Al-Qaeda followers on Islamic internet sites used the event as an opportunity to threaten to murder more people unless the Christian West (which, true or not, is exactly how the Islamic world sees us. The "West" is synonymous with Christianity in their minds) pulls troops out of the Middle East. But don't expect them to restrain themselves. People will be killed regardless of the alleged reasons for it. Other Islamists claimed that a conspiracy by Israel, the CIA, or Syria was behind the attack, as an alleged apparent attempt to make muslims look bad.

An Austrian man successfully managed to wear "religious headgear" in his DL photo. The headgear is a pasta-strainer, and is intended to mock organized religion. Pastafarianism is a mock religion invented by atheists in an attempt to show how ludicrous they apparently think 'religion' is. 

Note: a spokesperson said that the headgear was not approved 'for religious reasons,' but that it didn't violate the requirement that the entire face must be visible for the photograph.

The 'Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster' was invented and founded as a result of an imaginative, albeit invalid, analogy given in the Kitzmiller v. Dovertrial by one of the witnesses for the pro-evolutionism side.

Studies of maternal mitochondrial DNA show that all Polar Bears alive today contain genetic material from a female Brown Bear from, presumably, Ireland. Polar Bears are known to have produced viable hybrids with Brown Bears both in captivity and in the wild. The study did not use the whole mitochondrial genome, but fragments. The study confirms genetically what has been known for some time--that Polar Bears are Brown Bears, and that they all descend from the same original kind. They likely arose from simple shuffling of alleles, and didn't need long stretches of time to speciate.

Answers in Genesis Makes a Dent in the Middle East with Creation Science Materials

Motivated Egyptian Christians have translated large parts of the Answers in Genesis website (www.answersingenesis.org) into Arabic, which has made Biblical Creation information and materials available to 221 million Arabic-speaking people around the world. Dr. Terry Mortenson also recently held the very first Biblical Creation seminar in Cairo, Egypt. AiG also recently translated their materials into a major language in Pakistan, making the knowledge of God's Creation available to 80 million more people in their native language. 

A recent study of organic soft tissue in dinosaur fossils determines that collagen protein in T.rex and Hadrosaur fossils were original to the animal and not contaminants. That's good science. The authors also made it clear that organic materials absolutely cannot persist for more than one million years without completely decaying. However, they then concluded that because they believe that dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, that means that these compounds must therefore be 65 million years+ old. That's not bad science. That's just not science, period.

Australian researchers demonstrate that all that is needed to produce opals are the right conditions--not long spans of time. The study discovered a connection between bacterial microbes and opals, and "inferred the opal's growth rate using the known growth rate of the microbes." The study found that opals can grow within a span of weeks to months.