To Target Thought Crime?

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller Last week, Michelle Obama made headlines when she exhorted graduating high schoolers in a commencement address to monitor their families for politically incorrect thoughts and behaviors.

To one journalist, this was more than an off-hand comment made by the first lady. In the opinion of Cheryl Chumley, a reporter for The Washington Times and the author of “Police State USA,” Michelle Obama’s remark reflects a growing trend in America to target and attack individuals for committing “thought crime.”

“Michelle Obama’s push for kids around the nation to monitor their family members for perceived racist comments is just another way the government seeks to inject itself into an area it doesn’t really belong — the American home,” Chumley told The Daily Caller Monday.

“Having the first lady wag her finger at us and send America’s youth on some sort of quest to scour the homes and backyards of our nation’s families for any mention of a racist joke, slur or slight is nanny-governance run amok — something that belongs in a George Orwell novel, not the White House, Chumley said.”

Chumley sees a troubling growth of America’s most powerful political figures now singling out private individuals for their beliefs, and using government agencies and public denunciations to intimidate opponents into silence.

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Colorado City Pays $25k To Man Arrested For Bringing A Gun To The Movies

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Photo Credit: Scott Olson / Getty A man who was arrested for carrying a holstered handgun into a movie theater a week after the Aurora shootings in 2012 received a $25,000 settlement check from the city of Thornton last week, according to Denver’s 7News.

Jim Mapes had a concealed-carry permit and said he’d carried his gun to the same theater several times in the past. Another theater-goer called 911, saying a man with a weapon had just entered a movie theater. He was originally charged with brandishing the weapon, which Mapes denied.

“It never left my holster,” he told the station. And although the gun was carried openly rather than being concealed, his lawyer said that’s never been against the law in Thornton.

Mapes told Denver’s Fox 31 that he was in the same Thornton theater watching “The Dark Knight Rises” on the night James Holmes opened fire in an Aurora theater across town, killing 12 people and injuring at least 70. He had his gun that night too. Police questioned him, but didn’t arrest him.

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In California, Life With Parole Increasingly Leads To Freedom

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Photo Credit: Jeremy Raff / KQEDCalifornia has more than 26,000 inmates serving life sentences with the possibility of parole. Until recently, that possibility was a slim one; “lifers,” who are mostly murderers, rarely got out of prison.

But that’s changing. Since 2009, more than twice as many lifers have been paroled in California than in the previous two decades combined.

The shift in parole policy comes as California is under orders from the U.S. Supreme Court to relieve prison overcrowding. But state officials insist the rising number of lifers being paroled has nothing to do with that. Instead, they say, it’s the confluence of several other factors, including a 2008 state Supreme Court ruling that made it harder to deny parole to inmates who are no longer considered dangerous.

Since that ruling, parole boards have recommended release at a much higher rate than in previous years — and Gov. Jerry Brown is blocking fewer paroles than his predecessors.

Today, even for murderers, the possibility of parole is more than just a pipe dream. The change is being felt on both sides of the prison walls.

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Nigeria Army Claims to Know Whereabouts of Abducted Girls

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Photo Credit: ReutersNigeria’s military knows where the more than 200 girls abducted by Boko Haram are but has ruled out using force to rescue them, the state news agency quoted Chief of Defence Staff Air Marshal Alex Badeh as saying on Monday.

Seven weeks since Boko Haram militants abducted more than 200 girls taking exams at secondary school in the remote northeastern village of Chibok, little is known of their whereabouts or what the military is doing to get them out.

“The good news for the parents of the girls is that we know where they are, but we cannot tell you,” Badeh was quoted by the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) as saying.

“But where they are held, can we go there with force? We can’t kill our girls in the name of trying to get them back.”

Most officials think any raid to rescue them would be fraught with danger and probably not worth the risk that the girls would be killed by their captors – an Islamist group that has shown a high degree of ruthlessness in killing civilians.

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