Palestinian jailed for rape after claiming to be Jewish

A Palestinian man has been convicted of rape after having consensual sex with an Israeli woman who believed he was Jewish because he introduced himself as "Daniel".

A court in Jerusalem has made international legal history by jailing Sabbar Kashur, a 30-year-old delivery man from East Jerusalem, for 18 months.
He was convicted of "rape by deception" following a criminal trial that has drawn criticism from across Israel.

The court heard accusations that Mr Kashur misled the woman, whose identity has not been disclosed, by introducing himself with the traditionally Jewish name during a chance encounter on a street in central Jerusalem in 2008.

After striking up a conversation, the two went into a top-floor room of a nearby office-block and engaged in a sexual encounter, after which Mr Kashur left before the woman had a chance to get dressed. It was only later that she discovered Mr Kashur's true racial background, lawyers said.

Although conceding that the sex was consensual, district court judge Tzvi Segal concluded that the law had a duty to protect women from "smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price"

"If she hadn't thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have co-operated," Mrs Segal said as she delivered her verdict.

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ABC News: Billboard Battle in Bible Belt

BBC: EU boosts hi-tech research budget

The EU has announced 6.4bn euros (£5.4bn) of funding for scientific research and innovation next year - a 12% increase on this year's allocation.

The programme is aimed at creating more than 165,000 jobs and developing "a more competitive and greener Europe", the European Commission says.

The focus is on tackling climate change, energy projects, food security, health and Europe's ageing population.

Grants will be awarded to about 16,000 research bodies and businesses.

"Research and innovation are the only smart and lasting route out of crisis and towards sustainable and socially equitable growth," said the EU Commissioner for Research and Innovation, Maire Geoghegan-Quinn.

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Colbert Report - Yahweh or No Way - The Blues Brothers & Glenn Beck

Stephen Colbert jokes about how the Vatican newspaper endorses "The Blues Brothers".

When Jake and Elwood Blues, the protagonists in John Landis' cult classic "The Blues Brothers," claimed they were on a mission from God, the Catholic Church apparently took them at their word.

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Selective creationists

Some interesting, if terrifying statistics from the Why Evolution Is True website.


This flashy graph has already been posted on Pharyngula, but I thought I’d echo P. Z.’s sentiments. This graph comes from a survey of high school biology teachers published in PLoS Biology in 2008 (download is free). The teachers were asked about their personal beliefs about human origins (click to enlarge):


Only a tad more than one in four teachers really accepts evolution as scientists conceive of it: a naturalistic process undirected by divine beings. Nearly one in two teachers thinks that humans evolved but that God guided the process.

Can we count those 48% of “guided-by-Godders” 0n our side? I agree with P. Z.: the answer is NO. Yes, they do accept that our species changed genetically over time, but they see God as having pulled the strings. That’s not the way evolution works. The graph labels these 48% as believers in intelligent design, and that’s exactly what they are, for they see God as nudging human evolution toward some preconceived goal. We’re designed. These people are creationists: selective creationists.

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Chew on this: thank cooking for your big brain

THE French have elevated it to an art form, and even the British have got better at it - but chimps can't cook at all. According to one controversial evolutionary theory, early humans developed a taste for cooked food around 2 million years ago, and this set in motion a series of changes that made us utterly different from any other animal.

Now the proponents of the cooked-food hypothesis are presenting fresh evidence in support of the idea - and it all comes down to how you chew.

The theory, championed by Richard Wrangham at Harvard University, has divided palaeoanthropologists. In an attempt to convince the doubters, Wrangham and his colleagues have been amassing empirical evidence, including evolutionary adaptations consistent with a diet of heated food, such as the small size of our guts.

At the Evolution 2010 conference in Portland, Oregon, at the end of June, Christopher Organ of Harvard and Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, presented what he and Wrangham say is the best evidence yet that we are adapted to eating cooked food, and that this is the result of events that occurred early on in human evolution.

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The Age of Stupid: War on Resources

Sent onto me by my brothers girlfriend, these are some interesting little clips from a doco called The Age of Stupid.

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