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How much money does Planned Parenthood receive from taxpayers?

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Story from CNS News. (H/T The Blog Prof)

Excerpt:

Planned Parenthood received $349.6 million in tax dollars in the fiscal year ending on June 30, 2008, and it paid its president, Cecile Richards, $385,163, plus another $11,876 in benefits and deferred compensation.

According to a “fact sheet” published by the organization, Planned Parenthood Affiliate Health Centers performed 324,008 abortions in 2008.

Planned Parenthood’s fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2008 is the latest year for which the organization has publicly released an annual report and published the annual sum of grants and contracts it received from the government.

In January 2009, Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) introduced legislation to defund Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers that receive taxpayer funding. His bill, H.R. 614, would amend the Public Health Service Act to prohibit “providing any federal family planning assistance to an entity unless the entity certifies that, during the period of such assistance, the entity will not perform, and will not provide any funds to any other entity that performs an abortion.”

Why is it that all these liberal special interest groups like National Public Radio (NPR) and Planned Parenthood seem to be collecting so much taxpayer money? Well at least the Republicans are trying to do something about it.

Meanwhile, the International Planned Parenthood Federation is trying to lower the age of consent to 14 in Peru. I guess they are looking to drum up some more business by getting more people to have sex when they can’t possible deal with the natural outcome of sex.

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Pakistan woman sentenced to death for defending her faith against Muslims

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A story from CNS News about a very brave Christian woman from Pakistan.

Excerpt:

A Pakistani Christian woman is facing death following a conviction under the nation’s Blasphemy Law, after she defended her  faith against a group of Muslims who insulted her for her Christian beliefs.

Asia Bibi, a 45-year-old farmworker and mother of three, was working in the fields of her small town of Itan Wali in the Punjab region of Pakistan in 2009 when her hand touched the water that the workers were to drink.  The Muslim women working with her then refused to drink the water, saying that it had been contaminated by the touch of a Christian.  Some reports indicate that the group had been pressuring Asia to abandon Christianity for some time.

In the argument that followed, Asia reportedly defended her faith, although there are two versions of the exact nature of her statements. The Muslim women claim that she insulted Mohammed, claiming that he had died “with worms in his mouth.”  However, Asia’s defenders say that she never made any insults, but rather defended her faith in Christ, affirming that he had died for the sins of mankind and risen from the dead, while Mohammed had not.

After the women complained to a local imam, Quari Salim, the cleric filed charges against Asia for “blasphemy,” and she was sent to prison to face trial.  Fifteen months later, on November 7, she was sentenced to hang for her “crime,” and to pay a fine equivalent to two-and-a half years’ salary for an unskilled worker.

A group of townspeople in Itan Wali told CNN that they all support the death sentence against Asia, and Quari told the news agency that her death sentence was “one of the happiest moments of his life,” according to the interviewer.

“Tears of joy poured from my eyes,” said the imam during the videotaped interview.

[…]It has been reported that, in recent years, over 30 people who were accused of violating Pakistan’s Blasphemy Law were either murdered in prison or killed following their acquittal and release.

Meanwhile, here’s the Democrat Hillary Clinton defending the religious freedom OF MUSLIMS.

Excerpt:

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticized Wednesday the state of religious freedom in Europe, as Washington highlighted policies and attitudes toward Muslim veils and Islam as a whole.

“Several European countries have placed harsh restrictions on religious expression,” Clinton said, without elaborating as she unveiled the State Department’s report on international religious freedom for the last year.

Her assistant secretary for human rights, Michael Posner, cited France’s ban on wearing the niqab and other face coverings in public places and a Swiss motion passed last year that bans building new minarets.

[…]France’s law banning veils — passed last month — was considered an especially controversial move in a country with Europe’s biggest Muslim population, estimated at nearly six million. The Netherlands is expected to follow suit.

If you expect the Democrats to do something about Christians being persecuted by Muslims, you’re going to be waiting an awfully long time.

Also, why isn’t the secular-leftist mainstream media reporting this story as much as they report stories like the Matthew Sheppard story and the Abu Ghraib story? Do Christian women not count as victims to the mainstream media, if the perpetrators are Muslim?

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What’s more complex? Your brain or the Internet?

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Check it out… a new peer-reviewed paper discussed at CNET News. (H/T Darwin’s God via ECM)

Excerpt:

The human brain is truly awesome.

A typical, healthy one houses some 200 billion nerve cells, which are connected to one another via hundreds of trillions of synapses. Each synapse functions like a microprocessor, and tens of thousands of them can connect a single neuron to other nerve cells. In the cerebral cortex alone, there are roughly 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies.

These synapses are, of course, so tiny (less than a thousandth of a millimeter in diameter) that humans haven’t been able to see with great clarity what exactly they do and how, beyond knowing that their numbers vary over time. That is until now.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have spent the past few years engineering a new imaging model, which they call array tomography, in conjunction with novel computational software, to stitch together image slices into a three-dimensional image that can be rotated, penetrated and navigated. Their work appears in the journal Neuron this week.

To test their model, the team took tissue samples from a mouse whose brain had been bioengineered to make larger neurons in the cerebral cortex express a fluorescent protein (found in jellyfish), making them glow yellow-green. Because of this glow, the researchers were able to see synapses against the background of neurons.

They found that the brain’s complexity is beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief, says Stephen Smith, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology and senior author of the paper describing the study:

One synapse, by itself, is more like a microprocessor–with both memory-storage and information-processing elements–than a mere on/off switch. In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth.

Smith adds that this gives us a glimpse into brain tissue at a level of detail never before attained: “The entire anatomical context of the synapses is preserved. You know right where each one is, and what kind it is.”

I wonder why we consider evolution to be a “done deal” when we don’t have testable Darwinian accounts for how things like this can evolve. They are making the claim that it evolved. I am asking for some evidence.