An initiative to rename a popular Hawaii beach for President Obama has faced criticism and was dropped following a public outcry over "historic and cultural sensitivity" and the fact that the high-profile but rare visitor has "done nothing" for the venue.

After hearing from the public, Honolulu council members have dropped their plans to rename a beach, popular with both President Barack Obama and the public, as a tribute to the first Hawaii-born president.

The proposal was introduced last week and would have allocated $500,000 to pay for renovation and beautification to accompany renaming Sandy Beach Park to President Barack Obama Sandy Beach Park.

An article in Middle East Quarterly, a pro-Israel publication, reports that support for Israel is eroding among American evangelical Christians, with only 30 percent in a recent survey stating support for Israel above Palestinians.

This trend is even more pronounced among youth, according to an article by David Brog, Jewish-American executive director of "Christians United For Israel (CUFI), a major pro-Israel organization. Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu has called CUFI "a vital part of Israel's national security" and columnist Charles Kauthammer has said, "I do not know of an organization in the world more important to Israel than CUFI."

Brog's article, "The End of Evangelical Support for Israel?" is largely pitched as a wake-up call to Israel partisans who, according to Brog, "must take this threat seriously." (For more on Brog, see below.)

Brog quotes a journalist reporting in 2012 about the "the largest gathering of young evangelical leaders in America," the Catalyst convention: "In dozens of random conversations, I noted that Millenians ... expressed solidarity with the Palestinians and annoyance with Israel. This is a seismic shift in the American church and a serious threat to Israel's one traditional area of support."

A decade ago, Brog reports, "As if out of nowhere, a block of fifty to one hundred million friends of Israel were poised to enter the national debate and safeguard the U.S.-Israel relationship for generations to come."*

Today, however, Brog describes a significant reversal. As more and more evangelicals learn the facts on Israel-Palestine (Brog calls such information an "anti-Israel narrative") they are dropping their unconditional support for Israel.

While evangelical support for Israel has often been attributed to their theology, Brog's article indicates that the significant factor in the shift is learning the true situation in Israel-Palestine.

Brog states that there is a precedent for such an about-face. While many mainline Protestant churches used to support Israel, he states that today "to the extent the mainline denominations act corporately in connection with the Jewish state, it is to divest from it."

Similarly, as evangelicals learn more about the issue, Brog reports that "more leaders of this generation are moving toward neutrality in the conflict while others are becoming outspoken critics of Israel."

Brog writes, "Questioning Christian support for the Jewish state is fast becoming a key way for the millennials to demonstrate their Christian compassion and political independence."

Today, Brog writes, many of those 18 to 30 are "rebelling against what they perceive as the excessive biblical literalism and political conservatism of their parents. As they strive with a renewed vigor to imitate Jesus' stand with the oppressed and downtrodden, they want to decide for themselves which party is being oppressed in the Arab-Israeli conflict."

If you haven't been to Disney World near Orlando, Fla., lately, it will cost you, your wife and three kids about $1,500 for a four-day pass.

However, that's a price that many Disney World employees can't afford.

According to data from the U.S. Labor Department, the Orlando-area has a 18.4 percent poverty rate, notes Bloomberg News.

It's not because people aren't working, but rather their wages are not keeping up with the cost of living in Central Florida.

The Orlando Sentinel reported in 2013 that 37 percent of jobs in Orlando pay less than $25,000 per year. Almost 53 percent of people who rent homes in Orlando have to cough up 35 percent of their pay for housing. About 44,000 retail-sales jobs in the area paid more than $25,000 in 2007, but now those same positions pay less.

While Florida doesn't have a state income tax, it's minimum wage is $7.93. Attempts to raise Florida's minimum wage have been defeated by Republican politicians.

A Texas man who admitted to killing his mother and raping her corpse clowned around for jurors who are considering his sentence. Kevin Davis pleaded guilty Monday to first-degree murder, just as his trial began.

Prosecutors played a videotaped confession Tuesday to jurors, who heard the 18-year-old admit he tried to strangle Kimberly Hill with the power cord from a video game console on March 27, but when she did not stop screaming, he struck his mother's head repeatedly with a hammer. Davis told investigators on the recording that he stuck his hand into the open wound and moved her brain around to make sure she was dead, reported KZTV-TV. Then, Davis told investigators, he raped his mother's dead body.

"Guess I lost my virginity to a dead corpse," Davis said.

Davis watched the video intently, and when it was over, he swiveled his chair to face the jury and smiled, reported the Corpus Christi Caller Times. Davis told detectives he had long fantasized about killing his mother and sister, and he waited a while for his sister to return home before deciding to leave his family's Corpus Christi apartment and move away.

"I had my fill of killing," he said. "It seemed a little much."

Georgia law enforcement officers responsible for a bungled SWAT raid that left a toddler burned and disfigured will not face criminal charges, a grand jury has decided. The case is now being reviewed by federal officials.

News of the decision first broke on Monday, when a 23-person grand jury in Habersham County, Georgia, called the investigation "hurried and sloppy" but chose not to indict any officials involved in the SWAT operation's planning or execution, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

During the May drug raid, 19-month-old infant Bounkham "Bou Bou" Phonesavanh had his face severely burned and disfigured after a flashbang grenade landed in his playpen while he was asleep. The baby - who underwent more than one surgery as a result of his injuries - had his nose detached from his face and suffered from an open gash in his chest as well as a collapsed lung.

"This is unbelievable to me," said father Bounkham Phonesavanh to the Journal-Constitution. "I just don't understand how or why the grand jury would not charge any of these officers for what they did to us. It hurts me to see my family suffer like this and for them to do nothing."

One day later, the US Attorney's office announced it is considering charges of its own against the officers who conducted the raid.

In the dramatic diplomatic disaster that is occurring alongside the Ukrainian crisis, why are European leaders compelled, against their better interest and judgment, to follow Washington into an intractable feud with neighboring Russia?

No matter how many times the United States betrays its freedom-loving tri-colors, demonstrating to the world how little it treasures the very values it was founded upon, the individual nations of Europe continue to trip over themselves to pacify and glorify this newest beast of burden on the block.

Increasingly, America's superpower hubris is destroying European relations with Russia, America's former Cold War nemesis.

First, for those who have forgotten Washington's recent shortcomings, which should have forced a major rethink in European capitals, here is the sinister short list: Rendition flights to black hole sites in unknown locations in Eastern Europe, where purported terrorists were duly tortured; the grand opening of Guantanamo Bay Detention facility, which continues to do a robust business despite Obama's pledge to shutter the "gulag of our times," as Amnesty dubbed it; the bombing of Iraq in 2003 for the sheer hell of it; the indiscriminate drone attack on seven nations in five years by America's Nobel Peace Prize winning president; revelations of a worldwide spying network courtesy of the NSA against US enemies and allies alike, which included the personal phone conversations of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Russian President Vladimir Putin turned 62 today and, as they do every year, many Russians organized over-the-top tributes in celebration.

In St. Petersburg, a children's choir recorded a highly produced music video, literally singing Putin's praises. "May you have many more years with the same strength in your heart," the children sang.


In Moscow, a pop-up art exhibit portrayed Putin as the Greek god Hercules. Just like Hercules slayed the multiheaded hydra and tamed the Cretan bull in Greek mythology, Putin is depicted defeating Western sanctions and annexing the Crimean peninsula.

In honor of Putin's bday, exhibit comparing his feats to Hercules. Here he tames the Cretan bull i.e. annexes Crimea pic.twitter.com/LqlPm5LflZ

- Alec Luhn (@ASLuhn) October 6, 2014

A school is forced to cancel the visit of a charity worker and her son following opposition from 'ignorant' parents who feared their children would catch Ebola

A school in Stockport has cancelled the visit of a charity worker and her son after "ignorant" parents feared their children would be infected with Ebola.

Head teacher Elizabeth Inman wrote to parents on Tuesday to say that "with a very heavy heart" the school had taken "the pragmatic decision" to stop the visit, despite both mother and son having been screened and granted unrestricted movement in the UK.

Miriam Mason-Sesay, who is British but has lived in Sierra Leone since 2000, said her son has been treated like a "leper", adding that the school's decision was down to "ignorant" parents.

"Unfortunately, there was so much pressure from an ignorant parent body that the school had to act," she said.

Connecticut's governor declared a public health emergency in the Nutmeg State. The precautionary order, signed by Gov. Dannel Malloy, allows public health officials to coordinate a targeted quarantine in case Ebola arrives in the state.

The Democratic governor's order ‒ which is not in reaction to any specific case of the virus ‒ gives Department of Public Health Commissioner Jewel Mullen the power to quarantine any person or group who may be exposed to or infected with Ebola.

"We are taking this action today to ensure that we are prepared, in advance, to deal with any identified cases in which someone has been exposed to the virus or, worst case, infected," Malloy said in a statement.

"Our state's hospitals have been preparing for it, and public health officials from the state are working around the clock to monitor the situation. Right now, we have no reason to think that anyone in the state is infected or at risk of infection," he continued. "But it is essential to be prepared and we need to have the authorities in place that will allow us to move quickly to protect public health, if and when that becomes necessary. Signing this order will allow us to do that."

Without the declaration, there is no statewide ability to isolate or quarantine - instead, the authority rests with each individual local public health director, the governor's office said.

A European art group has selected a very unusual way to send birthday greetings to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is 62 today, and at the same time to emphasize his outstanding role in peace-making efforts in the modern troubled world.

A group of Geneva peace activists made a three-metre tall statue of the Russian leader and used it to prop up the world-famous anti-war monument known as the Broken Chair - a symbol of protest against land mines and cluster bombs that leave millions of people limbless. Putin's figure took the place of the crippled left front leg of the huge monumental sculpture in wood by the Swiss artist, Daniel Beret, constructed by carpenter Louis Geneve.

In this way the peace activists wished to show that Putin incessantly supports all those who need help and does his utmost to prevent the loss of human life whenever possible.

The twelve-meter tall monument stands in Geneva's Square of Nations. The author of its concept is Paul Vermeulen, the director of a non-governmental organization extending assistance to refugees.

The monument is a reminder to all politicians visiting Geneva of the bitter price that has to be paid for military conflicts.

For the first time the Broken Chair monument was placed by Handicap International in front of the main entrance to the Palace of Nations in Geneva in August 1997, where it was intended to remain for three months, until the signing of the Ottawa Treaty in December 1997. However, the public at large liked the idea and its message so much that a decision was made to leave the sculpture in place.

The Broken Chair is associated with the work for peace and the cessation of all hostilities. These ideals are linked inseparably with Vladimir Putin's policies, who repeatedly managed to preserve peace in the countries that needed it the most. Putin was the one who helped negotiate the recent ceasefire in the southeast of Ukraine, warded off the looming threat of war between Armenia and Azerbaijan by bringing their presidents to the negotiating table and also saved Syria from external military aggression.