Saira Liaqat and  Urooj Akbar are among Pakistan’s many female victims of arson and acid attacks. Such tales tend to end in a life of despair for the woman. The two instead became beauticians.
Nepal’s Supreme Court has ordered the government to ensure basic health care and education for virgin girls worshipped as “living goddesses” in a centuries-old tradition in the Himalayan nation.
The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans.
*Body Mind Spirit Journeys*
*A Division of RMC Travel presents….*
*Sacred Journey to Turkey: Sacred Places of the Goddess*
October 15 - 28, 2008
with Featured Speaker* Karen Tate*,
author of *S/acred Places of Goddess:/*/ *108 Destinations */
*NOTE: We will not be offering this Sacred Journey again soon
and participation is limited, so we encourage you to reserve your space
NOW!*
*Come with us to Turkey!
Immerse yourself in the essence of the Sacred Feminine in Anatolia,
the “Nourishing Mother,” as this area was called in times past. * Read the rest of this entry »
BERLIN - More than 1,600 years after it was written in Greek, one of the oldest copies of the Bible will become globally accessible online for the first time this week.
From Thursday, sections of the Codex Sinaiticus, which contains the oldest complete New Testament, will be available on the Internet, said the University of Leipzig, one of the four curators of the ancient text worldwide.
KANSAS CITY, Kansas (CNN) — Army Spc. Jeremy Hall, who was raised Baptist but is now an atheist, says the military violated his religious freedom.
Like many Christians, he said grace before dinner and read the Bible before bed. Four years ago when he was deployed to Iraq, he packed his Bible so he would feel closer to God.
He served two tours of duty in Iraq and has a near perfect record. But somewhere between the tours, something changed. Hall, now 23, said he no longer believes in God, fate, luck or anything supernatural.
Hall said he met some atheists who suggested he read the Bible again. After doing so, he said he had so many unanswered questions that he decided to become an atheist.
His sudden lack of faith, he said, cost him his military career and put his life at risk. Hall said his life was threatened by other troops and the military assigned a full-time bodyguard to protect him out of fear for his safety.
The Texas Supreme Court threw out a jury award over injuries a girl suffered in an exorcism conducted by church members, ruling the case unconstitutionally entangled the court in religious matters.
States refusing grants for abstinence education
Skeptical states are shoving aside millions of federal dollars for abstinence education, walking away from the program the Bush administration touts for slowing teen sexual activity. Barely half the states are still in, and two more say they are leaving.
An Ecuadorean politician has offered to include a woman’s right to good sex in the country’s next constitution, which faces a referendum on its approval later this year.
British diplomat Helen Rawlins struggles to help British women of Pakistani descent lured to Pakistan and forced, sometimes at gunpoint, into marriage.