Techcordance

* NYC Mosque
* Facebook Privacy Again
* Graham Speaks Out
* Religious Freedom
* Facebook
* NARAL
* Illegals in Mexico

Free Speech?

An Ohio college administrator recently lost her job after she wrote an article in her local newspaper against homosexuality. Now, Crystal Dixon, former associate vice president of human resources at the University of Toledo, is fighting back. “I wrote with no malice, no hatred in my heart. But I wanted to present another perspective on the subject and that was what was going through my mind,” Dixon said. “It never occurred to me that I would lose my job.On the morning of April 6, 2008 she woke up with a divine mandate, which was to respond to an editorial in the Toledo Free Press where editor-in-chief Michael Miller argued against gay prejudice, “based in religion.” He also advocated for domestic partner benefits for the Medical University of Ohio, the University of Toledo’s sister school.

Alternatives

Apple’s iPad will be available on April 3 and reports suggest that the product is off to a good start, with hundreds and thousands being ordered from Apple’s Web site. But the device has faced some criticism for lacking features such as a video camera, USB ports and support for technology called Flash that enables Web video.
But those technologies could be available in iPad alternatives reaching the market soon, including Neofonie’s WePad, Hewlett-Packard’s Slate, Notion Ink’s Adam and Innovative Converged Devices’ Ultra. These handheld devices have diagonal screen sizes from 7 inches to 11.6 inches and will be based on Google’s Android Linux OS or Windows 7.

Health Bill

ABC News’ Jake Tapper, Ann Compton and Sunlen Miller report:

Speaking volumes about how the votes are not yet there for health care reform, President Obama has decided to delay his trip to Asia. The president was due to leave for a trip to Guam, Indonesia and Australia on Thursday, March 18th, and return to Washington, D.C., on March 24th. The White House confirmed this morning that the trip will be delayed by three days. The president will now leave Sunday, March 21st, and return to Washington on Friday, March 26th.
White House officials and congressional Democratic sources say that while they believe ultimately the compromise House –Senate legislation will pass, as of now House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., does not have the votes.
She needs 216 votes — a majority of the House which currently has 431 members — to pass the Senate bill and changes to the Senate bill. Anti abortion democrats led by Rep. Bart Stupak, D- Mich., have said they will not support the Senate bill since it has less restrictive language on abortion than the House bill.
Democratic congressional leaders had asked the president to delay his trip until the health care reform vote is over so as to personally appeal to House Democrats to vote for the bill that has consumed so much of his presidency.

Chinese Church
An official from the Land Resources Bureau of Yaodu District in Linfen, China recently announced that a mega-church serving 50,000 Christians is to be torn down by the government.
The six-story main building of the Golden Lampstand Church towers over Linfen City where church leaders say the underground church is strong.
The $1.5 million facility has been the central location of an unregistered church network that is spread throughout the territory.
The military has been keeping people out of the building since the Chinese government seized it last year. Its confiscation came on the heels of the bloody attack and destruction of Fushan Church in September of 2009. Ten of Linfen City’s pastors have since been tried and sentenced to jail.
Now church members are calling on the global church to pray for their leaders and to protest the destruction of their church.

Gore

Gore

Al Gore has come in from the cold — writing an Op-Ed for the New York Times just two days after FoxNews.com noted the former vice president’s seeming unwillingness to comment on the Climate-gate scandal.Gore won a Nobel Prize and an Oscar for his film, An Inconvenient Truth,which explored the topic of climate change and argued that man is one of the main causes for it. But in the last three months, as global warming has gone from a scientific certitude to the subject of satire, Gore — the public face of global warming — had been silent on the topic.Despite an attention-grabbing appearance at an Apple shareholders meeting last week and a speech at a private IBM conference in Las Vegas, the politician-turned-Earth-advocate had been uncharacteristically silent on the topic of global warming. Meanwhile, Climate-gate has besmirched the science, scientists and politicians who back the theory of manmade climate change.