A new drug sweeping through Florida has been found that is stronger than crystal meth or bath salts.
The drug, called flakka (Spanish for skinny), has resulted in a man trying to break down the door of a police station, a man impaling himself while climbing a fence and a nude man screaming on a rooftop according to CBS.
The drug can be snorted, snoked, injected or swallowed. It can even be used in e-cigarettes.
“We’re starting to see a rash of cases of a syndrome referred to as excited delirium,” Jim Hall, an epidemiologist at the Center for Applied Research on Substance Use and Health Disparities at Nova Southeastern University, told CBS. “This is where the body goes into hyperthermia, generally a temperature of 105 degrees. The individual becomes psychotic, they often rip off their clothes and run out into the street violently and have an adrenaline-like strength and police are called and it takes four or five officers to restrain them. Then once they are restrained, if they don’t receive immediate medical attention they can die.”
The drug is usually made from the same class of chemical that is used to make bath salts, the drug that came to the public’s attention in 2012 when a man started chewing on another man’s face in public while high on the drug.
“On a scale of one to 10, Flakka is a 12,” Lt. Dan Zsido of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office told 10 News Tampa Bay Sarasota. “It comes from a place where we don’t know how it’s being made, who’s making it, and what’s been added to it before it reaches the end user so it’s very dangerous.”
A new proposal in the Connecticut legislature would legalize physician-assisted suicide in the state.
A public hearing was held last week to debate the matter. One of the pro-death speakers was Rep. Kelly Luxenberg (D-Manchester) whose father committed suicide by drowning himself after a battle with Parkinson’s disease.
“He never learned to swim and was intensely fearful of the water. So there is an even sadder irony in the way in which he chose to die,” she told the Judiciary Committee and those gathered. “Parkinson’s stripped my father of a life with dignity. Wouldn’t it have been great if in death his dignity could have been regained?”
Pro-life speakers also had their say before the Committee.
“People with disabilities, advocates against elder abuse are rightly concerned that the ‘right to die’ could become a ‘duty to die,’” Peter Wolfgang of the Family Institute of Connecticut told those gathered.
“Is it acceptable for someone’s life to be shortened because people may be actually on a wrong prognosis, or because they have been pressed to make this final move?” asked Cathy Ludlum of Second Thoughts Connecticut, who is disabled.
The bill would allow a doctor to prescribe a lethal dose of medication to the patient who would then ingest it on their own to end their life after submitting two requests to a physician and having two witnesses unrelated to the patient review the case and be present for the administration of the procedure.
A group of Satanists are outraged that a county in Washington is hanging a sign in their public hearing room that has the national motto of “In God We Trust.”
The Satanic Temple of Seattle is saying the sign is advocating Christian “tyranny”.
“We see Satan as our symbol of the rebel against tyranny,” said Satanic Temple’s Lillith Starr, who founded the Seattle chapter in late 2014, according to KING 5 News.
The sign was donated to the county by a local non-profit group, so there is no taxpayer dollars going to the sign.
The Satanists are demanding that they be able to place a sign of their own with any message they choose to add. They said most likely the sign would say “E Pluribus Unum” meaning “From the Many, One.”
Clark County’s manager said he doubted the council would welcome such a sign.
A British group fighting pornography has released a report showing a surprising rise in child pornography being produced by youths.
The Internet Watch Foundation called it a “disturbing trend” of “younger children…producing sexually explicit content which is being distributed online.”
In their report analyzing over 3,800 images and videos from September through November 2014. The report shows that 17.5% of the captured content contains children who are 15 years old or younger.
“Of particular concern is that the young people depicted took no steps to conceal their identity or location, even in many cases using their real names,” concluded the researchers.
“In some instances, it is apparent that this content is being knowingly created to appear on public websites, however, as 100 percent of the content depicting children aged 15 years or younger had been harvested from its original upload location and further distributed via third party websites, control over its removal or onward distribution has been lost.”
Dawn Hawkins of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation told the Christian Post that major consequences are awaiting the children engaging in this behavior. She says that the world’s highly sexualized society drives the problem.
“Largely, it is because highly sexual media is everywhere you look and is often portrayed as a way to be popular, cool, grownup and successful with no negative consequences. Kids are simply copying what they see adults do,” said Hawkins.
“Parents must recognize that even their most successful, well-behaved children are at risk. Talk to your kids about these realities — tell them about the science; tell them about the lasting consequences.”
Officials in Panama City Beach, Florida have revoked the local tax-exempt status of a “church” that has been running a sexually-themed nightclub during Spring Break.
“It’s very disturbing, especially inside our city limits here in Bay County,” Panama City Beach Police Chief Drew Whitman told reporters this week. “I think we’re better than that.”
The group calling itself “Life Center Church” has been hosting an event called “Spring Break Amnesia” since February that featured items local officials called “shocking” for a place of worship.
“A bottle club, charging $20 at the door and selling obscene T-shirts is not being used as a church,” Property Appraiser Dan Sowell told the Panama City News Herald. “A God-fearing, God-honoring church in January does not sponsor this type of debauchery in March.”
The “church” had been advertising events on their website that were anything but Christian.
“‘Slumber’ is a pajama and lingerie party hosted by the sexiest ladies on the beach,” the site’s event description read just three days ago. “‘Anything But Clothes’ showcases your artistic side, featuring your mind and body. How creative can you be? Bare as you dare to attend in anything but clothes (toga, body paint, etc.).”
The church’s “pastor” once had another church in the area called Faith Christian Family Church. He was arrested and placed on probation for giving pot to teens.
Franklin Graham is sounding the alarm to American Christians that their religious freedoms are being eroded while believers around the world are being persecuted.
“I believe we’re going to see persecution in this country,” Graham said during an interview on “Fox and Friends Weekend” on Sunday. “We’ve already seen many laws that have been passed that restrict our freedom as Christians. I believe it’s going to get worse, and we see no question gaining influence in Washington by those that represent the Islamic faith. We do have a problem in this country and we are losing our religious freedom and we’re losing it a little bit day by day.”
It’s the latest in warnings being given by Graham, who says the current government situation is the most hostile ever toward Christians.
Graham noted how the Obama administration routinely rebukes and condemns Israel while they actively defend Islamic nations who are out for the destruction of Israel.
Graham said that Christians need to stop shying away from expressing God’s view in the arena of ideas because we have the right to stand up for God’s way.
A California man has been arrested for lying on a passport application as he attempted to join the Islamic terrorist group ISIS.
Adam Dandach, 21, has also been charged with obstructing justice by attempting to destroy records of his online activity before they could be seized by investigators.
Dandach was stopped at the Orange County airport while attempting to board a flight to Turkey. He carried an “expedited replacement passport” that he obtained after claiming he threw away his old passport by accident. Prosecutors say that the man’s mother confiscated the passport when she discovered his plan to join ISIS, so he knew the claim was false.
Court papers showed that Dandach was more disappointed in not being able to join ISIS than he was to be arrested for lying to officials.
If convicted, he could face up to 15 years in prison on a terrorism related count and 25 years on each of the other counts in the indictments.
The North Carolina Ethics Commission (NCEC) has just given the green light to lobbyists to have sex with public officials and keep it quiet.
The NCEC says that because sex has no financial cost and thus is not a “thing of value”, no lobbyists or public officials have to reveal if sexual favors have been traded for influence in government actions.
“Consensual sexual relationships do not have monetary value and therefore are not ‘reportable expenditures made for lobbying’ for purposes of the lobbying law’s expenditure reporting provisions,” the commission’s advisory opinion states.
“Thus if the lobbyist does not receive payment from the lobbyist principal for engaging in the sexual relationship which you reference, which the commission presumes to be the case here, those activities would not constitute goodwill lobbying and would therefore not trigger a registration requirement,” the opinion continues.
The case was called “hypothetical” by some observers of the Commission. It was noted that in 2012, the chief of staff for then-House Speaker Thom Tillis, now a U.S. Senator, was forced to resign when the commission investigated his intimate relationships with two registered lobbyists.
The criticism of the soft-core pornographic film Fifty Shades of Grey being shown in mainstream theaters has taken a very dark, twisted turn.
A 19-year-old freshman at the University of Illinois at Chicago has been arrested on sexual assault charges. Mohammad Hossain reportedly assaulted a 19-year-old female student in a reenactment of scenes from the movie.
The judge in the case was shocked when he found out that Hossein was a part of several leadership programs at UIC and as a student ambassador to the alumni association.
“Sandra, how can someone involved in all that let a movie persuade him to do something like this?” Judge Adam Bourgeois Jr. asked Hossain’s lawyer, public defender Sandra Bennewitz.
“He would say that it was consensual,” she replied.
Police say that the couple “had previously been intimiate” but were not in a steady relationship. The report goes on to say that the woman had been willingly participating in the movie reenactment until Hossein started whipping her with a belt.
The producers of the film would not comment on the incident.
A drive-in theater in California is under fire from parents after their children were able to see the extremely sexually explicit film “Fifty Shades Of Grey” when they came to see the family-friendly Spongebob movie.
Deborah Powell told KTVU-TV that she had brought a large group of children to the West Wind Solano Drive-In to see “Spongebob: Sponge Out of Water.” However, from where they had to park to watch the film, they could see the heavy-R Fifty Shades.
“[On the screen] at the time there was a woman being slapped, naked, bound up… so, we had to have our children close their eyes,” she told KTVU. “I could see another car behind us that had children in there with their eyes closed.”
Powell said she expressed her concerns to a theater employee before trying to shield the pornographic film from being able to be seen by her children. Eventually, they had to leave.
“There is no way to avoid looking at that screen. It’s too tempting. So, we couldn’t stay. So, we had to turn around. My children were devastated.”
The theater company would not comment to KTVU.
Another California drive-in is also under fire because the screen showing Fifty Shades of Grey can be seen from Highway 50 at the Sacramento 6.
