Jim Paull

Osteoporosis is the most common cause for a broken bone among the elderly. If you’re concerned about your bone health, there’s good news: practicing yoga postures—for just 12 minutes a day—could improve bone quality.

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McDonald’s may be offering all day breakfast now, but it’s still cheaper to make your own Egg McMuffins at home. If you want your sandwich to look, feel, and taste like their version, however, it all comes down to how you cook the egg.

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Outlet stores are supposed to be places where you can get great deals on brand name clothing, but they aren’t always what they seem. This video explains how some outlet stores are ripping you off, and some red flags to watch out for.

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You’ve been putting off reading that book for weeks, and you’re supposed to have read it all by tomorrow. Whether you’re cramming for school, or trying to avoid looking like a lazy bum in your book club, don’t lose hope. You can power through that tome without forgetting everything and coming away with nothing.

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Here are eight of the best photos that readers added to the Consumerist Flickr Pool in the last week, picked for usability in a Consumerist post or for just plain neatness.

Want to see your pictures on our site? Our Flickr pool is the place where Consumerist readers upload photos for possible use in future Consumerist posts. Just be a registered Flickr user, go here, and click “Join Group?” up on the top right. Choose your best photos, then click “send to group” on the individual images you want to add to the pool.

JOHOR BARU: Traffic in Johor Baru came to a standstill yesterday morning as close to 120,000 vehicles – triple the usual traffic – headed into Singapore via the Bangunan Sultan Iskandar Customs, Immi­gration and Quarantine Complex (CIQ) in view of the holiday season.

KUALA LUMPUR: Projek Lintasan Kota Holdings Sdn Bhd (Prolintas) is offering a 20 per cent reduction in toll rates for all class one vehicles making payments via the electronic toll collection system at Touch ‘n Go cards and SmartTAGs lanes on its highways in conjunction with Christmas Day.

The toll rate rebate is effective for travel from 6am on Friday, December 25, 2015 to 6am on Saturday, December 26, 2015, it said in a statement today.

Group Chief Executive Zainudin A Kadir was quoted as saying in a statement that the group was encouraging road users to begin using Touch ‘n Go cards and SmartTAGs for their toll payment transactions.

Prolintas manages the Ampang-Kuala Lumpur Elevated Highway, Guthrie Corridor Expressway and the Kemuning-Shah Alam Highway.

– BERNAMA

We’ve seen several deals lately on Philips’ life-changing wake-up lights, but if you’re not among the 20,000+ Gawker media readers who have already pulled the trigger, the entry level model just dropped to its lowest price ever.

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A very tragic and serious incident occurred at the Intercontinental Hotel in Frankfurt, Germany where a 41 year old Korean woman died during what appears to be an exorcism ceremony.

The police has arrested 5 suspects of which four were family members and one unrelated boy of the age of 15 years of age, all of which are Korean nationals.

Police, prosecutors and I can imagine hotel staff are shocked and baffled by the incident and especially the nature of the crime which had the victim suffering before eventually succumbing to injuries and lack of oxygen.

The Korea JoonGang Daily reported about the matter (see here).

A 41-year-old Korean woman was found dead in a guest room of a hotel in Frankfurt last week, the victim of a supposed exorcism performed by her own family members.

German prosecutors said on Thursday five Koreans, including the dead woman’s teenage son, were arrested at the scene for suspected murder.  Police found the woman’s body tied to a bed in a guest room at the Frankfurt Hotel InterContinental on Dec. 5.  She had been beaten repeatedly on her chest and stomach over a two-hour period and finally suffocated to death, according to prosecutors.

The accused were mostly relatives of the victim. They included her 15-year-old son, a 44-year-old relative and her 21-year-old son and 19-year-old daughter, and an unrelated boy aged 15. The family members had allegedly been trying to drive a demon from the woman, believing her to be possessed.

Her mouth had been gagged with a towel to stifle screams and a cloth-covered coat hanger was pushed down her throat. The woman died from suffocation as a result of massive chest compression, as well as trauma to her neck, according to prosecutors. It is unclear what religious sect the suspects belong to.

The German police were initially alerted by a Catholic priest, who discovered the body and notified the hotel’s reception desk, The Associated Press reported.  “I’ve never come across anything like it,” Nadja Niesen, the chief prosecutor in Frankfurt, said about the case.

She said the victim had been subjected to “pain and agony” for two hours and that the suspects’ actions “were motivated by a callous and merciless attitude.”

A postmortem found that the woman had been smothered by a towel that had been pushed down her throat with a metal coat hanger.  The suspects reportedly refused to remove the towel even after police arrived, allegedly claiming that the demon still possessed the woman.

According to prosecutors, the family arrived in Frankfurt six weeks ago. Korean media reported that the family originally came from the United States and had stayed for several months with a church located in Namyangju, Gyeonggi.

This is a horrible event and I think the act itself should be condemned and not commented further as the nature of this appalling crime speaks for itself.

The circumstances are strange though. A Korean family comes to Europe, rents a house and then a hotel room to perform such a ceremony on the woman. To top it all off, four of the five suspects are children or young adults. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Conclusion

The article doesn’t elaborate on specific religious beliefs. Some cultures or tribes or religious sects indeed believe in evil spririts and witchcraft. One could even say the catholic church laid the foundation to it hundreds of years ago.

This will certainly be a highly publicized trial to come. Don’t expect heavy sentences though. Even if the case was clear cut (which is obviously isn’t) German law even for Murder in the first degree is 15 years and even less so for manslaughter. The suspects being Korean I’d imagine they would be deported after a certain time of their sentence has passed IF they’d be convicted. Considering the accommodation in a Korean jail I’d bet that most inmates would prefer to be in a German prison.

Just hours after “Santa B.,” a so-called layaway angel, shelled out $79,000 to pay for toys and other gifts at a Pennsylvania Walmart, another generous person was paying off $106,000 in balances on layaway orders at two Walmart stores just a state away in Ohio.

NewsNet5 reports [warning: link has video that autoplays] that the mystery donor paid a visit to two Walmart stores in northeast Ohio this week, to celebrate his birthday and bring a little cheer to others.

In all, the man paid for $70,000 in layaway balances at one store, and $36,000 at the second.

“Christmas is a time of year when many people go above and beyond to give back to their neighbors and communities. When customers anonymously pay off others’ layaway items we’re reminded of the amazing things people will do to support each other,” Walmart said in a statement. “We’re proud to be a small part of these random acts of kindness.”

While the donor asked to remain anonymous, word of his generous gift spread quickly.

“It made me happy because I know a lot of customers walked out of the store or are coming in the store very positively impacted by it,” a store manager for one of the Walmart locations tells NewsNet5.

Customers impacted by the good deed shared their thanks with the unknown Good Samaritan.

“It’s such a blessing to know there are still people out there that care,” one woman tells NewsNet5. “It’s like Santa, like a real Santa to me.”

UPDATE: Another mystery Santa, who may be a different person from “Santa B.,” paid off $100,000 worth of layaway tabs at each of two Walmart stores in Florida.

Mystery donor pays off more than $106,000 in Walmart layaways at 2 northeast Ohio stores [NewsNet5]

Scientists have long known that the brain sends signals to the gut, a process that reveals why stress, for example, can express itself through gastrointestinal symptoms. But it wasn’t until 2013, when researchers at the UCLA uncovered the first evidence that the signal can go the other way as well: from gut to brain. By studying a group of women who regularly ate yogurt — and with it, the beneficial bacteria known as probiotics — they found that ingested bacteria in food can affect human brain function, effectively altering the way the brain responds to the environment. Specifically, the researchers found that the bacteria in yogurt may help relieve anxiety and stress by reducing activity in the insula, the region of the brain responsible for emotion. "Many of us have a container of yogurt in our refrigerator that we may eat for enjoyment, for calcium or because we think it might help our health in other ways," said Kirsten Tillisch, an associate professor of medicine in the digestive diseases division at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine and lead author of the study. “When we consider the implications of this work, the old sayings 'you are what you eat' and 'gut feelings' take on new meaning." The study is just one of many that comprise a growing body of research examining how gut flora, and the fermented foods that contain it, such as yogurt, impacts mood. Since 2008, when the U.S. National Institutes of Health launched the Human Microbiome Project, a five-year initiative to identify and characterize the microorganisms in both healthy and diseased humans, “the profound appreciation for the influence of such organisms has grown rapidly with each passing year,” writes Peter Andrey Smith in a New York Times Magazine article in June. These helpful bacteria like probiotics do a lot for us, from extracting energy from the fermentation of undigested carbohydrates and increasing the growth of intestinal epithelial cells to synthesizing vitamins and suppressing the growth of pathogens. Now a new study recently published in the journal Food Research International indicates that there may be other, completely different reasons why yogurt has the power to make us happy, and it has to do with the way expectation impacts mood and possibly even scent. Conducted by a team of European researchers from Finland, Austria and the Netherlands, the study found that eating vanilla yogurt made people feel happy. Specifically, eating vanilla yogurt resulted in the study’s participants projecting more positive emotions than when they ate other flavors. Additionally, yogurts with less fat gave people a stronger positive emotional response, while yogurts with different fruits did not have much difference in their effect on emotions. The researchers also found that liking or being familiar with a product had no effect on a person’s emotion. But most tellingly, what did affect mood was how they felt after eating the yogurt compared to what they expected to feel before eating it. In other words, their moods were influenced by their expectation — either being pleasantly surprised or disappointed after eating the food in question. “We were looking for a valid, quick and not too expensive and time-consuming method to measure the emotions or mood changes evoked by food,” said Jozina Mojet from Food & Biobased Research in the Netherlands, lead author of the study. “This sort of implicit method can reveal the complex interactions between the different factors involved in a situation, which, based on his or her memory and expectations, is given meaning by the person under investigation.” In addition, the strong positive emotional response elicited by eating vanilla yogurt supports earlier evidence that “a subtle vanilla scent in places like hospital waiting rooms can reduce aggression and encourage relationships among patients and between patients and staff,” according to the study’s press release. To determine the effect of different yogurts on mood, the researchers exposed 24 subjects to a pair of yogurts of the same brand and marketed in the same way, but with different flavors or fat content. They used various analytical methods in the study, including tracking the subjects’ eye movements as they looked at the packaging, reading their faces while they ate the yogurt and a mood-based autobiographical reaction time test. Notably, the researchers also used a new emotive projection test (EPT), in which study participants were shown photographs of other people and asked to rate them on six positive and six negative traits. “The idea behind the test is that people project their emotions onto their perception of others, so their judgment of others can indicate their own mood,” writes Lucy Goodchild van Hilten, senior marketing communications manager for life sciences at Elsevier, the publisher of Food Research International. “We were surprised to find that by measuring emotions, we could get information about products independent from whether people like them,” said Jozina Mojet, lead author of the study. "This kind of information could be very valuable to product manufacturers, giving them a glimpse into how we subconsciously respond to a product.” The study supports the findings of an earlier study by researchers at University College London that lower expectations lead to a greater level of happiness. “It is often said that you will be happier if your expectations are lower,” said Robb Rutledge, the study’s lead author. “We find that there is some truth to this — lower expectations make it more likely that an outcome will exceed those expectations and have a positive impact on happiness.” ‘Our computational model suggests momentary happiness is a state that reflects not how well things are going but instead whether things are goingbetter than expected,” write the study’s authors. Could eating yogurt and lowering expectations help to combat depression? While more research is needed, these studies suggest the answer is yes. In the meantime, for a quck and easy mood booster that’s also safe and healthy, try some vanilla yogurt. And try not to expect too much out of it. Scientists have long known that the brain sends signals to the gut, a process that reveals why stress, for example, can express itself through gastrointestinal symptoms. But it wasn’t until 2013, when researchers at the UCLA uncovered the first evidence that the signal can go the other way as well: from gut to brain. By studying a group of women who regularly ate yogurt — and with it, the beneficial bacteria known as probiotics — they found that ingested bacteria in food can affect human brain function, effectively altering the way the brain responds to the environment. Specifically, the researchers found that the bacteria in yogurt may help relieve anxiety and stress by reducing activity in the insula, the region of the brain responsible for emotion. "Many of us have a container of yogurt in our refrigerator that we may eat for enjoyment, for calcium or because we think it might help our health in other ways," said Kirsten Tillisch, an associate professor of medicine in the digestive diseases division at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine and lead author of the study. “When we consider the implications of this work, the old sayings 'you are what you eat' and 'gut feelings' take on new meaning." The study is just one of many that comprise a growing body of research examining how gut flora, and the fermented foods that contain it, such as yogurt, impacts mood. Since 2008, when the U.S. National Institutes of Health launched the Human Microbiome Project, a five-year initiative to identify and characterize the microorganisms in both healthy and diseased humans, “the profound appreciation for the influence of such organisms has grown rapidly with each passing year,” writes Peter Andrey Smith in a New York Times Magazine article in June. These helpful bacteria like probiotics do a lot for us, from extracting energy from the fermentation of undigested carbohydrates and increasing the growth of intestinal epithelial cells to synthesizing vitamins and suppressing the growth of pathogens. Now a new study recently published in the journal Food Research International indicates that there may be other, completely different reasons why yogurt has the power to make us happy, and it has to do with the way expectation impacts mood and possibly even scent. Conducted by a team of European researchers from Finland, Austria and the Netherlands, the study found that eating vanilla yogurt made people feel happy. Specifically, eating vanilla yogurt resulted in the study’s participants projecting more positive emotions than when they ate other flavors. Additionally, yogurts with less fat gave people a stronger positive emotional response, while yogurts with different fruits did not have much difference in their effect on emotions. The researchers also found that liking or being familiar with a product had no effect on a person’s emotion. But most tellingly, what did affect mood was how they felt after eating the yogurt compared to what they expected to feel before eating it. In other words, their moods were influenced by their expectation — either being pleasantly surprised or disappointed after eating the food in question. “We were looking for a valid, quick and not too expensive and time-consuming method to measure the emotions or mood changes evoked by food,” said Jozina Mojet from Food & Biobased Research in the Netherlands, lead author of the study. “This sort of implicit method can reveal the complex interactions between the different factors involved in a situation, which, based on his or her memory and expectations, is given meaning by the person under investigation.” In addition, the strong positive emotional response elicited by eating vanilla yogurt supports earlier evidence that “a subtle vanilla scent in places like hospital waiting rooms can reduce aggression and encourage relationships among patients and between patients and staff,” according to the study’s press release. To determine the effect of different yogurts on mood, the researchers exposed 24 subjects to a pair of yogurts of the same brand and marketed in the same way, but with different flavors or fat content. They used various analytical methods in the study, including tracking the subjects’ eye movements as they looked at the packaging, reading their faces while they ate the yogurt and a mood-based autobiographical reaction time test. Notably, the researchers also used a new emotive projection test (EPT), in which study participants were shown photographs of other people and asked to rate them on six positive and six negative traits. “The idea behind the test is that people project their emotions onto their perception of others, so their judgment of others can indicate their own mood,” writes Lucy Goodchild van Hilten, senior marketing communications manager for life sciences at Elsevier, the publisher of Food Research International. “We were surprised to find that by measuring emotions, we could get information about products independent from whether people like them,” said Jozina Mojet, lead author of the study. "This kind of information could be very valuable to product manufacturers, giving them a glimpse into how we subconsciously respond to a product.” The study supports the findings of an earlier study by researchers at University College London that lower expectations lead to a greater level of happiness. “It is often said that you will be happier if your expectations are lower,” said Robb Rutledge, the study’s lead author. “We find that there is some truth to this — lower expectations make it more likely that an outcome will exceed those expectations and have a positive impact on happiness.” ‘Our computational model suggests momentary happiness is a state that reflects not how well things are going but instead whether things are goingbetter than expected,” write the study’s authors. Could eating yogurt and lowering expectations help to combat depression? While more research is needed, these studies suggest the answer is yes. In the meantime, for a quck and easy mood booster that’s also safe and healthy, try some vanilla yogurt. And try not to expect too much out of it.

Continue Reading...

SELANGOR:  Just days after commemorating the state’s Malaysia Cup win, today the Selangor government again won over residents by declaring tomorrow a public holiday to celebrate the long awaited release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Menteri Besar Azmin Ali said the public holiday recognises the state’s love for Star Wars and will reduce Cineplex […]

The post Selangor declares public holiday tomorrow for Star Wars appeared first on FMN.

An Evangelical Christian college suspended a tenured professor for insisting that Christians and Muslims "worship the same God," echoing the pope. Dr. Larycia Alaine Hawkins is an associate professor of political science at Wheaton College, an Evangelical private liberal arts school in Wheaton, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. She has taught at the school for seven years. Last week, in the midst of a wave of anti-Muslim attacks and hate crimes, Hawkins announced that she would publicly wear a hijab, a traditional Islamic headscarf, in solidarity with Muslims during the Christian season of Advent. Hawkins said she asked the leading Muslim civil rights organization the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) "whether a non-Muslim wearing the hijab was haram (forbidden), patronizing, or otherwise offensive to Muslims," and noted she "was assured by my friends at CAIR-Chicago that they welcomed the gesture." "I don't love my Muslim neighbor because s/he is American. I love my Muslim neighbor because s/he deserves love by virtue of her/his human dignity," Hawkins wrote in a Dec. 10 Facebook post explaining her decision. "I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book," she added. "And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God." "As I tell my students, theoretical solidarity is not solidarity at all," Hawkins explained. "Thus, beginning tonight, my solidarity has become embodied solidarity." Hawkins' act of inter-religious solidarity went viral, and was covered in a variety of news outlets. Her school, on the other hand, was not enthused by Hawkins' finding common cause with Muslims. In response to Hawkins' comments, Wheaten College released a statement Wednesday afternoon notifying the public that it had placed her on administrative leave. The Evangelical school cited "significant questions regarding the theological implications of statements ... Hawkins has made about the relationship of Christianity to Islam" in justification of its decision. Wheaten College could not be reached for further comment Wednesday night. In 2006, Wheaten attracted controversy for firing Assistant Professor Joshua Hochschild for converting to Catholicism. More recently, in 2012, the conservative Christian college also filed a lawsuit in opposition to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' mandate, under the Affordable Care Act, that the school must provide access to contraceptives in its health care plan or be subject to fines. On Dec. 13, Hawkins wrote in another Facebook post that, since she began wearing the hijab to show solidarity with Muslims, she has "received pushback almost exclusively from other Christians." "The pushback has primarily centered on the claim that Christians and Muslims worship the same God," she observed. An Evangelical Christian college suspended a tenured professor for insisting that Christians and Muslims "worship the same God," echoing the pope. Dr. Larycia Alaine Hawkins is an associate professor of political science at Wheaton College, an Evangelical private liberal arts school in Wheaton, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. She has taught at the school for seven years. Last week, in the midst of a wave of anti-Muslim attacks and hate crimes, Hawkins announced that she would publicly wear a hijab, a traditional Islamic headscarf, in solidarity with Muslims during the Christian season of Advent. Hawkins said she asked the leading Muslim civil rights organization the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) "whether a non-Muslim wearing the hijab was haram (forbidden), patronizing, or otherwise offensive to Muslims," and noted she "was assured by my friends at CAIR-Chicago that they welcomed the gesture." "I don't love my Muslim neighbor because s/he is American. I love my Muslim neighbor because s/he deserves love by virtue of her/his human dignity," Hawkins wrote in a Dec. 10 Facebook post explaining her decision. "I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book," she added. "And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God." "As I tell my students, theoretical solidarity is not solidarity at all," Hawkins explained. "Thus, beginning tonight, my solidarity has become embodied solidarity." Hawkins' act of inter-religious solidarity went viral, and was covered in a variety of news outlets. Her school, on the other hand, was not enthused by Hawkins' finding common cause with Muslims. In response to Hawkins' comments, Wheaten College released a statement Wednesday afternoon notifying the public that it had placed her on administrative leave. The Evangelical school cited "significant questions regarding the theological implications of statements ... Hawkins has made about the relationship of Christianity to Islam" in justification of its decision. Wheaten College could not be reached for further comment Wednesday night. In 2006, Wheaten attracted controversy for firing Assistant Professor Joshua Hochschild for converting to Catholicism. More recently, in 2012, the conservative Christian college also filed a lawsuit in opposition to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' mandate, under the Affordable Care Act, that the school must provide access to contraceptives in its health care plan or be subject to fines. On Dec. 13, Hawkins wrote in another Facebook post that, since she began wearing the hijab to show solidarity with Muslims, she has "received pushback almost exclusively from other Christians." "The pushback has primarily centered on the claim that Christians and Muslims worship the same God," she observed. An Evangelical Christian college suspended a tenured professor for insisting that Christians and Muslims "worship the same God," echoing the pope. Dr. Larycia Alaine Hawkins is an associate professor of political science at Wheaton College, an Evangelical private liberal arts school in Wheaton, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. She has taught at the school for seven years. Last week, in the midst of a wave of anti-Muslim attacks and hate crimes, Hawkins announced that she would publicly wear a hijab, a traditional Islamic headscarf, in solidarity with Muslims during the Christian season of Advent. Hawkins said she asked the leading Muslim civil rights organization the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) "whether a non-Muslim wearing the hijab was haram (forbidden), patronizing, or otherwise offensive to Muslims," and noted she "was assured by my friends at CAIR-Chicago that they welcomed the gesture." "I don't love my Muslim neighbor because s/he is American. I love my Muslim neighbor because s/he deserves love by virtue of her/his human dignity," Hawkins wrote in a Dec. 10 Facebook post explaining her decision. "I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book," she added. "And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God." "As I tell my students, theoretical solidarity is not solidarity at all," Hawkins explained. "Thus, beginning tonight, my solidarity has become embodied solidarity." Hawkins' act of inter-religious solidarity went viral, and was covered in a variety of news outlets. Her school, on the other hand, was not enthused by Hawkins' finding common cause with Muslims. In response to Hawkins' comments, Wheaten College released a statement Wednesday afternoon notifying the public that it had placed her on administrative leave. The Evangelical school cited "significant questions regarding the theological implications of statements ... Hawkins has made about the relationship of Christianity to Islam" in justification of its decision. Wheaten College could not be reached for further comment Wednesday night. In 2006, Wheaten attracted controversy for firing Assistant Professor Joshua Hochschild for converting to Catholicism. More recently, in 2012, the conservative Christian college also filed a lawsuit in opposition to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' mandate, under the Affordable Care Act, that the school must provide access to contraceptives in its health care plan or be subject to fines. On Dec. 13, Hawkins wrote in another Facebook post that, since she began wearing the hijab to show solidarity with Muslims, she has "received pushback almost exclusively from other Christians." "The pushback has primarily centered on the claim that Christians and Muslims worship the same God," she observed. An Evangelical Christian college suspended a tenured professor for insisting that Christians and Muslims "worship the same God," echoing the pope. Dr. Larycia Alaine Hawkins is an associate professor of political science at Wheaton College, an Evangelical private liberal arts school in Wheaton, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. She has taught at the school for seven years. Last week, in the midst of a wave of anti-Muslim attacks and hate crimes, Hawkins announced that she would publicly wear a hijab, a traditional Islamic headscarf, in solidarity with Muslims during the Christian season of Advent. Hawkins said she asked the leading Muslim civil rights organization the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) "whether a non-Muslim wearing the hijab was haram (forbidden), patronizing, or otherwise offensive to Muslims," and noted she "was assured by my friends at CAIR-Chicago that they welcomed the gesture." "I don't love my Muslim neighbor because s/he is American. I love my Muslim neighbor because s/he deserves love by virtue of her/his human dignity," Hawkins wrote in a Dec. 10 Facebook post explaining her decision. "I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book," she added. "And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God." "As I tell my students, theoretical solidarity is not solidarity at all," Hawkins explained. "Thus, beginning tonight, my solidarity has become embodied solidarity." Hawkins' act of inter-religious solidarity went viral, and was covered in a variety of news outlets. Her school, on the other hand, was not enthused by Hawkins' finding common cause with Muslims. In response to Hawkins' comments, Wheaten College released a statement Wednesday afternoon notifying the public that it had placed her on administrative leave. The Evangelical school cited "significant questions regarding the theological implications of statements ... Hawkins has made about the relationship of Christianity to Islam" in justification of its decision. Wheaten College could not be reached for further comment Wednesday night. In 2006, Wheaten attracted controversy for firing Assistant Professor Joshua Hochschild for converting to Catholicism. More recently, in 2012, the conservative Christian college also filed a lawsuit in opposition to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' mandate, under the Affordable Care Act, that the school must provide access to contraceptives in its health care plan or be subject to fines. On Dec. 13, Hawkins wrote in another Facebook post that, since she began wearing the hijab to show solidarity with Muslims, she has "received pushback almost exclusively from other Christians." "The pushback has primarily centered on the claim that Christians and Muslims worship the same God," she observed. An Evangelical Christian college suspended a tenured professor for insisting that Christians and Muslims "worship the same God," echoing the pope. Dr. Larycia Alaine Hawkins is an associate professor of political science at Wheaton College, an Evangelical private liberal arts school in Wheaton, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. She has taught at the school for seven years. Last week, in the midst of a wave of anti-Muslim attacks and hate crimes, Hawkins announced that she would publicly wear a hijab, a traditional Islamic headscarf, in solidarity with Muslims during the Christian season of Advent. Hawkins said she asked the leading Muslim civil rights organization the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) "whether a non-Muslim wearing the hijab was haram (forbidden), patronizing, or otherwise offensive to Muslims," and noted she "was assured by my friends at CAIR-Chicago that they welcomed the gesture." "I don't love my Muslim neighbor because s/he is American. I love my Muslim neighbor because s/he deserves love by virtue of her/his human dignity," Hawkins wrote in a Dec. 10 Facebook post explaining her decision. "I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book," she added. "And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God." "As I tell my students, theoretical solidarity is not solidarity at all," Hawkins explained. "Thus, beginning tonight, my solidarity has become embodied solidarity." Hawkins' act of inter-religious solidarity went viral, and was covered in a variety of news outlets. Her school, on the other hand, was not enthused by Hawkins' finding common cause with Muslims. In response to Hawkins' comments, Wheaten College released a statement Wednesday afternoon notifying the public that it had placed her on administrative leave. The Evangelical school cited "significant questions regarding the theological implications of statements ... Hawkins has made about the relationship of Christianity to Islam" in justification of its decision. Wheaten College could not be reached for further comment Wednesday night. In 2006, Wheaten attracted controversy for firing Assistant Professor Joshua Hochschild for converting to Catholicism. More recently, in 2012, the conservative Christian college also filed a lawsuit in opposition to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' mandate, under the Affordable Care Act, that the school must provide access to contraceptives in its health care plan or be subject to fines. On Dec. 13, Hawkins wrote in another Facebook post that, since she began wearing the hijab to show solidarity with Muslims, she has "received pushback almost exclusively from other Christians." "The pushback has primarily centered on the claim that Christians and Muslims worship the same God," she observed.

Continue Reading...

KUALA LUMPUR: Pertubuhan Martabat Jalinan Muhibbah Malaysia (MJMM) today lodged a police report against a Facebook account owner for allegedly posting an edited picture of Prime Minister Najib Razak.

Its President Abdul Rani Kulup Abdullah said the report against Fazlin Liani was lodged this morning at the Dang Wangi police station.

“The police and MCMC (Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission) should look into this and take necessary action against the person who has insulted the number one leader of this country.

“The post had greatly insulted our Prime Minister and even if she (Fazlin) is not satisfied with the way our country is governed, she could have expressed her feelings in a different way,” he said when met after lodging the report.

According to Abdul Rani, the Facebook account owner had allegedly posted a picture of Najib with the image of his face replaced with that of a dog. This picture was also accompanied with a string of abusive remarks.

This weeks Whine Wednesday edition is visiting South Korea’s Incheon Airport and presents one of the biggest traveler pet peeves worldwide: Super long, congested Airport Security Lines.

Each and every traveler has at some point of time gotten stuck in one of such lines and more often than not it’s a problem of either airport capacity or mismanagement.

While I think the Incheon Airport is one of the best in the world, their security and immigration lineup in the early morning hours 7-9am is completely out of control. The international departure area is choked with passengers leaving on flights to North America and intra Asia.

South Korea and their two national carriers Korean Air & Asiana have grown a lot in capacity and even their very modern and large airport is lacking the ability to deal with the masses of passengers departing from Incheon in the morning.

The problem is well known to airport authorities. To the point of where there are regular announcements are made that ‘If your flight is more than 3 hours ahead of time you should consider going through security after 10am when lines will subside.’

To take the case of Incheon Airport is just an example. They are usually very efficient but it shows that peak hours can drag down even the most efficient operations. If you then have an airport such as Frankfurt where more often than not, some security lines are not occupied by staff or they work inefficiently… the result is a disaster of a departure experience. Don’t forget that you are paying a security and airport facility charge with your ticket!

Conclusion

I’m someone who goes to the airport early if I can manage it, just to avoid situations where a line like this let’s me miss my flight or running late for it.

The same goes for countries where during a transfer or transit you have to go through immigration. In the U.S. I always plan a generous connection time since everything is possible, from no wait at all to two hours.

From Apartment Therapy → Ideas to Steal from 5 Gorgeous Scandinavian Kitchens

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iPhone: Last week we saw a cool app that turned the 3D Touch feature on the iPhone 6s into a scale , but Apple pulled the app. Thankfully, one place Apple can’t pull an app from the internet, which is why a web app is a perfectly suitable replacement.

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Most antiquities scholars think that the New Testament gospels are “mythologized history.”  In other words, based on the evidence available they think that around the start of the first century a controversial Jewish rabbi named Yeshua ben Yosef gathered a following and his life and teachings...

Passengers on board Thai Airways from Tokyo Haneda to Bangkok were not in the mood to wait for the boarding themselves so they decided to let their shopping goods do the deed.

A picture surfaced on a Thai online forum that lead to people scolding the travelers who caused this scene, saying they would damage the reputation of Thai travelers abroad.

Popular Thai online Forum Pantip (access here) has all sorts of useful (and useless) information including the one that ensued when a user posted an image from Tokyo’s Haneda airport this weekend.

It shows the boarding area of a Thai Airways flight departing for Bangkok and a rather interesting queue management system, invented by the passengers.

Japan is very popular with Thai tourists for a long time, especially since a visa waiver program has been put in place.

Thailand being a popular tourism destination itself sees a fair share of tourist misconduct and bad behavior with the Thais being not shy to voice their contempt for such offenders. A constant target are Chinese tourists in all parts of Thailand who give plenty of reason to aim and fire.

But this image had a vice versa effect. Thai contributors slammed the offending passenger for destroying the image of Thailand and Thai Tourists abroad with their bad behavior such as this.

One user wrote ‘Thais say many bad things about Chinese tourists but now we are trying to compete with them?’

Conclusion

That discussion certainly hits a sore spot because as far as it comes to Thailand, in media depiction and popular belief it’s always the foreigners that do the wrong things. This holds a mirror in their faces and Thais are confronted how they themselves as a representative sample of their country behave while being tourists.

This happening in Japan, obviously staff will not confront them over this situation. The boarding gates in Haneda are split with the left side (as seen in the image) are used for Economy Class boarding and the right side behind for Priority Boarding. At least this way they didn’t block the way for everybody.

Fellow passengers on their Air Asia flight were not happy when a Chinese woman started to remove her footwear and placed her bare feet on the armrest in front of her.

The passengers on the flight from Bangkok to Xi’an complained about the smelly and disgusting act to the flight attendant who answered there was nothing she should do as they were ‘all Chinese’.

Bare feet on the aircraft are a personal pet peeve of mine and I couldn’t escape this article in Chinese media that has been picked up by The Shanghaiist this week (access here).

A Chinese passenger was spotted giving approximately zero f**** during an Air Asia flight from Bangkok to Xi’an last week, kicking her bare feet up and resting them on a neighboring passenger’s armrest.

Looking to chill in her humble economy class seat, the woman sat down and proceeded to take her shoes and socks off, to the disgust of fellow passengers, she then went even further, invading the personal space of the person sitting in front of her. A flight attendant was overheard apologizing to disgusted passengers, explaining that there was nothing she could do because, “They are all Chinese,” according to Tencent (see here).

If you are curious how the whole situation looked like, here is the image captured by the passenger in the seat ahead of the woman.

Simply disgusting. It’s beyond me how people can think this is acceptable behavior. John has featured a similar case last week in the Whine Wednesday edition ‘Pigs on Planes’ (access here).

Conclusion

I’m glad other passengers said something but I think the flight attendants have realized that it’s fighting against windmills to try and enforce proper behavior with a good majority of these mainland Chinese.

Passengers should have approached the woman directly and told her to remove her disgusting feet off from that armrest. If it was me in that seat, the second after taking that picture I’d roll the onboard magazine together and give this pair of feet a good slap with it.

Images of what artists have imagined Jesus to look like are prolific. Most of them, in contemporary Western societies, depict a brown or blond-haired, blue-eyed, bearded man with a doe-like facial expression. But given the time and place of his life, it’s unlikely he looked like that. He was...

SINGAPORE: Two families on holiday were caught by surprise when the ceiling of the driveway at Hilton Singapore fell on the vehicles they were in on Sunday.

The “live active cultures” in yogurt may sound like a good source of probiotics, but there’s no guarantee they contain enough of those good bacteria to benefit your health.

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KUANTAN:   Just days after Umno-branded smartphones made waves at the party AGM this week, PAS today announced their own party branded communications device. “The short message based PASPhone has a better service life than other smartphones on the market though like all phones, PAS phones may occasionally crash!” said Abdullah bin Bakar heading up the […]

The post PAS launch own smartphone appeared first on FMN.

LABUAN: The prices of cooked food in most eateries in the duty-free-island here has gone up by 40 per cent mainly due to the escalating prices of goods.

Labuan Movement Consumer Council president Fauziah Datuk Mohd Din said the price increase was unexpected and a comprehensive measure was needed to address the issue.

“Based on a study by the Labuan Office Ministry of Domestic Trade, Cooperatives and Consumerism, the increase began since the slump in the value of the ringgit and this has since attributed to an increase in the prices of essential goods, thus, leading to the escalating prices of cooked food in most restaurants.

“We did not expect such a high increase, as we were only expecting a rise of between 10 to 20 per cent,” she said at a press conference after handing out school bags to school children under the Back to School with Consumer 2016 programme here today.

She said the government’s decision to scrap the subsidy on goods transported from the mainland of Sabah to Labuan had also contributed to the price increase of most essential items.

“Although, we are not affected by the implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), (being a duty-free island), there are still unscrupulous traders taking advantage by hiking the prices of goods. As such, a meeting will be held with various businesses especially restaurant owners to assist in getting input and feedback in addressing the issue,” she said.

She called on consumers to fully exercise their rights by boycotting eateries that charge exorbitant prices.

Fauziah also hoped the establishment of a special task force by the Federal Territory Ministry, which held its first roundtable meeting, would lead to a solution to the long-standing issue of the instability of prices of consumer goods.

“The Labuan consumer body is one of the committee members in the task force and will attend the second meeting in Kuala Lumpur next week to give input to resolve the issue,” she said.

— BERNAMA

A lot of folks worry about what to drink with their food, but I firmly believe that one should pay as much attention to what one drinks both before and after. The perfect apéritifs and digestifs (meaning “to open” and “digestive,” respectfully) will help you ensure your dining experience starts and ends on the highest of notes.

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Due to a combination of holidays and my being out, it’s been three weeks since our last installment of Flickr Finds. Let’s see what treasures have been submitted to the Consumerist Flickr pool in that period, picked for usability in a Consumerist post or for just plain neatness.

Want to see your pictures on our site? Our Flickr pool is the lace where Consumerist readers upload photos for possible use in future Consumerist posts. Just be a registered Flickr user, go here, and click “Join Group?” up on the top right. Choose your best photos, then click “send to group” on the individual images you want to add to the pool.

Have you ever been out for a run when nature decided to call? There’s some science behind why that happens, as well as a few things you can do to help avoid running into that problem in the future.

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For better or worse, we’ve come to a point where shopping on Thanksgiving day is no longer a fringe case. But what about Dec. 25? With the exception of some vital retailers — drugstores, the occasional supermarket, gas stations, and, most importantly, movie theaters — most stores don’t even mess with the idea of opening on Christmas. But a new survey says that a not insignificant number of shoppers would be willing to buy stuff after they clean up all the wrapping paper.

This is according to research from LoyaltyOne Consulting, which surveyed nearly 1,300 shoppers from across the country and found that, overall, 18% of them said that if stores opened after 6 p.m. on Christmas day, they would be there, ready to do some shopping.

The eagerness to ditch their families in favor of the mall was particularly strong among those in the 18-24 age group. Nearly 1/3 (30%) said they would shop on Christmas. The numbers didn’t dip much for the next oldest age bracket, 25-to-34-year-olds, with 27% willing to skip the Christmas ham for potential post-Christmas savings.

But before the malls start ordering all their retailers to open up on Christmas or else (like they do on Thanksgiving), a larger number of people are pretty opposed to the idea of shopping on Dec. 25.

According to the survey, 24% of all respondents said they not only wouldn’t shop on Christmas, but that they would also be less likely to shop in the future at a store that does open on Christmas. More than half of the people (58%) simply said they have no intention of ever shopping on Christmas. While that percentage was smaller for the 18-24 (53%) and 25-34 (52%) age brackets, it still seems to indicate that a majority of consumers just want the day off from shopping.

Of course, online retailers don’t shut down their websites for the holiday, so consumers are more free than ever to make purchases at whatever hour — on whichever day — they choose.

We’d predict that — rather than risk the ire of shoppers who oppose opening on Christmas (and dealing with the extra cost of paying for employees who come in to work on Dec. 25) — retailers may simply start offering Christmas day deals online for those who want to test out their new phone by buying something on it with the gift card they got from the uncle who never visits.

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