Speaking at the Pastor for Life Luncheon, which was sponsored by Pro-Life Mississippi, Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court declared that the First Amendment only applies to Christians because "Buddha didn't create us, Mohammed didn't create us, it was the God of the Holy Scriptures" who created us.

"They didn't bring the Koran over on the pilgrim ship," he continued. "Let's get real, let's go back and learn our history. Let's stop playing games."

He then noted that he loves talking to lawyers, because he is a lawyer who went to "a secular law school," so he knows that "in the law, [talking about God] just isn't politically correct." He claimed that this is why America has "lost its way," and that he would be publishing a pamphlet "this week, maybe next" that contained copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, thereby proving that all the people "who found this nation - black, white, all people, all religions, all faiths" knew that America was "about God."

Chief Justice Moore later defined "life" via Blackstone's Law - a book that American lawyers have "sadly forgotten" - as beginning when "the baby kicks." "Today," he said, "our courts say it's not alive 'til the head comes out."

Sammy McLean, 14, felt overwhelming helplessness as she stood with her family and watched two angry rivers - the Bow and the Elbow - surge through their home, cutting a path of destruction across the downtown Calgary neighbourhood. Furniture flew through the front windows, and the basement and first floor were washed out and filled with mud. McLean remembers thinking that her once calm, picturesque street resembled a war zone.

A confident, athletic girl, McLean says the flood left her vulnerable, scared and hating the rivers that encircled her home. "They wouldn't let us in for several days after we were evacuated," says McLean, who now lives in a downtown condo with her parents and three siblings while the house is being extensively renovated. "I used to think the rivers were so pretty. It made me not like them any more. I thought the water was going to take away the whole house - and my bedroom."

While the Alberta floods haven't been directly linked to climate change, destructive weather events are expected to increase in Canada in the future. McLean, a normally upbeat youth, is painfully aware of the sheer power of Mother Nature and the carnage its fury can wreak. She's now anxious about what we're doing to our environment. "I volunteered to take an active role in my school's Model United Nations, which is studying the impact climate change is having on our planet," she said.

On one hand it scared her, but it also made her want to know more so she could help activate positive change.

A Texas veterinarian arrested for animal cruelty has admitted to keeping alive five dogs meant to be put down, among them his own pet, which was discovered lying motionless with one of her legs missing.

Dr Millard Lucien 'Lou' Tierce, 71, turned himself in at the Tarrant County Jail at around Wednesday and was later released on $10,000 bail.

His veterinary license has been suspended by the state pending an investigation.

According to the suspension order, officials inspecting Tierce's popular Camp Bowie Animal Clinic found 'unsanitary conditions, animal organs kept in jars, bugs in exam rooms, open and unsecured medications' strewn about the office along with laundry and pieces of paper.

They also discovered that five pets the veterinarian had accepted for euthanasia were still alive, one of them kept in a cage for two or three years. Three dogs rescued from the veterinary office by police were described as being in 'such a decrepit shape' that they had to be euthanized to put an end to their suffering.

Tierce told investigators that two of the pooches had been brought to the clinic by their owners to be put to sleep, but according to state records, the 71-year-old doctor believed that the decision was his to make.

A third dog, a black and white border collie that belonged to Tierce himself, was discovered twitching in pain inside a box left in an exam room. One of the animal's legs was missing, another was dislocated, and the collie also had two dislocated shoulders.

Amid Kiev's info war branding Slavyansk civilians "hostages of the terrorists," the residents of Slavyansk speak out against the military campaign in eastern Ukraine and go out to block troops and APCs, as self-defense vows to "stand to the last."

Expecting a fresh wave of assaults from armed forces loyal to Kiev to start at any moment, the defiant anti-government stronghold of Slavyansk has become "eerily quiet," with the streets, dotted with checkpoints, practically devoid of passersby. These are the impressions of RT's Paula Slier reporting on the spot.

A while back, I was on a philosophy debate binge. Watching Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens annihilate their opponents with precision and wit is my idea of a good night in, and YouTube's "related videos" are a deep, dark rabbithole.

I stumbled upon two debates involving Deepak Chopra: one alongside possible alien Jean Houston against Sam Harris and Michael Shermer called Does God Have A Future? and one against Richard Dawkins at the Dangerous Ideas festival. I had never seen Chopra speak before, and I was only familiar with his name from cheesy-looking self-help titles. As I watched the debate, his childish behaviour and smugness amazed me. He constantly interrupted and talked over the others, usually to make cheap shots or have the last word instead of making a sound argument. He got weirdly defensive when Harris pointed out that nobody at the debate was qualified to talk about quantum physics - quantum is one of his favourite buzzwords - and boasted that he was the most qualified one there because he's an MD(!). It's clear the man isn't used to being challenged.

The US economy is a house of cards. Every aspect of it is fraudulent, and the illusion of recovery is created with fraudulent statistics.

American capitalism itself is an illusion. All financial markets are rigged. Massive liquidity poured into financial markets by the Federal Reserve's Quantitative Easing inflates stock and bond prices and drives interest rates, which are supposed to be a measure of the cost of capital, to zero or negative, with the implication that capital is so abundant that its cost is zero and can be had for free. Large enterprises, such as mega-banks and auto manufacturers, that go bankrupt are not permitted to fail. Instead, public debt and money creation are used to cover private losses and keep corporations "too big to fail" afloat at the expense not of shareholders but of people who do not own the shares of the corporations.

Profits are no longer a measure that social welfare is being served by capitalism's efficient use of resources when profits are achieved by substituting cheaper foreign labor for domestic labor, with resultant decline in consumer purchasing power and rise in income and wealth inequality. In the 21st century, the era of jobs offshoring, the US has experienced an unprecedented explosion in income and wealth inequality. I have made reference to this hard evidence of the failure of capitalism to provide for the social welfare in the traditional economic sense in my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, and Thomas Piketty's just published book, Capital in the 21st Century, has brought an alarming picture of reality to insouciant economists, such as Paul Krugman. As worrisome as Piketty's picture is of inequality, I agree with Michael Hudson that the situation is worse than Piketty describes.

Capitalism has been transformed by powerful private interests whose control over governments, courts, and regulatory agencies has turned capitalism into a looting mechanism. Wall Street no longer performs any positive function. Wall Street is a looting mechanism, a deadweight loss to society. Wall Street makes profits by front-running trades with fast computers, by selling fraudulent financial instruments that it is betting against as investment grade securities, by leveraging equity to unprecedented heights, making bets that cannot be covered, and by rigging all commodity markets.

The Federal Reserve and the US Treasury's "Plunge Protection Team" aid the looting by supporting the stock market with purchases of stock futures, and protect the dollar from the extraordinary money-printing by selling naked shorts into the Comex gold futures market.

Attorneys for an Oregon couple accused of allowing their daughter to die of untreated diabetes complications don't want jurors to hear about their faith-healing beliefs at trial.

Defense attorneys argue that evidence regarding the religious beliefs and practices of Travis and Wenona Rossiter would be prejudicial, reported the Albany Democrat-Herald.

The Rossiters, who are from Albany, are members of the fundamentalist Church of the First Born, which teaches that medical treatment is sinful and instructs followers to trust in God to heal them through faith.

Since 1976, at least 82 children linked to the church have died from lack of medical treatment, according to Children's Health Care Is A Legal Duty.

Deadly protests broke out in a slum near Brazil's Copacabana beach after police and protesters clashed over the death of a professional dancer on Tuesday night.

One person was reported dead in the shootout in the Pavao-Pavaozinho favela and a 12-year-old boy was injured in the protest, according to local media.

The slum was placed under lockdown as protesters set barricades of tyres and cars alight. Several streets were blocked as police struggled to contain the protest.

The unrest began after the body of professional dancer Douglas Rafael da Silva Pareira was found dead on Tuesday morning.

Today's world is a strange place. We are inundated with signals from early on in life, encouraging each of us to walk a particular path, establishing blinders on us along the way to discourage us from looking for alternatives to what the herd is doing or thinking. Life is so complex that over time, if we are paying attention, we realize that there are an infinite number of possibilities to what the human experience could be, and we come see that the world is on fire because individuals all too infrequently question why things are the way they are, failing to notice that their mindset or behavior needs adjustment in favor of more intelligent, common sensical, or sustainable patterns of existence.

Not meant to be overtly critical of anyone's lifestyle choices or personal situation, the following 16 signs that you're a slave to the matrix are meant purely as an observational approach to helping you identify the areas of your life where you may be missing an opportunity to liberate yourself from someone else's self-destructive design for your life.

The largest security training exercise in Boston's history is slated to kick off at 8 a.m. Saturday with a simulated active school shooter drill in Brookline. It will continue with other drills during 24 hours and involve about 2,000 state and local personnel.

"The Urban Shield Program, as we've learned over the last year, is essential to our city's safety at any time of crisis," Mayor Martin J. Walsh of Boston.

"Since the 2013 Boston Marathon, we learned a lot about resiliency as a community and about professionalism of our first responders. This initiative has a lot to do with that," Walsh said. Residents should not be alarmed, authorities said, if they see an increased police presence Saturday.

Rene Fielding, director of the city's office of emergency management, declined to give details about each drill to avoid tipping off participants.

In addition to the school shooter drill, participants will respond to drills involving an injured officer in Cambridge, a hospital evacuation in Boston, a hostage rescue of elected officials at Boston City Hall, an explosive device on a transit system in Boston, a structural collapse on Moon Island, and a simulation of a terrorist takeover at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.