ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 120

Antigay Hate Group Exaggerates Influence on Chick-fil-A Donations

By Trudy Ring The American Family Association, one of the most homophobic and transphobic groups in the nation, is exaggerating its role in pushing Chick-fil-A to continue to donate to faith-based organizations, including (perhaps) those that are anti-LGBTQ. The fast-food chain, owned by a conservative Christian family, sent mixed signals in November about whether the …

Missouri Republicans: Have Cops Stop Abortions

By Dennis Carter A Missouri Republican legislator has introduced so-called fetal personhood legislation that could mandate law enforcement to stop people from having abortions. House Bill 1799 was introduced by state Rep. Mike Moon (R-Ash Grove), a vociferous “fetal personhood” advocate who has compared abortion to slavery. The legislation was pre-filed in December. The GOP-dominated Missouri legislature will begin its 2020 session on Wednesday. …

Mormon leaders reported a child molester’s confession. Now his wife is suing the church for $9.5 million.

By Antonia Noori Farzan In recent years, prominent religious institutions have been dogged with accusations that they persistently covered up sexual abuse and failed to report heinous crimes. But a new lawsuit makes the opposite argument, claiming the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints violated a child molester’s confidentiality by turning his confession over …

Quest to use CRISPR against disease gains ground

By Heidi Ledford The prospect of using the popular genome-editing tool CRISPR to treat a host of diseases in people is moving closer to reality. Medical applications of CRISPR–Cas9 had a banner year in 2019. The first results trickled in from trials testing the tool in people, and more trials launched. In the coming years, …

God Put Trump in Office, But Prophesy Will Not Return Him Without Voter Registration and Turnout, Lance Wallnau Says

By Peter Montgomery Lance Wallnau, a “prophetic” author and speaker who has promoted President Donald Trump as God-ordained, delivered a “2020 Prophecy” message to his followers via a Facebook livestream on New Year’s Day. Wallnau charged that Trump’s Christian critics are on the wrong side of a spiritual war between God and his angels and the demonic …

Atheist Group Grades States on “Religious Equality”; There Are Lots of Failures

By Hemant Mehta Which states and the best and worst for atheists? Or at least people who support church/state separation? American Atheists just put out a scorecard ranking states based on four groups of issues. There are the legal ones, like if they have an establishment clause in the state constitution, whether they allow tax …

NASA’s TESS Mission Uncovers Its 1st World With Two Stars

By Jeanette Kazmierczak In 2019, when Wolf Cukier finished his junior year at Scarsdale High School in New York, he joined NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, as a summer intern. His job was to examine variations in star brightness captured by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and uploaded to the Planet Hunters TESS citizen science …

The Top Ten Scientific Discoveries of the Decade

By Jay Bennett Millions of new scientific research papers are published every year, shedding light on everything from the evolution of stars to the ongoing impacts of climate change to the health benefits (or determents) of coffee to the tendency of your cat to ignore you. With so much research coming out every year, it …

Trump Rule Would Exclude Climate Change in Infrastructure Planning

By Lisa Friedman Federal agencies would no longer have to take climate change into account when they assess the environmental impacts of highways, pipelines and other major infrastructure projects, according to a Trump administration plan that would weaken the nation’s benchmark environmental law. The proposed changes to the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act could sharply …

Bill Barr Thinks America Is Going to Hell

By Katherine Stewart and Caroline Fredrickson Why would a seemingly respectable, semiretired lion of the Washington establishment undermine the institutions he is sworn to uphold, incinerate his own reputation, and appear to willfully misrepresent the reports of special prosecutors and inspectors general, all to defend one of the most lawless and corrupt presidents in American …