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The Epoch Times reports that Sky TV has aired an independent investigation into China's Orient Organ Transplant Center (OOTC), claiming evidence that China executes prisoners in order to harvest their organs.  From the Epoch Times story:

 

Sky TV aired a report last week that confirms important claims The Epoch Times has made in its own investigations into organ harvesting in China.

This report verifies that:

• organs for transplantation are very plentiful in China;
• they are available on demand;
• the organs are supplied from prisoners;
• the prisoners are killed after they are found to match a patient who is awaiting a donor organ.

Reporter Dominic Waghorn entered the OOTC with a hidden camera, posing as someone seeking an organ transplant for his father.  Based on the conversations he had with hospital staff, he believes the hospital obtains organs from executed criminals, who are killed when they are found to be a good match for a transplant patient.

 

Waghorn's organ transplant consultant, Dr. Zhu, explains that the [OOTC] would have no trouble finding a donor. According to Waghorn, he openly admits that the hospital transplants organs harvested from executed prisoners.

Dr. Zhu tells Waghorn, "We will notify your father in advance that we have the donor. We will give him one or two weeks notice."

In other words, Dr. Zhu is explaining that the hospital will find a living donor, arrange for the patient's surgery, and once the surgery is scheduled, then arrange for the prisoner's execution at the appointed time.

 LifeSite is also reporting on this story.

Last week the British Transplantation Society announced concern that Chinese prisoners were being harvested of their organs against their will.  China's Foreign Ministry Spokesman Qin Gang rebuffed the Society's claims and threw a similar accusation back at Britain in a press conference the next day (see bottom of linked page).  China has denied that forcible organ transplants are performed on prisoners.

Smells like a rat. . . 

 

Weldon Angelos, a 28 year old music executive and father of two young children was convicted of selling small amounts of marijuana three times for a few hundred dollars each time. He was sentenced to 55 years in prison.

Angelos will serve what is essentially a life sentence for selling a small amount of pot.

This sentence is far longer than if he had been convicted of second degree murder, hijacking, kidnapping, rape or aggravated assault.

In the same courtroom on the same day, another defendant was convicted of bludgeoning an elderly woman to death with a log. He was sentenced to 25 years.

How did a relatively minor crime merit a sentence more than twice that of a vicious crime? Federal mandatory minimum sentences impose long prison terms for a small number of crimes, mostly drug offenses. The killing of the elderly woman was not covered by a mandatory sentence.

This excerpt is from Mandatory Minimums: Unjust and Unbiblical, an article by Pat Nolan of Justice Fellowship.  Nolan says there is a trend in our society toward harsher sentences--a positive development, I would say, when it comes to crimes like murder and sexual assault.  However, the legal establishment of "mandatory minimums" is upsetting the punishment-fits-the-crime principle that the Bible teaches, and is distorting justice in our country, according to Nolan.

I wonder:  Are mandatory minimums just affixed to the wrong crimes, or should they be done away with entirely? 

In the deepest dinosaur fossil discovery ever made, oil workers excavating in the North Sea off the coast of Norway accidentally brought a dinosaur knucklebone to the surface.  As you can imagine, the specimen isn't in the greatest shape, but it presumably belongs to a Plateosaurus, an extinct dinosaur that grew up to 30 feet long and weighed up to 4 tons, according to Norway dinosaur expert Jorn Harald Hurum.

Since the fossil was drilled from a depth of 1.4 miles below sea level, it sets a record for the world's deepest excavated dinosaur fossil.  Evolutionary scientists say:

[T]he old North Sea land was once a huge area where big rivers meandered through dry plains.

Now the landscape has been compressed to form a pattern of fossil alluvial sand between banks of red shale.

Creationist who believe in a global flood, however, could argue that the presence of dinosaur fossils deep underwater gives good evidence for a sudden global cataclysm.

Today, as the President of China, Hu Jintao, began speaking through a translator to a crowd during his first-ever appearance at the White House, he was shouted down by a female advocate of Falun Gong.  Yelling in both Chinese and English, she accused China of persecuting Falun Gong practitioners, until security guards escorted her away.

Falun Gong is a religious sect of recent origin.  Began in 1992 by Li Hongzhi, it emphasizes meditation and bodily exercises intended to bring the practitioner into enlightenment.  Its teachings on life and the supernatural are based directly on the writings of Li Hongzhi.  Falun Gong followers estimate themselves to be up to 100 million strong.

In 1999, China began a crackdown on Falun Gong practitioners, and many have publicly accused that country of torture and murder.  (See also the Friends of Falun Gong website.)

While many Christians consider Falun Gong a cult, they often lodge similar accusations of arrest, torture and murder against communist China.  In addition, China has received criticism for its One-Child Policy, which levies fines on families who have more than one child.  Many believe this has directly contributed to high infanticide and abortion rates.  Some insiders claim that forced abortions are practiced by local officials.  In December 1994, the AP reported:

Despite some changes, China's one-child family planning program remains a source of coercion, forced abortions, infanticide and perilously imbalanced boy-girl ratios, State Department officials said Tuesday. 

British Parliament and the United Nations have also raised questions of torture, abuse, and other human rights violations in China.

The persecution of Christians in China is widely recognized and has been reported on in the New York Times and BBC News.

The latest buzz in paleontology is the fossil discovery of a pack of sharp-toothed theropods which may have been larger than T-rex.  Mapusaurus roseae grew up to 40 feet long, and although it rivaled Tyrannosaurus and Giganotosaurus in size, it "appears to have been a sleeker, more agile predator, with teeth designed for slicing flesh rather than crushing bones," according to National Geographic News.

"Maposaurs have long, thin skulls with knifelike teeth and jaws that can close very fast. T. rex has a short skull with powerful, banana-shaped teeth better for biting through bone," said Philip Currie of the University of Alberta in a Washington Post interview, who coauthored a description of the dinosaur in the latest issue of the scientific journal Geodiversitas.  Found in the Patagonian region of Argentina, these Mapusaurs are unique in that they were found fossilized as a group--suggesting that flesh-eating theropods, including Tyrannosaurus rex, may not have lived and hunted alone, as previously believed.

 

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has released their own "deep space" image, a compilation of 714 frames.  Although not as "deep" or detailed as Hubble's Deep Field image, the Deep 3 'Empty' Field image reveals objects 100 million times fainter than the human eye can detect. (In fact, according to the ESO press release, the area of the sky Deep 3 covers would look starless to the unaided observer.)  The original image consisted of a whopping 300 million pixels and was taken by a ground-based telescope at La Silla, Chile.  If you have broadband, you can view a zoomable version of the image, or if you have a slower internet connection, view the medium-sized one.

According to ESO, the Deep 3  field is located in the Crater, or "Cup," constellation, between the Virgo, Corvus and Hydra constellations.

Image courtesy ESO

The following is from Creationism and Baraminology Research News:

Many people seem confused about what Irreducible Complexity is. I've had to explain it to several people, and have tired of it, so I'm writing this post so that I can just refer people here :)

The basic definition is not much in dispute. It is this:

 

A single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.

So, basically you have (a) well-matched parts, and (b) a core system.

Many people think that irreducible complexity is in and of itself an argument from ignorance. But actually it is an argument from what we know about how designers design, so it is an inference. Designers design systems holistically. Therefore, if we see something that is holistically designed, we can infer that there was a designer somewhere behind it. The problem comes in defining "holistically designed" so that it can be measured. Irreducible Complexity is simply an attempt at an empirical definition of holistic design. It may or may not wind up being true (I have a hunch that it will be true, though like any concept in science the definition will likely have to be modified as it gets more discussion), but that is what it is in a nutshell.

 

Continue reading Irreducible Complexity . . .

This post excerpt was written by Crevo and is used here by permission.

 

For those of you following the controversy surrounding Dr. Eric Pianka, who "advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth's population by airborne Ebola," The Pearcey Report has posted a partial transcript of Pianka's original speech online.

Hat tip to Mike Gene over at Telic Thoughts.