A panel of experts has rejected concerns by religious conservatives in Texas that a high school biology textbook contained factual errors about evolution and a state board approved the book on Wednesday for use in public schools.

The debate over the Pearson Biology textbook was the latest episode of a lengthy battle by evangelicals in Texas to insert Christian and Biblical teachings into public school textbooks.

Two years ago, conservatives pushed for changes in history textbooks, including one that would have downplayed Thomas Jefferson's role in American history for his support of the separation of church and state. That effort was unsuccessful.

The second-most populous U.S. state, Texas influences textbook selections for schools nationwide.

In the case of the biology book, an unidentified volunteer reviewer complained to the Texas State Board of Education that it presents evolution as scientific fact rather than a theory, which conflicts with the creation story written in the Book of Genesis in the Bible.

A Tulsa, Oklahoma man is in jail after allegedly assaulting a woman he believed to be Muslim.

According to police reports, the woman - who is Lebanese and was wearing a headscarf - pulled into Bill and Ruth's Deli. When she exited her vehicle, Stuart Manning began to berate her for having parked too close to his Jeep.

"Hey, you f***ing b***h Muslim, why did you get so close to my car?" he reportedly said. She claims he followed her to the door of the restaurant yelling, "Muslim b***h!" As she entered the store, she says she observed Manning crouching by her car.

Pope Francis recently urged the faithful to understand reality by looking at it "from the periphery" in order to avoid becoming fundamentalists.

Francis meet with 120 superiors general of men's religious orders at the Vatican in November. His comments were published Friday by La Civiltà Cattolica, a Rome-based Jesuit weekly.

"I am convinced of one thing: the great changes in history were realized when reality was seen not from the center but rather from the periphery," the pope said.

To look at something from the periphery, the pope explained, meant analyzing reality through a variety of viewpoints, rather than filtering all experience through a centralized ideology.

"It is not a good strategy to be at the center of a sphere," he said. "To understand we ought to move around, to see reality from various viewpoints. We ought to get used to thinking."

A new opinion poll indicates that a majority of Americans believe the United States will be on a downward spiral for decades.

The poll conducted by Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research said 54 percent of those surveyed expect American life to go downhill by 2050. Fifty-four percent of respondents said life in the United States is worse today than four decades ago when asked to rate the change in American life from 1972 until 2012.

According to the survey, 23 percent think life will improve and 21 percent predict life will remain the same. Middle-aged, older, and those who earn mid-level incomes are pessimistic about the future.

"I really worry about my grandchildren, I do," said 74-year-old Penny Trusty of Rockville, Md., a retired software designer and grandmother of five. "I worry about the lowering of morals and the corruption and the confusion that's just raining down on them."

A professional flutist says that U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents smashed every one of his 11 instruments upon landing at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport last week, saying they were made of agricultural material that is not allowed into the U.S.

The music blog Slipped Disc reported that Boujemaa Razgui - whom it described as a "flute virtuoso" - had built all of the instruments by hand.

Razgui, a Canadian citizen and native of Morocco who holds a U.S. Green Card, was returning home to New York from Morocco over the Christmas holiday when Customs agents opened his luggage for inspection.

"I told them I had these instruments for many years and flew with them in and out," he told Slipped Disc on Tuesday. "There were 11 instruments in all. They told me they were agricultural products and they had to be destroyed. There was nothing I could do. The ney flute can be made with bamboo. Is that agricultural?"

"Bouzemaa was both upset and unwilling to risk a confrontation with the US authorities," Slipped Disc reported, adding that the blog had sent the flutist's contact information to major media outlets hoping for wider coverage of the story.

West Virginia State Police were investigating on Thursday after a man reportedly shot and killed his wife and them himself while children were watching.

According to WOWK, the shooting occurred in the Comfort area of Boone County on Joe's Creek Road at around 9 a.m.

Investigators believed that the man shot his wife and then turned the gun on himself. The wife was found with at least two gunshot wounds.

A serially unemployed, tattoo-swathed neo-Nazi is declaring that Child Protective Services is "discriminating" against him after removing his ninth child - a newborn girl named Eva Braun - from his custody. The New York Daily News reported that Heath Campbell arrived in court to protest the removal dressed entirely in Third Reich regalia.

"I'm not allowed to have children because I'm a Nazi," said Heath Campbell, 40, to the Daily News. "That's what they're saying. Well, I'll stop making them when they stop taking them."

Campbell first came to national attention in 2008 when a grocery store refused to write "Happy Birthday Adolf Hitler" on a birthday cake for Campbell's son, Adolf Hitler Campbell.

The Nazi-obsessed father of nine has had children with five women but currently has custody of none of them. In addition to Adolf Hitler Campbell, he is the father of girls JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell and Honzlynn Jeannie Campbell and son Heinrich Hons Campbell. Eva Lynn Patricia Braun Campbell was born on November 11.

A men's rights group is encouraging its followers to falsely accuse a sexual assault victims advocate of rape in a stunt intended to undermine the veracity of all rape accusations.

Paul Elam, founder of the website A Voice For Men, hosted an online discussion Wednesday with his site's editor-in-chief, John Hembling, and feminist critic Karen Straughn to discuss their plan to harass executive director of the Sexual Assault Centre of Edmonton.

"I have looked at a number of cases where people have reported alien abductions were they were prodded and poked and had different orifices in their bodies explored by aliens in spaceships, and a common theme among these is that it turns out, in most of these cases, it was Karen Smith," Elam said. "It wasn't aliens."

The men's rights movement has been angry at Smith since at least this summer, when she helped promote the "Don't Be That Guy" rape prevention campaign that inspired imitators in other cities and a counter campaign blaming women for their own sexual assaults.

Men's rights activists also conspired to shut down a website that allowed the anonymous reporting of sexual assaults by flooding the system with false complaints.

When members of Congress come back from recess, they could put our nation's 11.7 million undocumented immigrant workers on a path to citizenship. But if they refuse to, as they did in 2013, they'll be pushing US workers further down the path to becoming like low-wage immigrant workers. After all, our economy is already headed in exactly that direction.

Move over, farmers, factory workers and technology "creatives" - the emblematic American workers are now low-wage immigrant day laborers and guest workers. More and more, Americans are trapped in the uncertainty and injustice that immigrant workers know all too well, whether they're here on temporary work visas cleaning luxury condos or undocumented and scrambling for daily construction jobs.

Increasingly, from an economic standpoint, office parks and store aisles in America are coming to resemble the street corners where day laborers gather and the labor camps where guest workers are trapped. We can either continue to pretend that low-wage immigrant workers are on the fringes of our economy - that their problems are theirs alone - or we can face the fact that their conditions are what we're all moving toward, and what millions of US-born workers already face.

Immigrant workers have long experienced vulnerability and instability, and have long been treated as disposable by their employers. Today, roughly one-third of American jobs are part-time, contract or otherwise "contingent." And the number of contingent workers in the United States is expected to grow by more than one-third over the next four years. That means more and more families are without the benefits of full-time work, such as health insurance, pensions or 401(k)s. And more of us are without the employment certainty that leads to economic stability at home - and to the consumer spending that drives the economy.

The brain tissue was taken from the Indiana Medical History Museum, site of the former Central State Hospital, which treated patients with psychiatric and mental disorders from 1848 to 1994.

The details sound like the plot of a bad horror movie: Desperate for cash, a young man breaks into a warehouse to steal the brains of dead mental patients, and the body parts are later sold on eBay.

This story line, however, is real.

Authorities say David Charles, a 21-year-old Indianapolis resident, is accused of breaking into the Indiana Medical History Museum multiple times last year and stealing jars of human brain tissue and other preserved material. A tipster who paid hundreds of dollars on the online auction site helped bring the organ entrepreneurism to an end.

The museum is the site of the former Central State Hospital, which served patients with psychiatric and mental disorders from 1848 to 1994. Indianapolis police had investigated several break-ins at the museum's storage facility before a California phone call led police to Charles.