ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 279

Mormon Church must end children’s sexual interviews, members say

By Jo Adnitt and Joice Etutu

Current and former members of the Mormon Church are calling for an end to the practice of asking children as young as eight intimate and sexual questions during annual interviews by church officials.

“I suffered with a lot of guilt, because I did things we weren’t supposed to do,” 27-year-old David Sheppard told the Victoria Derbyshire programme.

“They teach us masturbation is just below murder, and I felt like I was some sort of sexual deviant or pervert for doing it.”

Mr Sheppard, from London, was brought up within the Mormon Church.

From the age of 12 he was interviewed alone in a room by a bishop for what is known as a “worthiness interview”.

The Mormon Church is divided into wards, similar to parishes, with the bishop being the spiritual head of a local ward.

The worthiness interviews, the church says, are designed to prepare children and teenagers spiritually and ensure they are obeying the commandments.

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Capital Gazette Shooting Survivor: “I Couldn’t Give a F*** About” Your Prayers

By Hemant Mehta

During an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper tonight, Phil Davis and Selene San Felice, reporters at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland where a mass shooting took place today, said they really didn’t care about anyone’s thoughts and prayers — especially from Donald Trump — unless there was action backing it up.

Around the 12:25 mark, San Felice said,

We need more than prayers. I appreciate the prayers. I was praying the entire time I was under that desk. I want your prayers, but I want something else.

Davis then echoed her thoughts around 13:30:

I was praying when he started reloading that shotgun that there weren’t going to be more bodies, and you know what? If we’re at a position in our society where all we can offer each other is prayers, then… where are we? Where are we as a society where people die, and that’s the end of that story?

The reporters acknowledged, probably correctly, that no one would be covering this story after a couple of days. Which means this kind of tragedy will happen again, somewhere else, because Republicans refuse to do anything to limit gun violence.

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Clues to prehistoric times, found in blind cavefish – Prosata Chakrabarty

TED Fellow Prosanta Chakrabarty explores hidden parts of the world in search of new species of cave-dwelling fish. These subterranean creatures have developed fascinating adaptations, and they provide biological insights into blindness as well as geological clues about how the continents broke apart millions of years ago. Contemplate deep time in this short talk.

This Andean Volcano Is Restless. But Should We Expect an Explosive Eruption?

By Yasemin Saplakoglu

The Laguna del Maule, a field of volcanoes in the Andes, is restless.

The Earth’s surface in the region has been rising, and not slowly. Satellite photos taken over the past 10 years have shown that the surface has been rising by around 8 inches (20 centimeters) a year — much faster than any other volcanic area in the world.

Because this region is historically known to have explosive eruptions, geologists are trying to figure out what’s going on below the surface to better predict when and how such catastrophic events may occur.

In a new study published June 27 in the journal Science Advances, a group of geologists used traces of an ancient shoreline to understand why the ground is rising today.

“The restlessness expressed today is pretty astonishing,” said Bradley Singer, a geology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the lead author of the study, referring to the rising ground. But “we do not believe that this current astonishing state of unrest is something new.” These episodes have probably happened around 16 times in the past 10,000 years, he added.

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Interstellar Mystery Object Now Thought to Be a Comet

By Nola Taylor Redd

When astronomers first spotted the celestial object now known as ‘Oumuamua skittering across the sky last October after it had dived around the sun, its elongated trajectory and rapid speed quickly revealed that it came from outside the solar system.

Learning anything else about our first-known interstellar visitor, however—such as whether it was an asteroid or a dim comet—proved far more challenging, as it departed our planetary vicinity as quickly as it arrived. Either classification would have important implications not only for ‘Oumuamua itself, but also for understanding how planetary systems form.

Now a team of researchers monitoring the object on its journey back to the stars say they have the answer: ‘Oumuamua is almost certainly a comet, albeit one fittingly alien from those we find orbiting the sun. Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and other ground-based instruments, the team observed ‘Oumuamua’s changing position across time and plotted its outbound trajectory, finding that, remarkably, it did not follow the path they had anticipated. The result appears in the June 27 edition of Nature. “When put together, these positions showed that the motion of ‘Oumuamua was slightly different than what we expected,” says lead study author Marco Micheli of the European Space Agency’s SSA–NEO Coordination Center.

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Lawsuit: Port Allen police chief imposed religious beliefs on officers, wanted ‘saved’ department

By Terry Jones

A former officer with the city’s police department is claiming Police Chief Esdron Brown tried to force him to attend mandatory religious counseling sessions, and when the officer refused, Brown retaliated with disciplinary actions that included threats of suspension or job termination.

Patrick Marshall, who resigned from the Port Allen police force in November 2017, has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Brown, the city and its police department.

The lawsuit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Baton Rouge, comes a month after a city councilman raised questions about the high turnover rate in the city’s police department since Brown took office in 2013.

Since January of 2013 Brown has asked City Council to approve hiring 28 police officers. Fourteen of those hires are no longer with the department, having quit, been fired or retired.

The police department is budgeted for 16 full-time police officers.

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Justice Kennedy, the pivotal swing vote on the Supreme Court, announces his retirement

By Robert Barnes

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy announced Wednesday that he is retiring from the Supreme Court, a move that will give President Trump a chance to replace the pivotal justice and solidify a more conservative majority on the court that plays a crucial role in American life.

“It has been the greatest honor and privilege to serve our nation in the federal judiciary for 43 years, 30 of those years on the Supreme Court,” Kennedy, 81, said in a statement released in the afternoon of the last day of the term. He said his final day will be July 31.

Kennedy’s role at the center of a court equally balanced between more predictable conservatives and more consistent liberals made him the most essential member of the modern court.

His opinions often spoke of “dignity” and “liberty,” and his notions of how the Constitution provides for and protects them had an outsize effect on Americans.

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Supreme Court Backs Anti-Abortion Pregnancy Centers in Free Speech Case

By Adam Liptak

Ruling for opponents of abortion on free speech grounds, the Supreme Court said on Tuesday that the State of California may not require religiously oriented “crisis pregnancy centers” to supply women with information about how to end their pregnancies.

The case was a clash between state efforts to provide women with facts about their medical options and First Amendment rulings that place limits on the government’s ability to compel people to say things at odds with their beliefs.

Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the five-justice conservative majority, accepted the free-speech argument, ruling that the First Amendment prohibits California from forcing the centers, which oppose abortion on religious grounds, to post notices about how to obtain the procedure. The centers seek to persuade women to choose parenting or adoption.

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Supreme Court upholds Trump travel ban

By Robert Barnes and Ann E. Marimow

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that President Trump has the authority to ban travelers from certain majority-Muslim countries if he thinks it is necessary to protect the United States, a victory in what has been a priority since Trump’s first weeks in office and a major affirmation of presidential power.

The vote was 5 to 4, with conservatives in the majority and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. finding that a string of unprecedented comments and warnings from Trump about Muslims did not erode the president’s vast powers to control entry into this country.

The president reacted on Twitter: “SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS TRUMP TRAVEL BAN. Wow!”

Later, the White House issued a formal response that also took a swipe at Trump’s declared enemies. It called the ruling a “vindication following months of hysterical commentary from the media and Democratic politicians who refuse to do what it takes to secure our border and our country.”

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Republican Tax Law Hits Churches

By Brian Faler

Republicans have quietly imposed a new tax on churches, synagogues and other nonprofits, a little-noticed and surprising change that could cost some groups tens of thousands of dollars.

Their recent tax-code rewrite requires churches, hospitals, colleges, orchestras and other historically tax-exempt organizations to begin paying a 21 percent tax on some types of fringe benefits they provide their employees.

That could force thousands of groups that have long had little contact with the IRS to suddenly begin filing returns and paying taxes for the first time.

Many organizations are stunned to learn of the tax — part of a broader Republican effort to strip the code of tax breaks for employee benefits like parking and meals — and say it will be a significant financial and administrative burden.

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