Newsoverworld

WHEN OUR FATHER DIED, we didn’t know what to do with his body. Conversations with your estranged dad never include: “What kind of coffin would you like? Steel? Pine? Walnut?” “How about cremation?” “Where would you like to be spread ?” He was 66. He and his best friend had gone hiking. On the drive home, for reasons unknown, my father lost control of his car and went off the side of a mountain. Cause of death: “multiple blunt force injuries.” Makes me think of ninjas (or Vikings) just cinematically whaling on him, pummeling his body. But what actually happened was less glamorous, more frightening and mundane. He and his friend got knocked around and smashed up in a Chrysler Town & Country minivan. No man wants to go out like that — certainly not my father, who loved Charles Bronson and felt a stronger devotion to a carton of cigarettes than to his own children. The local Korean newspaper ran a photo of a mangled vehicle (the same car I had learned to drive in) and a body on a str

DARWINISM IS A RELIGION and has always been one. So says distinguished philosopher Michael Ruse, whose 2016 book Darwinism as Religion proposes that evolutionary theory is no mere explanation for our planet’s biology but a worldview that exceeds the warrant of science. For the past 150 years, Ruse claims, “evolutionary thinking generally […] and Darwinian thinking in particular […] has taken on the form and role of a religion.” In other work, Ruse has argued that religious and anti-religious controversialists have much in common: a cultivation of orthodoxies, a tendency to dogmatism, and a telling zeal for persecuting heretics. In this book, he makes the case that atheists such as himself ought to grant the religious orientation behind Darwinian culture. Ruse does not mean to cast aspersions on the science of biology. Rather, he seeks to show how Darwinian theory has served as a rival to the Christian worldview since the mid-Victorian period. We admire his treatment of the religious

ZEYTINBURNU DISTRICT in Istanbul is undergoing construction. The drills and chipping of hammer on marble set a rhythmic soundtrack. Farsi shop fronts intermingle with Turkish. Zeytinburnu was traditionally home to the leather workshops that serviced the luxury boutiques lining the streets down toward the Bosporus, along the tracks of the disused train line to Greece. Today the demand for cheap textiles has overtaken the leather industry. If you sit silently, you can hear the faint tapping of machines under the concrete ground. The Afghans who populate the district eat rice classed as “bird food” to evade the import tax usually reserved for humans. They import yellow sugar crystals from Iran, tea from India, cricket bats from Pakistan. Without legal status, employment rights, basic health care, or education, they exist in caged circumstances. Service provision is strictly utilitarian — call centers, money transfer shops, restaurants. The public spaces are for men, while the women stay

The U.S. State Department is calling out Moscow after a close call in the sky over the Black Sea between a U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane and a Russian fighter jet. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8260433 http://ift.tt/2DNYdH2

The Defense Department told its inspector general overseeing the reconstruction of Afghanistan to hide what used to be public data on how much of the country is controlled by insurgent groups, according to a new government report. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8260433 http://ift.tt/2rSYkQ8

Fox News Breaking News Alert Trump says he’s ‘100 percent’ behind releasing FISA surveillance memo 01/31/18 12:34 AM

Fox News Breaking News Alert Trump: 'I am keeping another promise' by signing order to keep Guantanamo Bay prison open 01/30/18 10:15 PM