ISIS Threatens to Invade Rome

From IraqNews.com:

On Wednesday, the so-called Islamic state in Iraq and the Levant threatened to launch a war against the Catholic Church and an invasion of Rome, after publishing a picture of its black flag fluttering above the Vatican.

ISIS issued in its electronic magazine a threat to the heart of Christianity (Rome) after publishing a picture of a black flag waving above the Vatican, threatening to “wage war against the Catholic Church.”

OK

Projected sea level shrinks

Al Gore warned of a 20ft  rise in sea level so the latest bit of Warmism is interesting.  The MAXIMUM estimated sea level rise is now down to 6ft.  It's all based on Warmist assumptions and modelling but it's some progress, I suppose.  I reproduce the journal abstract below.  Note the words I have highlighted.  Unusual humility!

Upper limit for sea level projections by 2100

By S Jevrejeva et al.

Abstract

We construct the probability density function of global sea level at 2100, estimating that sea level rises larger than 180 cm are less than 5% probable. An upper limit for global sea level rise of 190 cm is assembled by summing the highest estimates of individual sea level rise components simulated by process based models with the RCP8.5 scenario. The agreement between the methods may suggest more confidence than is warranted since large uncertainties remain due to the lack of scenario-dependent projections from ice sheet dynamical models, particularly for mass loss from marine-based fast flowing outlet glaciers in Antarctica. This leads to an intrinsically hard to quantify fat tail in the probability distribution for global mean sea level rise. Thus our low probability upper limit of sea level projections cannot be considered definitive. Nevertheless, our upper limit of 180 cm for sea level rise by 2100 is based on both expert opinion and process studies and hence indicates that other lines of evidence are needed to justify a larger sea level rise this century.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

NJ Woman Accused of Killing Boyfriend

(Staten Island, New York) Last month, 52-year-old teacher Virginia Vertetis was indicted on charges of murder and possession of a handgun stemming from the alleged killing of her boyfriend, 51-year-old Patrick Gilhuley.

Yesterday, the lawyer for Vertetis entered a plea of not guilty.

Vertetis is accused of shooting Gilhuley to death while he was trying to break up with her at her home. The victim was a retired New York City police officer who lived on Staten Island.

Court documents state that he went to Vertetis' home on Apollo Way on March 3 to end their relationship. His daughter called police at 10 p.m. that night to say she was speaking by cellphone to her father while he was at the house, and she heard him scream that Vertetis was shooting at him.[…]

When police arrived, they saw through windows in the house a woman walking around with a phone and a man was lying on the floor by the front door.

Upon entering the house, they found the bloodied body of the victim and Vertetis crying, according to an arrest affidavit.

Vertetis currently resides at the Morris County Jail in lieu of $500,000 bail.

Pool Party Crashers



(Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) Base jumpers launched themselves off the top of the 1,100ft Kuala Lumpur Tower, crashing a pool party on top of an adjacent building.

Interesting, eh?

Record Pumpkin

World Champion Pumpkin 2014
(Half Moon Bay, California)

A gourd weighing 2,058 pounds took first prize and set a new tournament record Monday at an annual pumpkin-weighing contest in Northern California.

John Hawkley, 56, won this year's Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-off in Half Moon Bay south of San Francisco.

Hawkley squashed his competition, beating the runner-up by more than 300 pounds, Tim Beeman, a spokesman for the weigh-off said.

The seeds will likely be marketed at a premium price.

A real puzzle




Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Indiana Woman Accused of Sex with Boy, 14

Brandi Lynn Phipps
(Muncie, Indiana) A 30-year-old local woman, Brandi Lynn Phipps, has been accused of engaging in sex with a 14-year-old boy.

Phipps allegedly drank brandy with the minor, as well as giving him half of a hydrocodone before having sex with him, the document said.

The boy had allegedly been going to Phipps' house since December 2013, documents said. And prior to the July encounter, Phipps allegedly flirted with the teenager and would dance in front of him.

Phipps' former boyfriend told authorities that his children told him their mom was having sex with a young man, the affidavit said.

Phipps was booked into custody at the Delaware County Jail with bond set at $15,000.

Iowa Woman Accused of Theft

Abigail Louise Roberts
(Clear Lake, Iowa) A 29-year-old woman, Abigail Louise Roberts, has been accused of stealing tens of thousands of dollars from the Clear Lake Pharmacy.

Roberts of Rockwell is charged with ongoing criminal conduct and 1st degree theft. She allegedly stole between $30,000 and $50,000 from Clear Lake Pharmacy while employed there between July 2012 and July 2014.

Authorities say Roberts repeatedly falsified refunds and delivered medication to relatives without charging a co-pay.

Details on booking not reported.

Texas Naked Woman Gets DWI with Child on Lap

Lyndsey Baker
(Corpus Christi, Texas) A 28-year-old local woman, Lyndsey Baker, has been accused of driving drunk and naked with her 3-year-old child on her lap.

Around 5:30 Sunday, a witness told police she saw a woman standing outside of a car and removing all of her clothing. She then got into the car and drove away.

Police caught up with the woman in the 1500 block of Kennedy Street.

As officers approached her car, they discovered that she was indeed driving nude, with her 3-year-old child sitting in her lap.

Details on booking not reported.

How donuts cause global warming

What they fail to mention is that food firms use palm oil because food freaks have demoninized first saturated fats and then trans fats.  Palm oil is what is left.  So it is the do-gooders who have created the demand for palm oil -- and the resultant cutting down of native trees to grow the trees that produce the palm oil.  So it is clear who is to blame for any adverse effects

McDonald's, Burger King, Yum Brands (Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut) and other members of the fast food industry are often the focus of negative attention for the effect on our heath, but did you know they are also having a big effect on our climate?

America's top fast food brands use palm oil, an ingredient linked to climate change and deforestation, in their products. As tropical forests are cleared to make way for palm oil plantations, carbon is released into the atmosphere, driving global warming and shrinking habitats for endangered species. Tropical deforestation currently accounts for about 10 percent of the world's heat-trapping emissions.

The good news is that two of the country's largest fast food chains, Krispy Kreme and Dunkin' Brands (who owns both Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robbins), just pledged to buy deforestation-free palm oil. The rest of the fast food industry should also set the bar high and make a firm commitment to use only deforestation-free palm oil.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

British Teacher Walks in Sex Case

Charlotte Parker
(Chelmsford, England)

A married teaching assistant sent thousands of lewd texts after starting a two-year affair with a schoolboy, 14, and threatened suicide when his parents found out.

Charlotte Parker, 32, admitted engaging in sexual activity with the teenage pupil whilst she was working at Hylands Academy in Chelmsford, Essex.

A jury at Basildon Crown Court today heard that the relationship began when the victim was 14 and sent her a Christmas card before spiralling into a two-year love affair.

Parker has pleaded guilty to sexual activity with a child, making indecent images of a child and encouraging a child to perform a sex act on himself.

Parker received a suspended sentence.

Tip: JR

Mississippi Woman Accused of Murder

Krystal Kersey
(Rio Grande City, Texas)

A woman set for trial Monday in Mississippi on a charge of murdering her husband has been arrested in far South Texas near the Texas-Mexico border.

Krystal Kersey is held in Rio Grande City in Starr County awaiting extradition to Mississippi after her arrest following a traffic stop Friday. Authorities say her 3-year-old and 18-month-old children were with her.[…]

Kersey was free on $100,000 bond and facing trial for the 2013 slaying of her husband of two months, 24-year-old Justin Stork, in Jackson County, Mississippi.

She's accused of running him down with her car between two apartment buildings.

Married for two months? Holey-moley, one would think the honeymoon lasted longer.

Virginia Teacher Accused of Sex with Juvenile

(Henrico County, Virginia) A 31-year-old teacher at Highland Springs High School, Tessa Monique Hairston, has been accused of engaging in sex with a juvenile.

Hairston was arrested and charged with indecent liberties of a person less than 18 years of age while in a custodial or supervisory relationship.

Police say the charge comes from an inappropriate relationship involving a juvenile male that occurred at Highland Springs High School while Ms. Hairston was employed as a teacher by Henrico County Public Schools.

Details on booking are unavailable.

Beer Temperature Law

From Tuoitrenews.vn:

Beer products should not be served in places where the temperature is higher than 30 degrees Celsius, the Vietnamese Ministry of Industry and Trade has suggested, the latest in a series of controversial propositions it put forward about beer management.

While its other draft decree which oversees the sales of alcoholic products still generates opposition from beer makers and sellers, the ministry continues introducing the draft of another fiat, intended to ensure food safety in beer making and selling places.

Beer selling locations strictly follow regulations stipulated by the Ministry of Health for the sake of food safety, the trade industry demanded in the draft legislation.

Temperatures in Vietnam regularly exceed 30 degrees C (86 degrees F).

Sens. Paul, Grassley challenge climate group’s spending on lobbying, alcohol and parties

The Washington Post reports that a climate research group got caught partying and boozing on taxpayer funds in a draft audit, but what’s worse, the National Science Foundation and Defense Department officials are under investigation because they signed off on it. A whistleblower leaked the sordid story, and now two US Senators are investigating. They warn that this may be a widespread practice because NSF documents show the foundation knew what the expenses were but still paid them.

Two senators are investigating whether the National Science Foundation and Defense Department auditors skirted federal laws by signing off on a nonprofit organization’s use of taxpayer money for “unallowable expenses,” including alcohol, lobbying and extravagant parties.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said the practice came to his attention earlier this year when a whistleblower provided him with a draft audit that showed a climate change group used federal funds to pay $112,000 for lobbying, $25,000 for an office Christmas party, and $11,000 for “premium coffee services” and an unspecific amount on French hotels.

The partiers were the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) — who received $90 million this year from the NSF.

On its Web site, NEON says it will collect data on the impacts of climate change, land use change and invasive species on natural resources from 106 sites across the nation over a 30-year period. The sites where scientists will collect their data are still largely under construction, and NEON says it will not be in full operation until 2017.

From 2009 to 2013, NEON classified all the expenses that Grassley and Paul are questioning as a “management fee.”

But it’s the cover up that is even uglier:

Internal documents show that the NSF was told by NEON that it was having a difficult time covering the costs because it had little in the way of private funds.

 Not once but twice:

According to Grassley’s staff, the auditor said two levels of supervisors signed off on his work. However, he told the senator’s staff that he said he believes the audit had stalled because DCAA management was concerned about spark a controversy for the high-profile program, the foundation, and the defense department.

Grassley’s staff said the auditor came forward because he believed the audit was going to be “whitewashed.”

SOURCE  

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Judge: Upskirt Photos 'Totally Legal'

Certainly, many folks will not welcome the following decision.

A Washington, D.C. judge has ruled that taking indecent photos of unsuspecting women without their consent is totally legal, because women have no expectation of privacy in a public space. The ruling forced prosecutors to abandon charges against D.C. man Christopher Cleveland, who ABC 7 reports was arrested after he was caught taking photographs of women near the Lincoln Memorial.

Judge Juliet McKenna agreed that the "fact that the Defendant was intentionally photographing publicly exposed areas of women's clothed and unclothed bodies ... is repellant and disturbing," but ultimately concluded that since Cleveland did not go to "extraordinary lengths" to obtain the photographs he did not commit a crime.

"This Court finds that no individual clothed and positioned in such a manner in a public area in broad daylight in the presence of countless other individuals could have a reasonable expectation of privacy," she ruled. "The images captured were not 'incidental glimpses' and in fact were images that were exposed to the public without requiring any extraordinary lengths whatsoever, to view."

More . . .

Dubious support for a popular health scare

There is a substantial body of people who get their jollies out of finding "threats" to health in popular products. They obviously want to appear wiser than the rest of us poor sods.  There seems to be no accepted name for them but I call them "food & heath freaks".  They are probably best known for their unfounded demonization of salt, saturated fat and artificial sweeteners  such as Aspartame.  Sugar is their current big boogeyman.
   
A somewhat less well-known scare is about Bisphenol A, a component of many plastics.  A few molecules of BPA have been shown to leach out of plastic bottles into the liquid contained in the bottle.  For that reason plastic bably bottles have been more or less banned and glass baby bottles are mostly used instead.  Glass is of course fragile and dangerous when broken but any decrease in safety from its use in baby bottles is ignored by food & health freaks.

The question is, however, how toxic is ingested BPA?  Rats given enough of it certainly fall ill but as Paracelsus pointed out long ago, the toxicity is in the dose.  And it seems unlikely that a few molecules received from a plastic bottle are harmful.  And that is what most studies of the matter show.  Like a terrier that won't let go of a bone, however, "research" to detect harm goes on among the  food & heath freaks.

The latest stab at BPA has just come out in JAMA and I give the abstract below.  I have however read the whole article and I would summarize the results rather differently.  What they found was that the amount of BPA in the pregnant mother's blood correlated marginally significantly (p = .03) with the infant's lung function 4 years after birth but not 5 years after birth.  That is a very shaky finding indeed and shows, if anything, that BPA is safe.  They also looked at the correlation between mother-reported wheezing in the kid and BPA levels but that correlation failed to reach statistical significance (p = .11).

They do however rather desperately hang their hat on a correlation with wheeze drawn from the BPA concentration in the mother at 16 weeks.  That correlation had vanished at 26 weeks gestation however so again the results actually show that BPA is safe  -- no lasting ill-effects.

Not much there for the BPA freaks. I am not alone in that conclusion.   The abstract follows:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Bisphenol A Exposure and the Development of Wheeze and Lung Function in Children Through Age 5 Years

Adam J. Spanier et al.

ABSTRACT

Importance
Bisphenol A (BPA), a prevalent endocrine-disrupting chemical, has been associated with wheezing in children, but few studies have examined its effect on lung function or wheeze in older children.

Objectives
To test whether BPA exposure is associated with lung function, with wheeze, and with pattern of wheeze in children during their first 5 years.

Design, Setting, and Participants
A birth cohort study, enrolled during early pregnancy in the greater Cincinnati, Ohio, area among 398 mother-infant dyads.
We collected maternal urine samples during pregnancy (at 16 and 26 weeks) and child urine samples annually to assess gestational and child BPA exposure.

Main Outcomes and Measures
We assessed parent-reported wheeze every 6 months for 5 years and measured child forced expiratory volume in the first second of expiration (FEV1) at age 4 and 5 years. We evaluated associations of BPA exposure with respiratory outcomes, including FEV1, child wheeze, and wheeze phenotype.

Results
Urinary BPA concentrations and FEV1 data were available for 208 children and urinary BPA concentrations and parent-reported wheeze data were available for 360 children. The mean maternal urinary BPA concentration ranged from 0.53 to 293.55 ‘g/g of creatinine. In multivariable analysis, every 10-fold increase in the mean maternal urinary BPA concentration was associated with a 14.2% (95% CI, -24.5% to -3.9%) decrease in the percentage predicted FEV1 at 4 years, but no association was found at 5 years. In multivariable analysis, every 10-fold increase in the mean maternal urinary BPA concentration was marginally associated with a 54.8% increase in the odds of wheezing (adjusted odds ratio, 1.55; 95% CI, 0.91-2.63). While the mean maternal urinary BPA concentration was not associated with wheeze phenotype, a 10-fold increase in the 16-week maternal urinary BPA concentration was associated with a 4.27-fold increase in the odds of persistent wheeze (adjusted odds ratio, 4.27; 95% CI, 1.37-13.30). Child urinary BPA concentrations were not associated with FEV1 or wheeze.

Conclusions and Relevance
These results provide evidence suggesting that prenatal but not postnatal exposure to BPA is associated with diminished lung function and the development of persistent wheeze in children.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Texas Teacher Gets No Jail for Improper Relationship

(Orange, Texas) A special education teacher formerly at Oak Forest Elementary School, Sondra Reed, has been convicted of engaging in an improper relationship between an educator and a student.

Consequently, Reed was sentenced to six years probation and fined $2,000.

“A lot of people confuse this charge with that of having sex with a minor,” said John Kimbrough, Orange County District Attorney. “This student was not a minor. It’s a different charge because it’s a different crime than that involving an underage student.”

Kimbrough said part of the agreement with entering the guilty plea is that Reed will permanently surrender her educator’s certification and will never be able to teach in the state of Texas again.

OK

Lego Bows to Greenpeace

A 1-minute, 45-second video has ended a long-term relationship between Lego and Royal Dutch Shell. The Danish toymaker said today that it will not renew a co-promotion deal with Shell, after a Greenpeace video linking Lego with the oil company’s Arctic drilling program went viral.

The video, which shows an Arctic landscape built of Lego blocks being swallowed up in a pool of black oil, “may have created misunderstandings among our stakeholders about the way we operate,” Lego Chief Executive Jørgen Vig Knudstorp said in a statement. Greenpeace has been pressing Lego to end a partnership signed in 2011, in which co-branded Lego toy cars are sold at Shell stations in some countries.

So, Greenpeace squeaks and Lego becomes mousey.

A Western Heart

Most of what I put online in my blogs is commentary and news reports written by others that I find interesting from a libertarian/conservative point of view.  So I could possibly be seen as a sort of Readers Digest for libertarian/conservatives.  In fact, however, on most days I do put up commentary somewhere on one of my blogs that I have written myself.  When such comments stretch to more than a sentence of two, therefore, I put them up on the blog A Western Heart (AWH) -- as a convenient way of keeping together my own writings  for my own reference.

The blog was originally created by a group of Australian bloggers but the rest of them all gradually burnt out -- leaving me as the only surviving blogger.  I am persistent if nothing else.

But another important reason for using AWH has to do with a certain search engine whose name begins with G.  For some reason not clear to me AWH gets a much higher priority in searches than do any of my other blogs.  If I search for some content that I have put up in more than one place, the AWH entry comes up first by far.  I don't know why but I am glad to take advantage of it

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).