Navy Caves to Atheists, Removes Nativity Scene From Bahrain Base

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A live Nativity scene planned at the U.S. Navy base in Bahrain was dropped from a holiday program after an atheist group complained that it amounted to command sponsorship of a Christian event and could put servicemembers in the Muslim-majority country at risk.

The live nativity was initially scheduled for Dec. 6 during an annual holiday tree-lighting ceremony hosted by Naval Support Activity Bahrain. The celebration also advertised appearances from “Mr. & Mrs. Claus and Camel,” according to a promotional flyer.

The Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers wrote a complaint to the Inspector General responsible for Navy installations, asking that the event be investigated because it promoted “Christianity as the official religion of the base.”

“This violates the Constitution and the mandates of the command to support all belief while privileging none,” the group wrote, according to a post on its website.

The event also could foster misconceptions about the U.S. military’s religious agenda in a Muslim country, the group argued. “This event threatens U.S. security and violates the Constitution as well as command policy,” the group wrote.

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Facelift Using Stem Cells Causes Bones to Grow Out of Eyes

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A Californian woman has been left with bones growing in her eyes after a botched facelift using stem cell injections.

The gruesome tale involves a woman in her Sixties, who is said to have paid $20,000 for the procedure at a Beverly Hills clinic. But three months later, she was still in pain and noticed her right eye was clicking, according to a report in Scientific American.

The woman complained of a clicking sensation when she tried to open her eye. Surgeons later discovered it was tiny fragments of bone grinding together. When it didn’t improve, she visited another cometic surgeon, Dr Allan Wu, and explained she could not open her right eye without considerable pain and that every time she forced it open, she heard a strange clicking sound.

Dr Wu, of The Morrow Institute in California, told the magazine that when he first heard the woman’s complaint, he wondered if she was imagining things. But after painstaking six-hour surgery, he dug out small chunks of bone from her eyelid and the surrounding tissue. The clicks the woman had heard were the bone fragments grinding against one another.

One theory is the stem cells – which can develop into any tissue in the body – could have reacted with a common dermal filler which contains calcium.

The procedure the woman had is unregulated in America. It involves removing the patient’s stem cells from the blood and injecting them elsewhere in the body.

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Ten Year Old Boy With Terminal Cancer Sworn In to Army

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A ten-year-old boy with terminal cancer received the surprise of his young life this week when his dreams of becoming a U.S. soldier came true.

Khalil Quarles, from Baltimore, had longed to enlist in the army for years before an aggressive form of soft tissue cancer attacked his leg and spread to his lungs in 2011.

And so as a special surprise, troops from the 200th Military Command out of Fort Meade paid him a visit on Wednesday to make the boy an honorary serviceman in the United States Army.

Khalil wore a look of awe and shock as he pledged his allegiance. Earlier in the day, while Skyping with a soldier stationed in Kuwait, he had thought things couldn’t get better.

But as he hobbled outside on his crutches and saw the crowd assembled on his front lawn, the dreams of this little boy with an incurable disease in that moment came true.

The boy’s mother, Cypress Mason told WBal TV of his long battle against the cancer and the multiple rounds of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation he had endured. ‘We decided to just stop the treatment so that Khalil could have the best quality of life that’s possible, being a 10-year-old child, to get to enjoy his life,’ she said.

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Bill Clinton: Champion of Women’s Rights?

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LITTLE ROCK – On Monday, Bill Clinton moderated a discussion about empowering the world’s women.

But the event was also clearly focused on the Clintons themselves. “Friend of Bill” Jerry Jones, senior vice president of Little Rock-based Acxiom, quoted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the group, reminding them of her words in Beijing to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995. “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.”

Jones also lamented to the group that the United States, unlike many nations in the world, still hasn’t had a female president. (A possible hint about 2016?)

Hillary Clinton, who is recovering from stomach flu and a fainting spell that gave her a concussion, addressed the group via video before her husband entered the room. In the message, taped prior to her illness, Hillary Clinton praised the city of Little Rock, which this year renamed an airport in her and her husband’s honor, in her brief remarks.

She also said the topic of women was “near and dear to her heart,” especially “how to harness the power of women around the world.”

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Three-Time Olympian Worked as $600/hour Escort

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A three-time U.S. Olympian who was publicity exposed on Thursday as an elite $600-an-hour escort has revealed that her husband knew about her double life and tried to put an end to it. Suzy Favor-Hamilton, a 44-year-old married mother of three, has been working with one of Las Vegas’ top agencies to book ‘dates’ across cities including Las Vegas, Chicago and Houston.

Despite using the name ‘Kelly Lundy’ as she advertised her services through Haley Heston’s Private Collection, her double life has been revealed after she told clients about her real identity, believing there was an unwritten rule they would not speak out.

But now at least one of these clients has contacted The Smoking Gun, which in turn has revealed the details of Favor-Hamilton’s clandestine career, which she now calls a ‘huge mistake.’

Soon after the story appeared online, instantly sparking a furor in the media, Favor-Hamilton took to Twitter to offer her 3,183 followers her side of the story. In one missive, the 44-year-old mother explained that she was initially drawn to escorting ‘because it provided many coping mechanisms for me when I was going through a very challenging time with my marriage and my life.

‘It provided an escape from a life that I was struggling in. It was a double life,’ she wrote.

In another, Favor-Hamilton wrote that the reasons behind her decision to turn to a life of prostitution, while seemingly irrational now, ‘made sense at the time’ and were closely related to depression. ‘As crazy as I know it seems, I never thought I would be exposed, therefore never hurting anybody,’ she said in one Twitter post.

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WARNING – Graphic Language and Content: Texas Trooper Being Sued in Irving Body Cavity Search Case Suspended (+ video)

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The officer being sued for a body cavity search has been suspended, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.

DPS spokesman Tom Vinger said trooper Kelley Helleson is suspended with pay pending the outcome of the investigation.

The Dallas County District Attorney’s Office says the case is being investigated by the office’s public integrity division and will go before a grand jury in January.

Two Irving women are suing two state troopers and the head of their department in federal court, alleging they were subjected to an illegal and humiliating “roadside body cavity search” during a traffic stop.

See video below:

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Transvestite Dressed Like Michelle Obama Graces Cover of Fashion Mag

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The publisher of a transvestite fashion magazine has featured a man dressed as Michelle Obama on its cover.

The publisher looks forward to seeing a transvestite in the White House some day:

I remember back in early 2007 when the Democratic Party’s nominees were narrowed down between two “controversial” stereotypes never before seen for presidency: a black man, Barack Obama; and a woman, Hillary Rodham Clinton. At that time, I thought, “when will the time come when these archaic walls break down and the White House will be occupied by, for example, a black, transsexual woman?”

Disabled Girl ‘Traumatized’ By TSA After Being Detained for ‘Bomb Residue’

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The 12-year-old girl left in tears after TSA agents detained her for nearly an hour at a Texas airport because they claimed to have found traces of bomb residue on her hands has revealed she is still ‘traumatized’ by the incident a week later.

Wheelchair-bound Shelbi Walser was traveling to Florida with her mother, Tammy Daniels, for treatment for her brittle bone disorder on December 8 when she was stopped at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport in Texas.

Shelbi Walser says she is still in shock by the event that caused a public outcry when video footage emerged showing Shelbi sobbing as officials detained her in front of hundreds of travelers at security, but refuse to allow her mother to get close enough to comfort her.

‘I didn’t know what was going to happen and what they were going to do to me. [I thought they might] take me away,’ she told RadarOnline.com.

The little girl makes the trip at least twice a year to receive treatment for brittle bone disease, which has left her wheelchair-bound. Her mom revealed that during the ordeal Shelbi told her that she didn’t want to go to Florida and that she wanted to go home. Shelbi said the unpleasant incident meant she would be more nervous in future and she would be washing her hands before going through security for fear that she might test positive again.

A TSA agent swabbed Shelbi’s hands and she tested positive for explosives. But the wheelchair, which is likely to have transferred any substance to her hands as she pushed it, was never tested, her mother said. Rather than ‘explosive residue’, her mom believes it was probably fertilizer they detected on Shelbi’s hands. The family live in the country and Daniels believes it could have transferred to her daughter’s hands via her wheels.

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More Babies, Please

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photo credit: o5com

IN the eternally recurring debates about whether some rival great power will knock the United States off its global perch, there has always been one excellent reason to bet on a second American century: We have more babies than the competition.

It’s a near-universal law that modernity reduces fertility. But compared with the swiftly aging nations of East Asia and Western Europe, the American birthrate has proved consistently resilient, hovering around the level required to keep a population stable or growing over the long run.

America’s demographic edge has a variety of sources: our famous religiosity, our vast interior and wide-open spaces (and the four-bedroom detached houses they make possible), our willingness to welcome immigrants (who tend to have higher birthrates than the native-born).

And it clearly is an edge. Today’s babies are tomorrow’s taxpayers and workers and entrepreneurs, and relatively youthful populations speed economic growth and keep spending commitments affordable. Thanks to our relative demographic dynamism, the America of 50 years hence may not only have more workers per retiree than countries like Japan and Germany, but also have more than emerging powers like China and Brazil.

If, that is, our dynamism persists. But that’s no longer a sure thing. American fertility plunged with the stock market in 2008, and it hasn’t recovered. Last week, the Pew Research Center reported that U.S. birthrates hit the lowest rate ever recorded in 2011, with just 63 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age. (The rate was 71 per 1,000 in 1990.) For the first time in recent memory, Americans are having fewer babies than the French or British.

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Vladimir Putin Calls On Russian Families to Have Three Children

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. . . Mr Putin lauded recent measures to give cash payments and other benefits to mothers having a second child. Current birth rates show an average of 1.7 children are born to each Russian woman, but the president urged a huge leap in family-building.

New payments for those having a third child would begin next year, he said. “Demographers affirm that choosing to have a second child is already a potential choice in favour of a third,” he added. “It’s important that families make that step… I am convinced that the norm in Russia should become a family with three children.”

To achieve that goal, he said, women needed to be provided with the opportunity to continue work, so that they “did not fear that having a second and third child would close the path to a career”.

Mr Putin has long equated Russia’s demographic decline over recent decades with a potential threat to security. On Wednesday, he added: “In order for Russia to be a strong and sovereign country, there must be more of us and we must be better in morality, in our competences, our work and our creativity.”

To applause, the president said there were already signs that Russia’s long term demographic decline was reversing, and the population had grown by 200,000 in the first nine months of this year. “The birth rate is at last above the mortality rate,” he said.

Read full story HERE.