Sunday

Hundreds of teens have had two abortions: figures show



Hundreds of teenage girls given more than two abortions on NHS including three who have had seven terminations, official figures show. Fourteen teenage girls had their fifth abortion in 2010, 57 teens had a termination for the fourth time and 485 women aged 19 or under went through the procedure for a third time.

Pro-life campaigners said young women were being "let down in an appalling way" after it emerged three of the 38,269 teenagers who had a termination in 2010 had undergone the procedure at least seven times. NHS figures released under the Freedom of Information Act show another two teenage girls had their seventh abortion in 2010, the most recent year for which data is available, while four more teenagers had a termination for the sixth time. Fourteen teenage girls had their fifth abortion in 2010, 57 teens had a termination for the fourth time and 485 women aged 19 or under went through the procedure for a third time. Rebecca Mallinson, of the Pro Life Alliance, said: "There is something seriously wrong with a country where teenagers are having even one abortion, let alone repeat abortions to this extent. "We are failing these young people in an appalling way, and storing up serious sexual health problems for the future, whether the direct issue of sexually transmitted diseases, but also the effects that multiple abortions can have on future fertility.

Lamentations 4:3Even the sea monsters draw out the breast, they give suck to their young ones: the daughter of my people is become cruel, like the ostriches in the wilderness. 4The tongue of the sucking child cleaveth to the roof of his mouth for thirst: the young children ask bread, and no man breaketh it unto them.

Wednesday

New York mom faces murder charges for allegedly poisoning 2 kids to get back at cheating husband



A New York City schoolteacher faces two first-degree murder charges after she allegedly killed her children in a failed suicide-murder plot aimed to get back at her cop husband, who she believed had a baby with another woman. Lisette Bamenga, 29, who works as a teacher at PS 58 in Brooklyn, poisoned her two children, Trevor Jr. and Liliane, ages 5 and 4 months, by making them drink a mixture of juice and de-icing fluid Thursday, police tell DNA Info. Bamenga then sealed her Bronx apartment's windows with plastic and cranked up the gas, before slitting her wrists in a suicide attempt, sources told the New York Post. Neighbors smelled the gas and alerted authorities, who found Bamenga unconscious in the apartment, DNA Info reports. The children were declared dead at the scene, but Bamenga remains in stable condition at Jacobi Hospital. Her husband, NYPD Officer Trevor Noel, was described as speechless when he returned home after working a late-night shift, the New York Post reports. Bamenga left two suicide notes inside the apartment. “You got what you wanted,” she allegedly wrote in one of the notes. “Me and the kids are in a better place now.” Another note contained the phrase “DNR,” meaning “do not resuscitate,” if someone found Bamenga in the apartment, the New York Post reports.

Ecclesiastes 7:26And I find more bitter than death the woman, whose heart is snares and nets, and her hands as bands: whoso pleaseth God shall escape from her; but the sinner shall be taken by her.

Louisiana dismantling public education


Louisiana is embarking on the nation's boldest experiment in privatizing public education, with the state preparing to shift tens of millions in tax dollars out of the public schools to pay private industry, businesses owners and church pastors to educate children. Starting this fall, thousands of poor and middle-class kids will get vouchers covering the full cost of tuition at more than 120 private schools across Louisiana, including small, Bible-based church schools. The following year, students of any income will be eligible for mini-vouchers that they can use to pay a range of private-sector vendors for classes and apprenticeships not offered in traditional public schools. The money can go to industry trade groups, businesses, online schools and tutors, among others. Every time a student receives a voucher of either type, his local public school will lose a chunk of state funding. "We are changing the way we deliver education," said Governor Bobby Jindal, a Republican who muscled the plan through the legislature this spring over fierce objections from Democrats and teachers unions. "We are letting parents decide what's best for their children, not government." BIBLE-BASED MATH BOOKS The concept of opening public schools to competition from the private sector has been widely promoted in recent years by well-funded education reform groups. Of the plans so far put forward, Louisiana's plan is by far the broadest. This month, eligible families, including those with incomes nearing $60,000 a year, are submitting applications for vouchers to state-approved private schools. That list includes some of the most prestigious schools in the state, which offer a rich menu of advanced placement courses, college-style seminars and lush grounds. The top schools, however, have just a handful of slots open. The Dunham School in Baton Rouge, for instance, has said it will accept just four voucher students, all kindergartners. As elsewhere, they will be picked in a lottery. Far more openings are available at smaller, less prestigious religious schools, including some that are just a few years old and others that have struggled to attract tuition-paying students. The school willing to accept the most voucher students -- 314 -- is New Living Word in Ruston, which has a top-ranked basketball team but no library. Students spend most of the day watching TVs in bare-bones classrooms. Each lesson consists of an instructional DVD that intersperses Biblical verses with subjects such chemistry or composition.

Deuteronomy 6:4Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: 

Deuteronomy 6:5And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. 

Deuteronomy 6:6And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: 

Deuteronomy 6:7And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. 

Deuteronomy 6:8And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. 

Deuteronomy 6:9And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.


Evangelical ministers plan to endorse candidates, Catholic Church launches campaign against Obama Pastor Jim Garlow will stand before congregants at his 2,000-seat Skyline Wesleyan Church in La Mesa, California, on Sunday, Oct. 7, just weeks before the U.S. presidential and congressional elections, and urge his flock to vote for or against particular candidates. He knows such pulpit pleading could endanger his church's tax-exempt status by violating IRS rules for a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. A charity can take a position on policy issues but cannot act "on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office." To cross that line puts the $7 million mega-church's tax break at risk. Even so, Garlow not only intends to break the rules, he also plans to spend the next four months recruiting other pastors to do the same as part of Pulpit Freedom Sunday. On that day each year since 2008, ministers intentionally try to provoke the IRS. Some even send DVD recordings of their sermons to the agency. Last year, 539 pastors participated. This year organizers expect far more. Participants want to force the matter to court as a freedom of speech and religion issue. "I believe we're on the early stages of the next great awakening," Garlow told his congregation last year. "We're going to see it just sweep across this nation." The situation is fraught with peril for the IRS, which needs to be seen as apolitical. When it cracks down on political activities proscribed by the 501(c)(3) regulations, it is inevitably branded as partisan. When the target is a church, mosque or synagogue, enforcement puts two fundamental American values at odds: freedom of speech and the separation of church and state. Although the agency has enforced the tax-exemption rules against churches in the past, it has so far ignored the provocations of Freedom Sunday. The IRS has also been silent about the increasingly aggressive political activity of the U.S. Catholic bishops, who have called for their own Fortnight for Freedom this week. Masses, rallies, and parish bulletins are being mobilized against the Obama administration's healthcare regulations on contraceptives. The result of agency inaction, according to tax experts and former IRS staffers, will be a lot more electioneering by leaders of the faithful, in local races as well as national, and to the benefit of Democrats as well as Republicans. "It will get worse unless the IRS takes action, and they seem reluctant," said Nicholas Cafardi, dean emeritus and professor of law at Duquesne University and the longtime lawyer for the Catholic diocese of Pittsburgh. Cafardi called the current state of affairs "toxic" in its mingling of the two worlds. Many religious leaders do not support the trend toward more political involvement by organized religion and worry it will undercut their moral authority. Billions In Tithes The money involved is enormous. Combined, federal tax breaks on donations to churches and exemptions from state and local property taxes likely add up to something on the order of $25 billion in lost revenue each year. Last year churches received $96 billion in tax-free contributions, according to estimates compiled by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. Unlike other types of charities, churches do not have to file financial statements with the government. There are only rough estimates of church endowment or investment income, which is also tax-free and believed to be larger than annual contributions. Using tax data from the U.S. Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation and data on giving to churches from the Indiana Center, a Reuters analysis found that tax breaks on church giving shaved $12 billion or so from total U.S. tax collections in 2011 and approximately $145 billion over the last decade. The property tax break is probably even bigger. In their 2011 book "Politics, Taxes, and the Pulpit," law professors Nina Crimm and Laurence Winer calculated that houses of worship received $12.7 billion in property tax exemptions on $685 billion of property in 2006, a figure large enough to have played a role in city and state budget deficits of recent years. In big cities the numbers can be dramatic. New York City's 9,500 churches, synagogues, and mosques, for example, will avoid $626.9 million in property taxes this year thanks to their tax-free status, according to the city's Independent Budget Office. Like most of California, La Mesa, where Garlow's Skyline Church is located, has suffered a steep drop in property tax collections, forcing municipal staff cuts and a sales tax increase. Skyline's campus, which is assessed at $7.3 million and cost a reported $27 million to build, is almost entirely tax-exempt, according to the county assessor's office. An Era of Enforcement The IRS has not always been quiet. In 1992 it went after the Church at Pierce Creek in Binghamton, New York, which had bought full-page newspaper ads opposing then-Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton. The church lost its IRS tax-exempt status but continued operating, changing its name to Landmark Church when it moved into central Binghamton several years ago. Pastor Dan Little said the church never lost its property tax break. At the end of the year, Landmark gives people a record of their giving just like other churches, he said, leaving it up to them and their accountants to decide tax matters. "We just never have made any big issue of it," said Little, who continues to preach about politics and morals. In 2004 the IRS created a dedicated enforcement program focused on political activity by churches and other nonprofits. Called the Political Activities Compliance Initiative (PACI), it investigated in the 2004, 2006 and 2008 election cycles 80 instances where church officials were alleged to have endorsed a candidate during services. According to IRS tallies made public after each election, the majority of the PACI complaints were upheld and settled with a warning that the organization comply with the ban on political activity. The IRS did not respond to Reuters questions about its enforcement activities in recent years, or explain why they seem to have ended abruptly in 2009. Bachmann Endorsement a Key IRS church audits seem to have halted entirely in January 2009. That was when Living Word Christian Center in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, successfully appealed an IRS audit. In question were an endorsement of Republican Michele Bachmann for Congress by pastor James Hammond and financial deals that may have benefited him personally, a violation of IRS rules. IRS audits of churches must comply with strict rules designed to prevent undue governmental pressure. One is that a high-level IRS or Treasury Department official must authorize the audit. In the Living Word case, the U.S. District Court in Minnesota ruled that the IRS staffer who authorized the audit did not qualify. In July of that year, Minnesota's Warroad Community Church was told by an IRS official that it was closing its 2008 examination of the church "because of a pending issue regarding the procedure used to initiate the inquiry." (Reuters obtained a copy of the letter from the Alliance Defense Fund, which was representing Warroad in the audit.) Other churches that had been under IRS review received comparable letters, according to their lawyers. The IRS stopped publishing the results of its PACI initiative. Three years later the IRS has yet to come up with a new set of church audit rules, making it impossible, experts say, for the agency to pursue such examinations. Former staff insist that being seen as weak on enforcement of the law would be more damaging to the IRS than any allegation of partisanship would be. Still, tight budget may have made it easy to put off tackling 501(c)(3) disputes. Others argued the agency may worry it could lose a court case over revocation on constitutional grounds, and that by avoiding such a test they may preserve the deterrent power of having the law on the books. Whatever the reason, IRS inaction has effectively thwarted the evangelicals' efforts to force the matter in court. Bishops Take Aim At the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting last week in Atlanta, bishops vowed to keep up their criticism of Obama administration policies on employer-provided birth control and other controversies. "The first principle is that American citizens don't lose their freedom of religion or their freedom of expression when they become bishops," said Cardinal Francis George of Chicago. As to what is and is not acceptable to say about candidates for office, "the guidelines are broader than some may interpret them," George told Reuters at the conference. In follow-up email correspondence, he declined to say whether he thought the IRS rules constrained free speech or whether he would be willing to forgo the church's tax exemption so clerics could speak out without restriction. The meeting offered no public discussion of an April sermon by Illinois Bishop Daniel Jenky that has been vigorously debated in the local and the religious press and which many think violated the prohibition against opposing a candidate for office. The sermon has drawn a request for an IRS investigation by a watchdog group. After asserting that Obama, "with his radical, pro-abortion and extreme secularist agenda" seemed to be on an anti-Catholic path similar to Hitler and Stalin, Jenky exhorted all Catholics to "vote their Catholic consciences" this fall. Do the people in congregations follow such instructions? Only 18 percent of those polled by the Pew Research Center in January said the endorsement of a candidate by their minister, priest or rabbi would sway their vote. Seventy percent said it would make no difference. A second Pew study this spring found that most parishioners would prefer their religious leaders steer clear of electioneering, with Catholics among the most adamant.

Acts 19:13Then certain of the vagabond Jews, exorcists, took upon them to call over them which had evil spirits the name of the Lord Jesus, saying, We adjure you by Jesus whom Paul preacheth. 14And there were seven sons of one Sceva, a Jew, and chief of the priests, which did so. 15And the evil spirit answered and said, Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are ye? 16And the man in whom the evil spirit was leaped on them, and overcame them, and prevailed against them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded. 17And this was known to all the Jews and Greeks also dwelling at Ephesus; and fear fell on them all, and the name of the Lord Jesus was magnified

James 1:1 Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. 

James 1:2 Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. 

James 1:3 Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. 

James 1:4 Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth. 

James 1:Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter. 

James 1:6 Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you.

Female pastor burns down house for insurance money.


Dr. Bridget Barnes Steib (pictured), the head pastor and televangelist of a Baton Rouge ministry, has been arrested for allegedly trying to burn her own house down, and her actions were captured on video surveillance, reports the Advocate .

Steib and her husband, Joseph , are the couple better known in the community as the pastors of the Ministry of Love Congregation . The 49-year-old woman — who also hosts a local radio broadcast, appeared on various Christian TV shows, and authored books — began the full gospel church in 1994 along with her husband, whom investigators say is not a suspect. The multi-alarm blaze took place on Monday morning at the couple’s million-dollar home. By Wednesday, it was determined that the blaze, which took 35 firefighters to extinguish, had been intentionally set. A video from a surveillance camera in the Steib’s home shows two women inside the residence as the fire is starting. Both Steib and her sister, Lucille Ellen Brown , are then seen taking belongings to a vehicle that is parked in the garage then driving away. The fire department was never contacted by either of the women. Steib’s husband is the one who gave investigators permission to view the home’s surveillance video. According to an affidavit, Steib told authorities that she was not home at the time of the fire and was actually on her way to pick up her mother to go and visit someone at a hospital.

Fire Marshall Butch Browning told the Advocate that the fire had actually started not long after an insurance policy was taken on the house, increasing its value. Fire officials also state that about 25 percent of the house was destroyed by the fire that began in the utility room. The rest of the sprawling brick home had water and smoke damage. Both women have been charged with simple arson and arson with intent to defraud.

1 Timothy 6:5Perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness: from such withdraw thyself. 

1 Timothy 6:6  But godliness with contentment is great gain. 

1 Timothy 6:7For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. 

1 Timothy 6:8And having food and raiment let us be therewith content. 

1 Timothy 6:9But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. 

1 Timothy 6:10For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. 

1 Timothy 2:11Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. 

1 Timothy 2:12But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.