LDS Freedom Forum

BEAVERCREEK, Ohio (WDTN) — Dozens gathered in front of the Beavercreek Walmart for a rally held by the Ohio Open Carry group Saturday afternoon.

Following the grand jury’s decision not to indict the officer who shot John Crawford III, the group scheduled the open carry walk and protest in front of the Beavercreek store. The group said it was an effort to show solidarity with the Crawford family and protest the Beavercreek Police Department’s policies.

Crawford was shot and killed August 5 when he picked up a BB gun from a store shelf and carried it around the store.

About 40 people came out Saturday to support the rally. Some carried signs reading “I am John Crawford” and “Serve and Protect. Not Serve to Kill”.

To date, there have been dozens of protests following the Walmart shooting.

A television station in eastern Iowa is refusing to run an attack ad paid for by a conservative super PAC against the Democratic candidate in the state’s contentious Senate race, The Daily Caller has learned.

The group, Conservative War Chest, has produced a spot comparing Bruce Braley, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, to “extremist” liberals like Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton. The fast-paced ad references a variety of issues while flashing photos of prominent liberals.

“In the judgment of station management, the ad did not meet our criteria to allow it to air,” John Huff, the general sales manager at KWWL-TV, confirmed in an email to TheDC.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Raising fresh concern around the world, a nurse in Spain on Monday became the first person known to catch Ebola outside the outbreak zone in West Africa. In the U.S., President Barack Obama said the government was considering ordering more careful screening of airline passengers arriving from the region.

David Hooks’s death reads like a boilerplate tale of a police raid gone wrong. Around 11 PM on September 24, deputies from the Laurens County, Georgia, sheriff’s department stormed their way into his house looking, they say, for meth. A reported 16 shots later, the 59-year-old was dead, and naturally there are conflicting accounts about what happened. The cops claim Hooks brandished his shotgun at them when they came in; Hooks’s family’s lawyer says that the raid victim’s wife, Teresa, had seen cops in hoods lurking around the house and was worried they were robbers (the home had been burglarized only a couple nights before) and Hooks was merely worried about defending his property. No drugs or anything illegal was found in the home, according to the lawyer.

The complicating factor here is that the warrant was issued on the say-so of an informant, Rodney Garrett, who had stolen an SUV, a firearm, and—he claimed—a bag containing scales and 20 grams of meth from the Hooks residence. Garrett turned himself in and told the police about the alleged drugs, saying that he feared for his life.

The raid, then, can serve a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with the war on drugs: a door busted down on what, in hindsight at least, was flimsy evidence; a search warrant that was seemingly signed off on and executed in a hurry; an operation that was unnecessarily militaristic. Whoever was at fault for Hooks’s death, the man himself seems completely blameless—if his wife’s account is accurate, he was merely defending himself against what he thought was a home invasion.

A prominent Nigerian reverend has revealed Islamist terror group Boko Haram destroyed over 180 churches in the West African country following its capture of towns and villages in the north-eastern states of Borno and Adamawa.

Reverend Gideon Obasogie, the director of Catholic Social Communication of Maiduguri Diocese in Borno State, said the group's seizure of territory in both states has seen 185 churches torched and over 190,000 people displaced by their insurgency.

In his statement, Obasogie said Boko Haram's "ransacking and torching" of churches had forced priests to leave their homes for two months while displaced civilians were still unable to return to their towns and villages.

SAN DIEGO - A school touted just weeks ago by the San Diego Unified School District is now described by some as an atmosphere of fear and fights.

10News has learned in the past two weeks, two separate incidents at Lincoln High School have led to arrests on campus, and one may have involved a butcher knife.

"They're actually happening every day," said Jessica, a sophomore who did not want her identity revealed, referring to fights.

This story has been updated to clarify the Einstein program's role in detecting cyber intrusions.

The Department of Homeland Security has spelled out its intentions to proactively monitor civilian agency networks for signs of threats, after agencies arguably dropped the ball this spring in detecting federal websites potentially harboring the Heartbleed superbug.

Annual rules for complying with the 2002 Federal Information Security Management Act released Friday require agencies to agree to proactive scanning. The regulations also contain new requirements for notifying DHS when a cyber event occurs.

On Monday, we got news that the first confirmed case of Ebola transmission in Europe has happened. A nurse in Spain that had treated a couple of returning Ebola patients has contracted the disease herself...

. . .

Meanwhile, Ebola continues to rage out of control in West Africa. It is being reported that Sierra Leone just added 121 new Ebola deaths to the overall death toll in a single day. If Ebola continues to spread at an exponential rate, it is inevitable that more people will leave West Africa with the virus and take it to other parts of the globe.

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I have written extensively about Ebola, but it is certainly not the only virus making headlines right now.

Down in Uganda, a man has just died from a confirmed case of the Marburg Virus...

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The Marburg Virus is an absolutely horrible disease, and many consider it to be even more deadly than Ebola. But the fact that it kills victims so quickly may keep it from spreading as widely as Ebola.

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Meanwhile, a disease that sounds very similar to Ebola and Marburg has popped up in Venezuela and doctors down there do not know what it is...

In its initial stages, the disease presents symptoms of fever and spots on the skin, and then produces large blisters and internal and external bleeding, according to data provided week stop by the College of Physicians of the state of Aragua, where the first cases were reported.

Then, very quickly, patients suffer from respiratory failure, liver failure and kidney failure. Venezuelan doctors have not been able to determine what the disease is, much less how to fight it.

. . .

Here in the United States, enterovirus D-68 has sickened hundreds of children all over the country. So far cases have been confirmed in 43 different states, several children have been paralyzed by it, and one New Jersey boy has died...

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Last but not least, the Chikungunya virus is at pandemic levels all over Central and South America.

We aren't hearing that much about this disease in the U.S., but at this point more than a million people have already been infected...

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The good news is that very few people actually die from this disease.

The bad news is that almost everyone that gets it feels like they are dying.

Yet some scientists who have long studied Ebola say such assurances are premature — and they are concerned about what is not known about the strain now on the loose. It is an Ebola outbreak like none seen before, jumping from the bush to urban areas, giving the virus more opportunities to evolve as it passes through multiple human hosts.

Ellen Bogan expects police to protect and serve — not proselytize.

But she says Indiana State Police Trooper Brian Hamilton pitched Christianity to her when he pulled her over for an alleged traffic violation in August on U.S. 27 in Union County.

With the lights on his marked police car still flashing, the trooper handed Bogan a warning ticket. Then, Bogan said, Hamilton posed some personal questions.

Did she have a home church?

Did she accept Jesus Christ as her savior?

"It's completely out of line and it just — it took me aback," Bogan, 60, told The Indianapolis Star.

Colorado Attorney General John Suthers ordered Colorado’s county clerks to be prepared to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples on Monday.

His statement came just hours after news that the Supreme Court would not hear cases from Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin. Suthers is a Republican who has defended the state’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

Gay couples in Colorado will be eligible for marriage licenses in all 64 counties as soon as the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals lifts its stay, something that’s expected to happen soon now that the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear cases on same-sex marriage from five states. This refusal to take up appeals essentially legalizes gay marriage in those states.

Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts took to Twitter this weekend to voice her displeasure over the fact that a Kroger manager in Ohio gave her cronies the cold shoulder when they tried to deliver some protest signatures to the store.

IGUALA, Guerrero, Mexico - Federal agents in Mexico are taking over security in a city where a mass grave was discovered. Local police are accused of working with a criminal gang to kill students or make them disappear.

The latest shadow over the civil liberties of Australians is a yet-unnamed mandatory data retention bill that will be introduced into the federal parliament during the week of 27 October. Under the flimsy pretext that this measure is urgently needed to fight terrorism (though actually its scope will be far broader), the bill, if passed, will require Australian Internet providers to scoop up highly personal information about their customers as they use the Internet, and to store it for two years for law enforcement agencies to access.

The classic example is a fee collected to pass from one fiefdom’s border to the next: no value is provided to the person paying the border fee; it is a rentier skim that transfers wealth from serfs to the fiefdom’s landowning nobility.

In the modern economy, rentier skims take a variety of forms. The government is adept at levying rentier skims. Harsh penalty fees piled on top of minor traffic violations are one example; another is extra fees to “expedite” services government is supposed to provide in a timely manner.

A California architect recently recounted the new fee structure in a Northern California municipality: the fee to have the city planning department review your building permit application leaped to $6,000. Since the department warned applicants it will take at least six months for the agency to process the application, they kindly offer an alternative: for a mere $4,000 more (an “expedited fee”), the applicant can get his application reviewed in a mere four months rather than six months.

This is pure rentier skim.

ASPEN, Colo. – Aspen Elementary School officials want students to be quiet during their 20-minute lunch, and have imposed a new set of rules and penalties for talkative youngsters to keep down cafeteria chatter.

Many parents, however, are speaking up about the policy, which was outlined in a school newsletter that was recently sent home with students. School administrators reportedly told students they must use a 1-inch rule to speak during their lunch, meaning they can only open their mouths one inch to whisper, according to the Aspen Times.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. plans to eliminate health insurance coverage for some of its part-time U.S. employees in a move aimed at controlling rising health care costs of the nation's largest private employer.

Starting Jan. 1, Wal-Mart told The Associated Press that it will no longer offer health insurance to employees who work less than an average of 30 hours a week. The move, which would affect 30,000 employees, follows similar decisions by Target, Home Depot and others to eliminate health insurance benefits for part-time employees.

PRINCETON, NJ -- Relatively few Americans have a favorable impression of U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid or Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives John Boehner -- the two top-ranking members of Congress. But as weak as both men's ratings have been in recent years, Reid's has recently gotten worse, with his favorable score dropping from 27% in April to 21% today.

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has signed an order that gives the state’s public health commissioner the ability to quarantine anyone she believes may have been exposed to the Ebola virus.

Malloy says Tuesday’s order is precautionary and designed to ensure that the state is prepared to deal with any suspected Ebola cases.

He says it also will allow for a more coordinated response to any potential case of Ebola.

The order declares a public health emergency, giving Commissioner Jewel Mullen the authority to issue quarantine orders. That authority usually rests with local public health directors.

Mullen says there is no reason to believe anyone in the state is infected or at risk of infection.

October 7, 2014 Billowy and filled with life-sustaining water vapor, the cloud passes overhead without emitting a drop of rain. In times of severe drought, that cloud is a frustrating, lumbering tease. That cloud is tantalizing. Delicious even.

What that cloud needs is a kick start, a catalyst to squeeze the water out of it. It's not science fiction; it's called cloud-seeding. And in beyond-parched California, it may become a viable option to combat long-term water shortages.

“As schools get modernized or renovated or as we’re doing work on the playground equipment, we’ll take out the swings. It’s just really a safety issue, swings have been determined to be the most unsafe of all the playground equipment on a playground,” Richland School District’s Steve Aagard told KEPR.

(CNSNews.com) - The number of Americans on food stamps has topped 46,000,000 for 35 straight months, according to data from the Department of Agriculture (USDA).

From September 2011 through July 2014, the latest month for which data is available, the number of persons participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has exceeded 46 million. As of July 2014, there were 46,486,434 beneficiaries of the SNAP program.