Millennials Want Jobs, Not Vote Pandering; 3 Ways Technology Enables the Mission of the Church; Poland in defense shift...more

Why America has fallen out of love with its President   ...Barack Obama was elected in 2008 less on the back of a programme than a personality. He embodied rather than articulated change. As such, his election did mark a revolution in American race relations but it did not represent a serious effort at governmental reform. With the notable – and controversial – exceptions of Obamacare and gay marriage (the latter led entirely by the courts and not the administration), liberals should be asking themselves what Obama has ever done for them. Conservatives will be asking what he’s done to the economy, having over-regulated and over-spent to little obvious advantage. I’m not so sure we can call the Obama administration liberal rather than just chaotic and vain...

Poland in defense shift as security concerns rise
Poland is planning a major realignment of its military structure because of the conflict in neighboring Ukraine, the country's defense minister said Monday, a move that could shift thousands of troops to its eastern border.

"The geopolitical situation has changed. We have the biggest crisis of security since the Cold War and we must draw conclusions from that," Polish Defense Minister Tomasz Siemoniak told The Associated Press...

Coeur d'Alene Says Hitching Post Is Exempt From Gay Rights Law  The city of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, said a for-profit wedding chapel owned by two ministers doesn't have to perform same-sex marriages.

The city has been embroiled in controversy ever since the owners of the Hitching Post sued the city. They say a city anti-discrimination law threatened to force them to marry same-sex couples now that gay marriage is legal in Idaho.

The story lit up conservative and gay-rights blogs. Wedding chapel owners Donald and Evelyn Knapp said they feared jail time or fines if they declined marriage services to a same-sex couple.

Initially, the city said its anti-discrimination law did apply to the Hitching Post, since it is a commercial business. Earlier this week, Coeur d'Alene city attorney Mike Gridley sent a letter to the Knapps’ attorneys at the Alliance Defending Freedom saying the Hitching Post would have to become a not-for-profit to be exempt.

But Gridley said after further review, he determined the ordinance doesn’t specify non-profit or for-profit...

Mother undergoes quadruple amputation after post-abortion infection   A woman had to have both feet, her right arm at the elbow, and left hand amputated after she developed septicemia following an abortion at a French hospital....

Millennials Want Jobs, Not Vote Pandering
...The effective unemployment rate for 18- to 29-year-olds is near 15 percent. For the 85 percent, their work is hardly assured to match their skill level: “[W]hile finding a job has become easier for recent college graduates over the past few years, finding a good job has not, and doing so is likely to remain a challenge for some time to come,” write New York Fed economists Jaison Abel and Richard Deitz. More than half of millennials are living paycheck to paycheck...

3 Ways Technology Enables the Mission of the Church  The technological-ification of the church is a huge issue, and every congregation and every pastor needs to take advantage of technology in order to enable the church’s mission.

I believe technology is a resource that we can use for God’s glory. Here’s three ways technology enables the church’s mission...

How Facebook Is Changing the Way Its Users Consume Journalism  ...Facebook now has a fifth of the world — about 1.3 billion people — logging on at least monthly. It drives up to 20 percent of traffic to news sites, according to figures from the analytics company SimpleReach. On mobile devices, the fastest-growing source of readers, the percentage is even higher, SimpleReach says, and continues to increase.

The social media company is increasingly becoming to the news business what Amazon is to book publishing — a behemoth that provides access to hundreds of millions of consumers and wields enormous power. About 30 percent of adults in the United States get their news on Facebook, according to a study from the Pew Research Center. The fortunes of a news site, in short, can rise or fall depending on how it performs in Facebook’s News Feed...

Scientists Still Can’t Find UFOs, And They Should Stop Trying   ...  With the backing of governments and other organizations, scientists have poured untold billions of dollars into searching for intelligent life out there somewhere. SETI scans cosmic noise for tunes. Yet, all it has produced is a useful plotline for B-grade sci-fi movies.

Astronomers are building ever more powerful and expensive telescopes to peer deeper into space. Hawaii will soon host the Thirty Meter Telescope. The University of California-Los Angeles reports the cost on that particular piece of hardware, even before construction has begun, is already $141 million. NASA is set to launch the James Webb Space Telescope into orbit by 2018, at a projected cost of $8.8 billion.

This is not money flushed down some theoretical wormhole. We have made basic astrophysical discoveries, from the afterglow of the Big Bang to the shape of our universe. Yet, there isn’t as much as a pip or a squeak suggesting the existence of intelligent life...