Along political lines, 67 percent of Republicans support legal anti-gay discrimination, compared to 40 percent of Independents and 24 percent of Democrats. While white Americans are fairly evenly divided on the question, 61 percent of black Americans and 68 percent of Hispanic Americans stand opposed.
White evangelical Protestants are the only major religious group with a majority that […]
Credit: U. S. Air Force Academy
Captain Sonny Hernandez, a chaplain at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, has become the subject of a formal complaint after he published an article claiming that Christians who serve in the armed forces should not support the rights of non-Christians to practice their faiths.
“Christian service members who openly profess and support the rights of Muslims, Buddhists, and all other anti-Christian worldviews to practice their religions—because the language in the Constitution permits—are grossly in error, and deceived,” Hernandez wrote in an essay for a Christian nationalist website.
He continued:
“Counterfeit Christians in the Armed forces will appeal to the Constitution, and not Christ. … This is why so many professing Christian service members will say: ‘We “support everyone’s right” to practice their faith regardless if they worship a god different from ours because the Constitution protects this right.’”
Hernandez is a part of a growing movement within some fundamentalist armed forces chaplains to openly defy military policies governing political activity and sectarian worship while in uniform.
According to Newsweek, the Military […]
Chicago Public School
Credit: The Defender
The Chicago Public Schools will begin teaching students about police brutality as part of a $5.5 million reparations package agreed to by city officials and various civil rights groups in 2015.
The classes will discuss cases handled by disgraced former Chicago Police commander Jon Burge who was accused torturing 125 Black men into confessing to crimes they didn’t commit between 1972 and 1991, according to Chicago Torture Justice Memorials and the People’s Law Office, two of the groups involved in forcing a settlement.
The lesson plan is called the “Burge Reparations Curriculum.”
Burge served 4½ years in prison for lying about torture but not for torturing Black men. The police department fired him in 1993.
Burge and his so-called “midnight crew” administered electric shock, held mock executions, caused near suffocation, and carried out beatings to make Black men confess to crimes they didn’t commit.
The Chicago Public Schools, the city of Chicago, African-American activists and the Chicago Police Department worked together before deciding on a curriculum.
“After working for months with African-American community leaders, civil rights […]
Global ocean circulation appears to be slowing Credit: NASA
Scientists have long known about the anomalous “warming hole” in the North Atlantic Ocean, an area immune to warming of Earth’s oceans. This cool zone in the North Atlantic Ocean appears to be associated with a slowdown in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), one of the key drivers in global ocean circulation.
A recent study published in Nature outlines research by a team of Yale University and University of Southhampton scientists. The team found evidence that Arctic ice loss is potentially negatively impacting the planet’s largest ocean circulation system. While scientists do have some analogs as to how this may impact the world, we will be largely in uncharted territory.
AMOC is one of the largest current systems in the Atlantic Ocean and the world. Generally speaking, it transports warm and salty water northward from the tropics to South and East of Greenland. This warm water cools to ambient water temperature then sinks as it is saltier and […]
Pollution colors the sky Credit: David McNew
Deadly climate change could threaten most of the world’s human population by the end of this century without efforts well beyond those captured in the Paris Agreement.
That’s the finding of a pair of related reports released yesterday by an international group of climate science and policy luminaries who warned that the window is closing to avert dangerous warming. They say carbon dioxide might have to be removed from the atmosphere.
Scientists Yangyang Xu and Veerabhadran Ramanathan found in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that there already exists a 1 in 20 chance that the 2.2 trillion tons of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere could cause an existential warming threat. This “fat tail” scenario would mean the world experiences “existential/unknown” warming by 2100 — defined in the report as more than 5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
Temperatures haven’t been that high since the Miocene warming period. That low-probability but very extreme scenario could expose most of the world’s people to deadly heat stress, […]
