How movies embraced Hinduism; Slain NYPD Officer saw streets as his ministry...more

NYPD Officer Rafael Ramos saw streets as his ministry   ...In fact, he was just hours away from becoming a lay chaplain and graduating from a community-crisis chaplaincy program before he and fellow New York police Officer Wenjian Liu were gunned down in their patrol car Saturday in Brooklyn.

The gunman in the two officers' killing, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28, was found dead of self-inflicted gunshot wounds at a subway station immediately after the slayings...

Missing AirAsia flight: South Korean missionaries aboard  A pair of South Korean Christian missionaries and their 12-month-old daughter are among those on the missing AirAsia jet that lost contact with air traffic control on Sunday, it has emerged...

How movies embraced Hinduism (without you even noticing) Interstellar’s box office total is $622,932,412 and counting. It is the eighth highest-grossing film of the year and has spawned an endless raft of thinkpieces testing the validity of its science and applauding the innovation of its philosophy. But it is not so new. The idea that propels the plot – there is a universal super-consciousness that transcends time and space, and in which all human life is connected – has been around for about 3,000 years. It is Vedic.

When the film’s astronaut hero (Matthew McConaughey), declares that the mysterious and all-knowing “they” who created a wormhole near Saturn through which he travels to save mankind – dissolving his sense of material reality in the process – are in fact “us”, he is simply repeating the central notion of the Upanishads, India’s oldest philosophical texts. These hold that individual human minds are merely brief reflections within a cosmic one...

Pain Relievers Tied to Reduced Skin Cancer Risk

Aspirin and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs taken orally may reduce the risk for squamous cell carcinoma, a review of studies has found.
 

Squamous cell carcinoma, caused by exposure to ultraviolet light over a lifetime, is the second most common form of skin cancer (after basal cell carcinoma). If caught early, it is almost always curable; left untreated it can be disfiguring or deadly. A topical Nsaid, diclofenac (brand name Voltaren and others), is used to treat actinic keratoses, a type of lesion that can develop into skin cancer if not treated.

 

Researchers, writing in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, analyzed data from nine studies of various designs. Some used aspirin and Nsaids, some aspirin or non-aspirin Nsaids alone. Over all, use of Nsaids reduced the risk for squamous cell skin cancer by 18 percent. Using aspirin alone also reduced the risk, though the reduction was not statistically significant....