Republican lawmakers in North Carolina have proposed a bill that they say would allow to the state to establish an official religion and defy the Constitution of the United States.

Nine state House members joined with Republican state Reps. Harry Warren and Carl Ford of Rowan County to sponsor House Bill 494 in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) last month that sought to stop Christian prayers at official Rowan County government meetings.

In 2009, a court found that the Forsyth County Board of Commissioners had violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by using sectarian prayers to open official meetings.

In his ruling, Magistrate Judge Trevor Sharp wrote that Forsyth County prayers ‘display a preference for Christianity over other religions by the government

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Housing has emerged as the brightest spot in the economy this year, but some analysts are questioning whether the market’s recovery is built to last.

Home prices, sales and construction have increased sharply in the past year after six years of relentless declines, suggesting a classic recovery and adding fuel to a broader economic expansion. For the first time since the Great Recession, the housing sector started adding jobs in areas such as construction over the past few months in a sign of a dramatic market turnaround.

But a close look at the numbers reveals that much of the housing activity is driven by abnormal conditions stemming from the housing crisis.

Much of the pickup in sales and prices has been powered by investors who, convinced that the market is bottoming, are scooping up bountiful supplies of distressed and foreclosed properties at bargain prices and often paying with cash.

With investors targeting lower-priced homes that they intend to purchase and rent out, they have been crowding out many first-time buyers who are having difficulty getting mortgage loans and are at a disadvantage when competing with well-heeled buyers. Cash sales to investors now account for about one-third of all home sales, according to the National […]

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Just outside of the small town of Maumelle, Arkansas sits your run-of-the-mill American strip mall. And as in so many other box store hubs, a Walmart dominates the landscape.

But something is a shade different about this one; its big, looming letters are not the standard blue. These letters, in a new, green hue, spell out ‘Walmart Neighborhood Market.

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Many of the assumptions that the use of GMO crops are based upon are not true, researchers at the University of Arizona have found. Specifically, the widely-used new strategy of planting GMO crops that produce two or more toxins to provide ‘redundant

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In September 2012, pictures of seriously tumorous rats (Figure 1) went viral across the Internet, setting off passionate and acrimonious exchanges between proponents and opponents of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Charges and countercharges flew like verbal grapeshot across the various levels of the digital world and scientific media as each side tried to spin what these photos meant.

‘GMOs may be creating an entire generation of cancer victims who have a frighteningly heightened risk of growing massive mammary gland tumors caused by the consumption of GM foods. We are witnessing what may turn out to be the worst and most costly blunder in the history of western science: the mass poisoning of billions of people with a toxic food crop that was never properly tested in the first place,

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