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The Great Inception Part 9: Jesus vs. the Old Gods

March 12, 2017 by Derek Gilbert

(See our lead article from February 17, And The World Was Changed )

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the ninth part in a new online series based on a SPECIAL SKYWATCH TV INVESTIGATIVE REPORT set to air on network television mid February (2017) through mid-March. This series and the forthcoming programs will center on two groundbreaking books (available starting this week) — Reversing Hermon by Dr. Michael S. Heiser and The Great Inception by SkyWatch TV host Derek P. Gilbert. These reports and entries will unveil what most in the modern Church have never heard regarding how the story of the sin of the Watchers in 1 Enoch was central to the mission of Jesus, the messiah, as well as Biblical facts hidden behind the stories of the old gods, the Titans, and the role they played AND WILL PLAY in the lead up to Armageddon, imperative supra-classified details altogether forgotten by modern religious institutions.

Jesus, of course, was fully aware of the ongoing war for his holy mountain. For him, the war was personal.

Many of the key events in the life of Jesus occurred at the Temple Mount. As an infant, Jesus was presented at the Temple in accordance with the Law, where Simeon, a man who had been told he’d live to see the Messiah, and Anna, an 84-year-old prophetess, were led to Jesus by the Holy Spirit. When he was twelve, he stayed behind in the Temple after his parents started back to Nazareth after the Passover celebration in Jerusalem. It was a full day before they realized Jesus was missing, and at least three more before they found him in the Temple talking with the rabbis.

Early in his ministry, Jesus visited Jerusalem during Passover and drove the moneychangers and animal merchants out of the Temple. Later, probably during the second Passover of his ministry, Jesus healed a lame man at the Pool of Bethesda at the north end of the temple complex. Shortly before the Crucifixion, Jesus drove out the moneychangers a second time, and Matthew records that he healed many lame and blind people who came to him at the Temple.

Isn’t it interesting that even in the building erected by the wicked king Herod, and without the Ark of the Covenant in the temple, Jesus was still consumed with zeal for his Father’s house?

And that passion extended beyond the 35 acres (This is incorrect. Click The Coming Temple for the correction.)that make up the Temple Mount. Israel’s inheritance was Yahweh, and the land inside the borders He established during the time of Moses and Joshua belonged to Him. That’s why Jesus devoted so much of his ministry to healing the sick and casting out demons—which were, remember, the spirits of the Nephilim. He wasn’t just restoring people to physical and spiritual health, he was casting them out of his land, Israel.

When we step back and take a fresh look at the events of Jesus’ life, many things take on new meaning when they’re framed in the context of the war between God and the gods. And, of course, many of the arguments offered by skeptics to explain away the divinity of Jesus are nothing more than PSYOPs by the Fallen to convince modern minds, clouded by the fog of scientism, that Jesus was either a political radical, a social justice warrior, or a misunderstood itinerant preacher—anything but God made flesh.

For example, the Transfiguration. What was the point of all that?

And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became radiant, intensely white, as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, and they were talking with Jesus. And Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good that we are here. Let us make three tents, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” For he did not know what to say, for they were terrified. And a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud, “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.” And suddenly, looking around, they no longer saw anyone with them but Jesus only.

Mark 9:2-8 (ESV)

First reaction by the modern reader: Awesome special effects! But if the purpose of the Transfiguration was to demonstrate his divinity, why did Jesus take only three of his disciples? Wouldn’t it have been more productive to bring all twelve? Or why not perform this great visual effect for the thousands of people who had to settle for a miraculous lunch of bread and fish?

Here’s why: The intended audience wasn’t human.

The clue to the real purpose of the event is the location. Both Mark and Matthew note that the Transfiguration took place on a high mountain. Now, Israel has plenty of mountains, but not many that can be described as high—at least not relative to the rest of the peaks in the land.

Second, note that they climbed a mountain near Caesarea Philippi. That narrows the field. The town was in the northeastern part of the Holy Land, north of the Sea of Galilee and Lake Huleh, in the area we call the Golan Heights. To be precise, Caesarea Philippi sat at the southwestern base of Mount Hermon.

Ah. Bull’s eye!

Yes, the very mountain where the Watchers/Titans descended and made a pact to corrupt humanity was where Jesus was transfigured into a being of light before the eyes of Peter, James, and John.

Coincidence?

Not on your life! Jesus knew exactly what he was doing. This was a cosmic poke in the eye, a declaration to the Fallen that the Second Power in Heaven had arrived in the flesh. He was declaring that the temporary dominion of the rebellious bene elohim was nearly at an end—that Yahweh’s mount of assembly would soon fulfill the promises proclaimed by the prophets. And he did it on the mount of assembly of El, the high god of the Canaanites.

More accurately, it was where the Fallen tried to usurp the name of El Shaddai, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

If we back up a chapter in Matthew and Mark, there is another incident that foreshadowed what happened on Mount Hermon. At the base of the mountain, outside the city of Caesarea Philippi, is a place called Paneas (today called Banias). It’s a cave and a spring that’s been sacred to the Greek god Pan since the time of Alexander the Great.

Pan was the god of wild, desolate places, shepherds and flocks, music, fields, groves, and wooded glens. Pan was also linked to fertility, which influenced much of the art depicting the god in the classical world. He was often shown pursuing or engaged in physical relations with goddesses, nymphs, women, teen boys called eromenoi, and/or goats. (Ecch. Some of those ancient vases and frescoes should have been rated R or NC-17.) As a rustic nature god, Pan normally wasn’t worshiped in temples. He preferred outdoor settings, especially those that were like his home in Arcadia, a mountainous region of southern Greece.

The Grotto of Pan at Paneas has been sacred since ancient times. A gushing spring once flowed from the cave, feeding the marshy area north of Lake Huleh that was the source of the Jordan River. An earthquake years ago shifted something under the mountain, and today the stream seeps quietly from the bedrock below the mouth of the cave.

After the Greeks came to the Levant, Pan gradually replaced an earlier local fertility cult. Scholars have suggested that Aliyan, a minor Canaanite god of fountains, may have been the deity worshiped at Paneas before the Greeks arrived. This might have been the god called Baal-Hermon, the Lord of Hermon, in Judges 3:3.

Christians in the centuries after Jesus equated Pan with Satan. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how Greek depictions of the goat-god influenced later artists, what with the horns, hooves, tail, and all. But those connections were mainly in the minds of imaginative medieval artists, since there is nothing definite in the Bible that describes the appearance of Satan other than a warning that he can appear as an angel of light. However, there are some interesting links that suggest there was more to Pan than a fun-loving, randy nature spirit.

We go back more than 1,400 years from the time of Jesus to the Exodus. Apparently, the Israelites began to worship entities during their forty years in the desert called se’irim, or “goat demons.”

And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to Aaron and his sons and to all the people of Israel and say to them, This is the thing that the Lord has commanded. If any one of the house of Israel kills an ox or a lamb or a goat in the camp, or kills it outside the camp, and does not bring it to the entrance of the tent of meeting to offer it as a gift to the Lord in front of the tabernacle of the Lord, bloodguilt shall be imputed to that man. He has shed blood, and that man shall be cut off from among his people. This is to the end that the people of Israel may bring their sacrifices that they sacrifice in the open field, that they may bring them to the Lord, to the priest at the entrance of the tent of meeting, and sacrifice them as sacrifices of peace offerings to the Lord. And the priest shall throw the blood on the altar of the Lord at the entrance of the tent of meeting and burn the fat for a pleasing aroma to the Lord. So they shall no more sacrifice their sacrifices to goat demons, after whom they whore. This shall be a statute forever for them throughout their generations.

Leviticus 17:1-7 (ESV), emphasis added

The se’irim, literally “hairy ones,” were satyr-like (i.e., Pan-like) beings who the Israelites began to worship during their wanderings in the desert. The sacrifices away from the tabernacle were consistent with the worship of Pan. It appears that the section of the Law recorded in Leviticus 17, requiring that all sacrifices be brought to the tent of meeting, was specifically to stop the worship of these goat-demons.

Now, se’ir is one of those words where the translation depends on the context. Usually, it simply means “goat” or “kid.” But there are four places in the Old Testament where the word clearly refers to a demon or devil. Here’s another example: In Isaiah 34, the prophet turns his polemical gift on the land of Edom:

Thorns shall grow over its strongholds,

nettles and thistles in its fortresses.

It shall be the haunt of jackals,

an abode for ostriches.

And wild animals shall meet with hyenas;

the wild goat shall cry to his fellow;


indeed, there the night bird settles

and finds for herself a resting place.

Isaiah 34:13-14 (ESV), emphasis added

Again, the “wild goat” is based on the Hebrew root se’ir. The KJV translates the word as “satyr,” as it does in Isaiah 13, but most English translations are similar to the ESV—wild goat, male goat, hairy goat, etc.

Now, back to Moses: The Book of Leviticus records an interesting requirement for the Day of Atonement. It involved a goat that was driven from the camp into the wilderness for a being called Azazel.

“Aaron shall offer the bull as a sin offering for himself and shall make atonement for himself and for his house. Then he shall take the two goats and set them before the Lord at the entrance of the tent of meeting. And Aaron shall cast lots over the two goats, one lot for the Lord and the other lot for Azazel. And Aaron shall present the goat on which the lot fell for the Lord and use it as a sin offering, but the goat on which the lot fell for Azazel shall be presented alive before the Lord to make atonement over it, that it may be sent away into the wilderness to Azazel.

Leviticus 16:6-10 (ESV), emphasis added

Scholars interpret the ritual as complementary rites of atonement, with the sacrificial goat and the second goat who carries the sin of the people away. The priest would lay hands on the goat for Azazel and impart the sins of the people on it before it was led out of the camp and into the wilderness. This is the origin of the term “scapegoat.”

Because you’ve been paying attention, you’re remembering right about now that the name Azazel has come up once before in this book. That’s because the Book of 1 Enoch names Azazel as one of the leaders of the rebellious Watchers who descended at Mount Hermon. And right there is a link between Azazel and the se’irim, the satyr-like deities dancing in the wilderness who just happen to bear a strong resemblance to the Greek god Pan.

Of course, unless you’re a coincidence theorist, you see these details as a connected thread, part of an enemy PSYOP to distract the Jews from their devotion to Yahweh. But that’s not all.

Greek myths record fascinating connections between Pan and a pair of other deities we’ve already encountered in this study: In one story, Pan, in his goat-god aspect Aegipan, assisted Zeus in the chief god’s epic battle with the chaos god, Typhon. When Typhon turned to attack Aegipan, the goat-god dove into the Nile River, with the parts above the water remaining a goat but the part below the waterline transformed into a goat. (We believe the author meant to write “fish”. Ed.)

Thus, Aegipan became the goat-fish Capricornus, or Capricorn.

Even though the constellation Capricorn is faint, it’s been consistently depicted as a hybrid goat-fish since at least the 21st century B.C., the time of the last Sumerian kings to rule over all of Mesopotamia. And—here’s the kicker—the goat-fish was a well-known symbol of the god of the abzu, Enki.

So now we can draw links directly from Enki, god of the abyss, to the goat-demons of the Exodus and the goat-god worshiped at the base of Mount Hermon in the time of Jesus Christ.

And it was there at Caesarea Philippi, right outside the Grotto of Pan, where this exchange took place between Jesus and his hot-headed disciple, Peter:

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”

He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.“

Matthew 16:13-18 (ESV), emphasis added

Remember that the Grotto of Pan is at the foot of El’s mount of assembly, site of the rebellion by the Watchers. It’s also in Bashan, gateway to the netherworld. Was it a coincidence that it was there Jesus asked Peter, “Who do you say that I am?”

No. Jesus made a statement to the Fallen there, a declaration of his divinity: On their rock, he would build his church!

Then he climbed their rock, Mount Hermon, and was transfigured into a being of light, his face like the sun and his clothes dazzling white—and the disciples heard Yahweh’s voice from heaven.

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We need to look at one more event that took place in northern Israel, near Mount Hermon. This is in Luke 10, the chapter immediately after Peter’s declaration of faith and the Transfiguration on Mount Hermon. In other words, the time and place of this event was also deliberate.

After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them on ahead of him, two by two, into every town and place where he himself was about to go. […]

The seventy-two returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!” And he said to them, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”

Luke 10:1-20 (ESV), emphasis added

Now, some translations say there were seventy disciples, others say seventy-two. The Greek manuscripts of Luke are split and there is no way to know for sure which number Luke wrote on his original draft of the gospel. But either way, given the location and the purpose of the mission, there are good theological reasons to believe the number was not, you know, coincidental.

How many sons of El were in El’s assembly on Mount Hermon? That’s right, seventy—plus Ba`al and El equals seventy-two.

How many nations did Yahweh create at the Tower of Babel? Seventy—but some translations of the Bible actually name seventy-two.

How many elders of Israel climbed Mount Sinai to meet Yahweh face to face? Seventy—plus Moses and Aaron makes seventy-two.

What was the point of Jesus sending the disciples out ahead of him? It was the start of the church’s mission to reclaim the nations from the Fallen, the kickoff event of the Great Commission. Satan, the nachash from the book of Genesis, fell “like lightning from heaven” because he’d lost his legal claim as lord of the dead over those who die in Christ. Why? Because we are guaranteed eternal life through the shedding of his blood.

However you count it, sending out that specific number of disciples wasn’t an accident or a coincidence, it was a clear message to the old gods: Get off my land!

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CBN NEWS

It’s Happening AGAIN: More Syrian Refugees Convert After Seeing Jesus in a Dream

03-08-2017

Syrian refugee Abu Radwan was born into a Muslim family, but after reportedly seeing Jesus appear to him in a dream, everything changed.

It was a year and a half ago that Radwan, who is now in Beirut, Lebanon, with his wife and two children, converted to Christianity — an event that unfolded just months after the purported dream.

“Of course it was a difficult decision. I was born into a Muslim family,” he recently said of his conversion, noting that his family fled Syria after the civil war began. “I started going to the church. I believed that Jesus was coming to help us, to save us.”

Radwan’s story isn’t unique, as there are likely many other Syrian refugees who have converted from Islam to Christianity, though the move doesn’t come without profound risk. In fact, Radwan said he was recently stabbed while coming out of church, saying the culprits were Syrians from his tribe who disagreed with his conversion decision; he risks his life if he ever returns to Syria.

Still, Radwan doesn’t have any regrets, saying he was relieved when Bishop George Saliba baptized him after his conversion.

“If I die, now, here in front of the church, I will die in peace,” he told PRI.org.

Saliba said he has baptized at least 100 Muslim refugees since the start of the Syrian civil war, though, as The Christian Post noted, additional reports on the ground point to many other conversions.

As Faithwire noted back in November, an Iranian Christian pastor claimed at the time that there’s a stunning revival underway in his country, where he says the number of Christian adherents has increased from 100,000 in 1994 to 3 million today. Some claim that Jesus has been appearing in dreams and that those visions have helped spark the conversions.

“Right now, you can see the results of the holy spirit,” Pastor Rahman Salehsafari told CBN News of the situation today in Iran. “You can see what the holy spirit is doing with people.”

And, on a separate note, the pastor of a British church said in December that at least two Muslim refugees have converted to Christianity after purportedly having dreams about Jesus — dreams they say led them to attend a Christian church.

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CHRISTIAN NEWS

Christian Physicist Says New Evidence of Africa’s Wet Past Points to Biblical Great Flood

By Garrett Haley on March 6, 2017

New research has confirmed that the dry, desolate climate of the Sahara Desert was once a lush tropical climate—an observation that correlates well with the predictions of biblical creationists, a physicist with the Institute for Creation Research says.

A team of international researchers collected and analyzed marine sediments from off the coast of west Africa, looking for clues into Africa’s climatological past. Their findings, published in the journal “Science Advances,” show that northern Africa was at one time much wetter than it is today.

“It was 10 times as wet as today,” said the study’s lead author, Jessica Tierney, in a press release from The University of Arizona.

Tierney and her colleagues found ancient leaf wax samples that reveal what the African climate was like several thousand years ago. The evidence suggests that the Sahara Desert, where annual rainfall now is usually less than five inches, was once lush and green.

“Our precipitation rate estimates confirm the interpretation that a seasonal tropical climate dominated most regions of North Africa during the Green Sahara time,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

“It is therefore feasible that, at the peak of the Green Sahara, monsoonal moisture inundated the entire western Saharan region,” they added.

Although scientists already knew that rainfall rates in ancient Africa were once higher than they are today, most climate model simulations underestimated how widespread the tropical conditions were.

“With some notable exceptions, climate model simulations do not predict these high rainfall rates, nor do they indicate that the Green Sahara extended as far as 31°N,” the team wrote in their journal article.

As scientists struggle to make sense of the new data and adjust their climate models accordingly, biblical creationists say that these findings point to the global flood described in Genesis. Dr. Jake Hebert, a physicist with the Institute for Creation Research, says scientific models based on the Bible predict an extremely wet period following the Great Flood.

“Rapid seafloor spreading and volcanic activity during the Genesis Flood would have significantly warmed the world’s oceans,” he wrote in a online article published late last month. “This would have greatly increased evaporation, putting much more moisture into the atmosphere. This increased moisture would have resulted in much more precipitation, in the form of snow, in the higher latitudes and on mountaintops, and rain at lower latitudes and elevations.”

North Africa is not the only dry region that was once wet and tropical, Hebert pointed out. However, secular models, based primarily on uniformitarianism, struggle to explain the drastic climate changes that the earth experienced several millennia ago.

“This past climate change is difficult for secular scientists to explain,” he wrote. “Some uniformitarian scientists claim the wet Green Sahara was caused by changes in Earth’s orbital motions (the astronomical or Milankovitch theory of climate change), which caused a small increase in solar radiation some 9,000 years ago. This extra solar radiation supposedly warmed the continents, intensifying summer monsoons over Europe and Africa. But there are serious problems with attributing past climate change to astronomical motions.”

The Biblical model accounts for the evidence much better than secular theories, Hebert concluded.

“The conclusion of increased Saharan rainfall in the recent past is in perfect agreement with the history recorded in Genesis,” he said.

ARUTZ SHEVA

'Trump will keep his promise to move embassy to Jerusalem'

Delegation from US Congress visits Israel to examine issue of relocating embassy to Jerusalem.

Eliran Aharon, 05/03/17 18:47

A congressional delegation sent to Israel to examine the issue of relocating the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem arrived this weekend for a fact-finding mission to assess the practical and political implications of the move.

Chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Security Ron DeSantis (R-Florida), a member of the delegation, told reporters at a press conference Sunday evening that President Trump intends to stand by his campaign pledge to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital, Jerusalem. Israeli journalists have been writing articles doubting Trump's intentions since the inauguration.

According to DeSantis, Trump’s inauguration and the selection of Ambassador-Designate to Israel David Friedman were exciting moments following eight years under President Obama, during which relations between Israel and the White House were “not simple.”

“The American people are excited to see the embassy move from Jerusalem after fifty years,” said DeSantis, referencing the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the Old City of Jerusalem during the 1967 Six Day War.

Contrary to media reports that the Israeli government and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had asked the White House to hold off on the proposed embassy relocation, Rep. DeSantis said Israel’s leadership was unified in its support of the move.

“I also met with Netanyahu and everyone [in the government] was in favor. Maybe Netanyahu is waiting for the confirmation of the new ambassador. In my opinion, [the delay in the relocation] is a logistical problem.”

Regarding speculation by opponents of the embassy move that the relocation could increase tensions in the region, DeSantis said the threats seemed overblown.

“I can’t know what will be in the future. I do know that there are advantages to moving the embassy, and one of them is honesty. We have to be honest that Jerusalem is the capital [of Israel]. There is no real argument about that at all. America stands behind its ally, Israel. Just as we condemned the UN [Security Council] resolution, we stand by our friend’s side.”

DeSantis added that by relocating its embassy, the US would likely cause other countries to do the same.

“I don’t know how many countries will take this step, but if the US does this, we will see more countries joining.”

THE TIMES OF ISRAEL

Jewish Iran MP brands Netanyahu ‘insane vampire’

Lawmaker claims racism and anti-Semitism ‘never been witnessed’ in Islamic Republic, after PM links Purim holiday to Tehran regime

BY TIMES OF ISRAEL STAFF March 14, 2017, 7:30 pm

Jewish Iranian MP Siamak Moreh Sedgh during an interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria, Sunday, September 29, 2013 (photo credit: CNN screen cap)

Iran’s sole Jewish parliamentarian branded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an “insane vampire” for repeatedly saying that modern Iran, like ancient Persia, is bent on annihilating the Jewish people.

“Netanyahu is an insane vampire drowned in crimes from head to toe and the recent remarks made by the racist Israeli prime minister [are] not surprising to me,” Siamak Moreh Sedgh told the Iranian parliament on Tuesday, according to the semi-official Fars news agency.

Sedgh further claimed that anti-Semitism and racism have “never been witnessed” in Iranian culture.

Sedgh, a 50-year-old physician who also serves as director of the Tehran Jewish Committee, has represented his community in parliament since 2012 and has been a frequent critic of Israel.

His remarks were the latest in an ongoing spat between Iranian officials and Netanyahu, who has recently made several references to Iran or ancient Persia in the context of this week’s Jewish holiday of Purim.

During a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday, Netanyahu said Persia had made “an attempt to destroy the Jewish people that did not succeed” some 2,500 years ago, the event commemorated on Purim.

“Today there is an attempt by Persia’s heir, Iran, to destroy the state of the Jews,” Netanyahu said. “They say this as clearly as possible and inscribe it on their ballistic missiles.”

Putin was the first to reject Netanyahu’s Purim parallel, telling him that the events described had taken place “in the fifth century BCE.”

“We now live in a different world. Let us talk about that now,” Putin said.

Then, while visiting a synagogue on Saturday, Netanyahu told young children celebrating the holiday that Iran wants to murder the Jews just as the Persians did.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif then swung back at Netanyahu, accusing the prime minister of distorting history, and claiming that Iranians had “saved Jews 3 times” throughout history.

“To sell bigoted lies against a nation which has saved Jews 3 times, Netanyahu resorting to fake history & falsifying Torah. Force of habit,” he tweeted on Sunday.

In an attachment to the post, Zarif wrote, “Once again Benjamin Netanyahu not only distorts the realities of today, but also distorts the past — including Jewish scripture. It is truly regrettable that bigotry gets to the point of making allegations against an entire nation which has saved the Jews three times in its history.”

On Monday, Netanyahu blasted the Iranian regime for repeatedly calling for Israel’s annihilation while speaking of tolerance.

“Iran’s FM speaks of tolerance while the regime hangs gays, jails journalists and calls for Israel’s annihilation. Who are they kidding?” the prime minister tweeted.

Purim, which started Saturday night, commemorates the Biblical tale of an averted genocide of the Jews in the Persian empire some 2,500 years ago, and is a festive occasion celebrated with costumes, parades and street parties in cities around Israel.

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In the biblical Purim story, retold in the Book of Esther, the Persian viceroy Haman plotted to kill all the Jews in the kingdom. King Ahasuerus initially supported the plan, but eventually his Jewish wife, Esther, convinced him that he should not allow Haman to kill the Jews. Ahasuerus had Haman and his sons killed and the Jews were given leave to kill all those who wanted to destroy them.

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MailOnline

Giant 3,000-year-old statue of Pharaoh Ramses II found buried in a Cairo slum is hailed as 'one of the most important discoveries ever'

• Researchers from Egypt and Germany found the bust of the statue and the lower part of the head

• They also found upper part of a life-sized limestone statue of Pharaoh Seti II, Ramses II's grandson

• Discovery was made in the working class area of Matariya among unfinished buildings and mud roads

• It shows shows importance of the city of Heliopolis, dedicated to worship of Ra, the sun god

By REUTERS and TIM COLLINS FOR MAILONLINE

PUBLISHED: 16:00, 9 March 2017 | UPDATED: 14:50, 10 March 2017

Archaeologists from Egypt and Germany have found a massive 26ft (8 metre) statue submerged in ground water in a Cairo slum.

Researchers say it probably depicts revered Pharaoh Ramses II, who ruled Egypt more than 3,000 years ago.

The discovery, hailed by the Antiquities Ministry as one of the most important ever, was made near the ruins of Ramses II's temple in the ancient city of Heliopolis, located in the eastern part of modern-day Cairo.

Archaeologists from Egypt and Germany have found a massive 26ft (8 metre) statue submerged in ground water in a Cairo slum. Researchers say it probably depicts revered Pharaoh Ramses II, who ruled Egypt more than 3,000 years ago

'Last Tuesday they called me to announce the big discovery of a colossus of a king, most probably Ramses II, made out of quartzite,' Antiquities Minister Khaled al-Anani told Reuters on Thursday at the site of the statue's unveiling.

The most powerful and celebrated ruler of ancient Egypt, the pharaoh also known as Ramses the Great was the third of the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt and ruled from 1279 to 1213 BCE.

He led several military expeditions and expanded the Egyptian Empire to stretch from Syria in the east to Nubia in the south.

His successors called him the 'Great Ancestor'.

'We found the bust of the statue and the lower part of the head and now we removed the head and we found the crown and the right ear and a fragment of the right eye,' Anani said.

Yesterday, archaeologists, officials, local residents, and members of the news media looked on as a massive forklift pulled the statue's head out of the water

The joint Egyptian-German expedition, which included the University of Leipzig, also found the upper part of a life-sized limestone statue of Pharaoh Seti II, Ramses II's grandson, that is 80 centimetres long.

WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT HELIOPOLIS?

Archaeologists found the statue in Mattarya district, site of the ancient capital of Heliopolis.

The ruins of Heliopolis, which means 'city of the sun' in ancient Greek, are located in the north eastern part of modern-day Cairo.

The sun temple in Heliopolis was founded by Ramses II, lending weight to the likelihood the statue found on the site of the old city is of him.

Ancient Egyptians believed Heliopolis was the place where the sun god lives, meaning it was off-limits for any royal residences.

It was one of the largest temples in Egypt, almost double the size of Luxor's Karnak, but was destroyed in Greco-Roman times.

Many of its obelisks were moved to Alexandria or to Europe and stones from the site were looted and used for building as Cairo developed.

Researchers found the bust of the statue and the lower part of the head (pictured) yesterday. It is believed to be of Ramses the Great, the most powerful and celebrated ruler of ancient Egypt, who ruled from 1279 to 1213 BCE

The sun temple in Heliopolis was founded by Ramses II, lending weight to the likelihood the statue is of him, archaeologists say.

It was one of the largest temples in Egypt, almost double the size of Luxor's Karnak, but was destroyed in Greco-Roman times.

Many of its obelisks were moved to Alexandria or to Europe and stones from the site were looted and used for building as Cairo developed.

Experts will now attempt to extract the remaining pieces of both statues before restoring them.

If they are successful and the colossus is proven to depict Ramses II, it will be moved to the entrance of the Grand Egyptian Museum, set to open in 2018.

The discovery was made in the working class area of Matariya, among unfinished buildings and mud roads.

Dietrich Raue, head of the expedition's German team, told Reuters that ancient Egyptians believed Heliopolis was the place where the sun god lives, meaning it was off-limits for any royal residences.

'The sun god created the world in Heliopolis, in Matariya. That's what I always tell the people here when they say is there anything important. According to the pharaonic belief, the world was created in Matariya,' Raue said.

'That means everything had to be built here. Statues, temples, obelisks, everything. But ... the king never lived in Matariya, because it was the sun god living here.'

The find could be a boon for Egypt's tourism industry, which has suffered many setbacks since the uprising that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011 but remains a vital source of foreign currency. The number of tourists visiting Egypt slumped to 9.8 million in 2011 from more than 14.7 million in 2010.

A bomb attack that brought down a Russian plane carrying 224 people from a Red Sea resort in October 2015 further hit arrivals, which dropped to 1.2 million in the first quarter of 2016 from 2.2 million a year earlier.

Archaeologists from Egypt and Germany found the statue in Mattarya district, site of the ancient capital of Heliopolis and today a sprawl of working class districts in northeastern Cairo

WHO WAS RAMSES II? THE SELF-PUBLICIST WHO COULDN'T STOP BUILDING STATUES OF HIMSELF

The fame of Rameses II, the third king of the 19th dynasty of Ancient Egypt, is put down to his flair for self-publicity.

He is remembered principally for the colossal statues he commissioned and for his massive building programme.

Dubbed Rameses the Great by the Egyptologists of the 19th century, his reign from 1279 to 1213BC marked the last peak of Egypt’s imperial power. He ascended the throne as the third king of the Nineteenth Dynasty at the age of twenty-five.

t’s thought that during his 67-year reign, he built more temples and fathered more children than any other pharaoh.

Rameses, born around 1303BC, was appointed regent at 14 by his father Seti I. He had been made a captain of the army aged just ten. Becoming king in his early 20s, he expanded his empire, leading an army north to recover the lost provinces his father had failed permanently to conquer in modern-day Syria and Israel.

In Kadesh, Syria, he was fed false information by two captured enemy spies, which saw Rameses II and his small corps of household troops surrounded by 2,500 enemy Hittite chariots.

He was saved by reinforcements and although he had failed to take Kadesh, the pharaoh had a long poem about his proud last stand carved on temple walls in Egypt.

In Nubia, part of which is now in northern Sudan, Rameses II built six temples, including Abu Simbel, whose image of his face cut into the rocky sides of the Nile Valley may have inspired the vast depictions of American presidents at Mount Rushmore.

The king, who kept a harem of 100 women and had more than 100 children, dedicated Abu Simbel’s smaller temple to his favourite queen, Nefertari. His building projects included the Great Hypostyle Hall, with its roof supported by columns, at Thebes – part of modern-day Luxor – and his own funerary temple, known as the Ramesseum, across the Nile from Luxor. He also built a city – Per Ramessu, also known as Pi-Ramesses – north-east of Cairo where he lived surrounded by gardens and orchards.

Experts say he understood that visibility was central to the success of his reign, and built bombastic structures to project his strength as a leader.

He founded a new capital, Piramesse and built temples throughout Egypt and Nubia. The most famous of these buildings is the Abu Simbel, cut into rock, and ‘the Ramesseum’ – his mortuary temple at Thebes.

The tomb of his principal wife, Nefertari, is one of the best preserved royal tombs and the resting place of some of his sons has recently been uncovered in the Valley of the Kings.

Rameses II was lived to about 90. He was originally buried in the Valley of the Kings but his mummy, which has the face of an old man with a long, narrow face, striking nose and large jaw, was moved to the nearby Deir el-Bahari to thwart looters. Still with its hair, some skin and teeth It was rediscovered in 1881 and is kept in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum.Nine subsequent pharaohs took the name Rameses, as it was seen as an honour to be descended from him

***

Fox News

Rabbit hole leads to incredible 700-year-old Knights Templar cave complex

Published March 07, 2017 FoxNews.com

A font in the caves (MICHAEL SCOTT/CATERS NEWS)

A rabbit hole in the UK conceals the entrance to an incredible cave complex linked to the mysterious Knights Templar.

New photos show the remarkable Caynton Caves network, which looks like something out of the movie “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” The shadowy Knights Templar order is said to have used the caves.

The Sun reports that the caves are hidden beneath a farmer’s field in Shropshire. The site was visited by photographer Michael Scott after he saw a video of the caves online. “I traipsed over a field to find it, but if you didn’t know it was there you would just walk right past it,” Scott said.

Once inside, Scott encountered arches, walkways, and carved niches. He described the caves as cramped, noting that anyone nearing six-feet tall has to bend down inside the complex. “I had to crouch down and once I was in it was completely silent,” he said. “There were a few spiders in there but that was it.

Said to be 700 years old, the caves have been long been linked to the Knights Templar – a Catholic military order that played a key role during the Crusades. Named after Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, where the order was based, the order was founded in 1119 protect pilgrims visiting the Holy Land.

With the loss of the Holy Land, the Templars’ military influence waned, although they still held great economic sway in medieval Europe. In 1307 the French King Philip IV, who wanted to wipe out his debts to the order, launched a plot to bring the Knights Templar down. Many Templars were arrested on charges including heresy and dozens were later burned at the stake.

Pope Clement V disbanded the order in 1312.

The caves had been closed for a number of years before Scott’s visit. Black magic ceremonies reportedly forced the owners to seal up the entrance to the caves in 2012.

While some people believe the caves are 700 years old, others think that the complex was carved out by followers of the Templars in the 17th century.

***

RT

‘Ghosts’ drive Brazil’s president out of palace residence

Published time: 12 Mar, 2017 16:47his Sharing Buttons

Brazil’s president, Michel Temer, left his official residence, the Alvorada palace, just ten days after moving in with his family due to “bad vibes,” a Brazilian weekly reported.

Michel Temer, first lady Marcela, and their seven-year-old son, Michelzinho, abandoned the lavish Alvorada palace, opting for the smaller vice presidential residence, the Palace of Jaburu, located down the road.

“I felt something strange there. I wasn’t able to sleep right from the first night. The energy wasn’t good,” the president reportedly told Veja magazine.

“Marcela felt the same thing. Only Michelzinho, who went running from one end to the other, liked it. We even started to wonder, could there be ghosts?” Temer joked.

The first lady reportedly even invited a priest to rid the family’s new home of the “bad spirits.”

A few minor changes had been made to the palace, specifically to accommodate the president and his family. Since little Michelzinho is the first child to live in the Alvorada palace since the 1960s, some safety precautions needed to be taken, including installing a new protective screen on the upper floor balcony, which cost some $6,000. The Alvorada, translated as dawn, was designed by famous architect Oscar Niemeyer. The residence has a lot to offer, including a pool, a helipad, a vast lawn, a football field, and its own chapel.

Despite all of the lavish amenities, the palace did not feel welcoming. “The president did not like it, it felt very cold,” one of the president’s aides told Veja magazine on condition of anonymity, saying that the Jaburu Palace, where the Temer family had been living since 2011, “looks much more like an ordinary house.”

Temer took office last August, replacing Dilma Rouseff, who was ousted in an impeachment vote prompted by a massive corruption scandal involving Brazil’s state-owned oil giant, Petrobras. No one has yet taken the vice-presidential seat, leaving the smaller palace available to Temer.

***

The Telegraph

Dead could be brought 'back to life' in groundbreaking project

Scientists believe that a combination of therapies could stimulate regeneration CREDIT: GETTY

Sarah Knapton, science editor

3 MAY 2016 • 12:15PM

A groundbreaking trial to see if it is possible to regenerate the brains of dead people, has won approval from health watchdogs.

Indian specialist Dr Himanshu Bansal, working with Biotech companies Revita Life Sciences and Bioquark Inc, has been granted ethical permission to recruit 20 patients who have been declared clinically dead from a traumatic brain injury, to test whether parts of their central nervous system can be brought back to life.

Scientists will use a combination of therapies, which include injecting the brain with stem cells and a cocktail of peptides, as well as deploying lasers and nerve stimulation techniques which have been shown to bring patients out of comas.

The trial participants will have been certified dead and only kept alive through life support. They will be monitored for several months using brain imaging equipment to look for signs of regeneration, particularly in the upper spinal cord - the lowest region of the brain stem which controls independent breathing and heartbeat.

The team believes that the brain stem cells may be able to erase their history and re-start life again, based on their surrounding tissue – a process seen in the animal kingdom in creatures like salamanders who can regrow entire limbs.

Dr Ira Pastor, the CEO of Bioquark Inc. said: “This represents the first trial of its kind and another step towards the eventual reversal of death in our lifetime.

“We just received approval for our first 20 subjects and we hope to start recruiting patients immediately from this first site – we are working with the hospital now to identify families where there may be a religious or medical barrier to organ donation.

"To undertake such a complex initiative, we are combining biologic regenerative medicine tools with other existing medical devices typically used for stimulation of the central nervous system, in patients with other severe disorders of consciousness.

“We hope to see results within the first two to three months."

The ReAnima Project has just received approval in India, and the team plans to start recruiting patients immediately.

The first stage, named 'First In Human Neuro-Regeneration & Neuro-Reanimation' will be a non-randomised, single group 'proof of concept' and will take place at Anupam Hospital in Rudrapur, Uttarakhand India and is being led by Dr Himanshu Bansal of Revita Life Sciences.

Dr Bansal said he had already had some success with two patients in the Gulf and Europe.

"We have even offered the same protocol to a couple of brain dead subjects in Gulf and Europe," added Dr Bansal.

" They are still in minimal conscious state but who knows that they may come out and have reasonable conscious useful human life.

"We are now trying to create a definitive study in 20 subjects and prove that the brain death is reversible. This will open the door for future research and especially for people who lose their dear ones suddenly."

The peptides will be administered into the spinal cord daily via a pump, with the stem cells given bi-weekly, over the course of a 6 week period.

Dr Pastor added: "It is a long term vision of ours that a full recovery in such patients is a possibility, although that is not the focus of this first study – but it is a bridge to that eventuality."

Brain stem death is when a person no longer has any brain stem functions, and has permanently lost the potential for consciousness and the capacity to breathe.

A person is confirmed as being dead when their brain stem function is permanently lost.

However, although brain dead humans are technically no longer alive, their bodies can often still circulate blood, digest food, excrete waste, balance hormones, grow, sexually mature, heal wounds, spike a fever, and gestate and deliver a baby.

Recent studies have also suggested that some electrical activity and blood flow continues after brain cell death, just not enough to allow for the whole body to function.

And while human beings lack substantial regenerative capabilities in the central nervous system, many non-human species, such as amphibians and certain fish, can repair, regenerate and remodel substantial portions of their brain and brain stem even after critical life-threatening trauma.

“Through our study, we will gain unique insights into the state of human brain death, which will have important connections to future therapeutic development for other severe disorders of consciousness, such as coma, and the vegetative and minimally conscious states, as well as a range of degenerative CNS conditions, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease,” added Dr Sergei Paylian, Founder, President, and Chief Science Officer of Bioquark Inc.

Commenting on the trial, Dr Dean Burnett, a neuroscientist at the Cardiff University’s Centre for Medical Education said: “While there have been numerous demonstrations in recent years that the human brain and nervous system may not be as fixed and irreparable as is typically assumed, the idea that brain death could be easily reversed seems very far-fetched, given our current abilities and understanding of neuroscience.

“Saving individual parts might be helpful but it's a long way from resurrecting a whole working brain, in a functional, undamaged state.”

***

PHYS ORG

Your brain is unique – here's how it could be used as the ultimate security password

March 10, 2017 by Palaniappan Ramaswamy, The Conversation

Think to log in, please. Credit: Syda Productions/Shutterstock

Biometrics – technology that can recognise individuals based on physical and behavioural traits such as their faces, voices or fingerprints – are becoming increasingly important to combat financial fraud and security threats. This is because traditional approaches, such as those based on PIN numbers or passwords, are proving too easily compromised. For example, Barclays has introduced TouchID, whereby customers can log onto internet banking using fingerprint scanners on mobile phones.

However, this is not foolproof either – it is possible to forge such biometrics. Fingers can after all be chopped off and placed by impostors to gain fraudulent access. It has also been shown that prints lifted from glass using cellophane tape can be used with gelatine to create fake prints. So there is a real need to come up with more advanced biometrics that are difficult or impossible to forge. And a promising alternative is the brain.

Emerging biometric technology based on the electrical activity of the brain have indeed shown potential to be fraud resistant. Over the years, a number of research studies have found that "brainprints" (readings of how the brain reacts to certain words or tasks) are unique to individuals as each person's brain is wired to think differently. In fact, the brain can be used to identify someone from a pool of 102 users with more than 98% accuracy at the moment, which is very close to that of fingerprints (99.8% accuracy).

More recently, this has been confirmed by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures brain activity by tracking changes in blood flow. A study using fMRI data from the Human Connectome Project was able to recognise individuals with up to 99% accuracy when performing certain mental tasks such as relaxing, listening to a story, computing maths, looking at emotional faces or imagining moving parts of their body.

However, the cost and difficulty of using fMRI (you have to lie very still in the scanner for a fairly long time) means it is clearly not practical for everyday biometric authentication. For that reason, researchers have instead looked at electroencephalography (EEG), which uses electrodes to track and record brain-wave patterns. But this is also cumbersome – who would be willing to wear a cap of gel-based electrodes just to log in to their computer? Hence, the technology has remained in the realm of science fiction for some time.

Recently, technological advances in recording EEG from the ear using electrodes placed on the surface of standard earphones have provided a solution – no gel needed. It is not easy though – EEG is very "noisy" since the brain is always actively processing different information. But advanced signal-processing approaches have recently been able to reduce the noisy components, albeit this typically requires powerful computing. This is, however, becoming less of a problem now that mobile-phone processing power is growing rapidly – it should in theory be possible to perform all the required processing on a smart phone.

So why aren't brainprints everywhere already? One downside is that it can't be used by twins – they have near-identical EEG patterns. But the main problem is the lack of stability of brainprints over time.

It seems that it is not enough to just have an EEG done once – occasional re-enrolment (say, monthly) is necessary. This is because the brain connections exhibit plastic behaviour (they change with experience) and thought processes in the brain change over time. However, in ongoing work at the University of Kent, we have shown that specific tones (which can be played using earphones) can be used to minimise these changes. It is not yet clear exactly how these tones affect the brain but we speculate that they may allow the brain to calm down, allowing more focused activity.

Two-factor authentication is now a norm for many banking transactions, for example using a password and an additional code sent to the phone. Soon, banks in New York may have to comply with multi-factor authentication protocol proposed by the New York State Department of Financial Services, whereby at least three authentication mechanisms are used for enhanced security by personnel accessing internal systems with privileged access or to support functions including remote access.

While fingerprints and voice recognition are possibilities, thought-based biometric technology is more apt to be used as an add-on to meet this new cybersecurity regulation. The brain biometric template could even be updated for a different mental activity should there be a security breach on the stored template (unlike a fingerprint biometric which remains for life and cannot be replaced once compromised).

Brainprints can also be used to generate passwords that can replace conventional alphanumeric passwords or PINs in ATM machines to withdraw cash. For example, rather than keying in the PIN, one would connect earphones and be shown a series of PIN numbers on the ATM screen. Brain patterns would change when the correct PIN number showed up – activating the transaction. By doing so, one does not have to worry about others looking over the shoulder to steal the PIN. Moreover, under coerced situations, brainprints will not work due to the stress – making them even more fraud resistant.

Given that it is difficult to copy another person's exact thought process, the technology is certainly advantageous. Considering the advancement in the technology, we will likely see uptake of biometric applications based on brainprints soon – especially as part of multi-factor system for enhanced authentication. So don't be surprised to see EEG earphones appearing in your post from the bank shortly.

***

Futurism

Self-Replicating “DNA Computers” Are Set to Change Everything

IN BRIEF

• DNA computers can create more storage as-needed through self-replication, and their computing potential is almost unfathomable.

• Scientists know how to code information into DNA, but it costs $12,500 to code a single megabyte of information.

DNA: THE BLUEPRINT OF COMPUTERS?

Computers have without a doubt revolutionized modern society. They’re everywhere: our offices and homes, our pockets — even in our kitchen appliances. As for the next place computer technology could be headed, you already have the basic component: your DNA. It sounds strange, but researchers at the University of Manchester are working on turning strands of DNA into the next basis for computing.

Scientists have actually created a DNA-based computing device that “grows as it computes.” While our current computers have a finite capacity for computations, DNA computers could be designed to self-replicate, making them able to create more storage as-needed. Computers today have gradually worked up to being able to hold a few terabytes — but DNA computing can work at 100 billion terabytes. To top it off, all of that storage is guaranteed with just one gram of DNA. While that’s impressive enough on its own, storage isn’t the only benefit a DNA computer can provide.

With a self-replicating computer, there’s also the advantage of instantaneous computing power. In an interview with Popular Mechanics, lead researcher Professor Ross D King illustrated a maze with two paths — one leading left and the other leading right. He explained that current “Electronic computers need to choose which path to follow first.” On the other hand, a DNA computer “doesn’t need to choose, for it can replicate itself and follow both paths at the same time, thus finding the answer faster.”

Using Your DNA as a Hard Drive

WHAT’S THE CATCH?

While there are pioneering companies and individuals working on perfecting the system, at the moment coding just 1 megabyte of information into DNA costs $12,500. Most information we own contains thousands of megabytes, making encoding information a particularly expensive endeavor to undertake.

However, cost is currently the only drawback to the operation. DNA is not only the most reliable resource to store information, but it’s also the best medium to copy information. Just as sequencing a genome dropped from $2.7 billion to a low of $280, experts hope to see a similar trend in encoding computing information in DNA.

References: Engadget, European Bioinformatics Institute , Futurism

allnewspipeline.com

Sleepwalking Towards Armageddon: The Nightmare Continues Six Years Later While The Mainstream Media Remains Silent

- And Is A Massive 'Radioactive Snowstorm' About To Strike 50 Million Americans?

'Therefore shall the land mourn, and every one that dwelleth therein shall languish, with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven; yea, the fishes of the sea also shall be taken away.' Hosea 4:3

Back on March 11th of 2011, our world changed forever for those of us living in the Northern Hemisphere though most still do not know it. Whether via an 'act of nature' or an 'act of HAARP', the earthquake and resultant tidal wave that struck Fukushima, Japan on that day left a path of death and destruction that has stretched far beyond that island nation.

As nuclear expert Dr. Helen Caldicott recently stated of Fukushima, "highly radioactive water is still pouring into the ocean every day and will likely continue doing so until the end of time". Calling the hopes of cleaning up the mess that's been made 'a fantasy', the stories and videos we examine in this ANP story prove to us we're sleepwalking towards extinction. The 'mass animal deaths' painstakingly kept track of by End Times Prophecy continue with at least '117 known mass death events' in 43 countries in 2017 alone.

According to End Times Prophecy, the year 2016 brought 556 KNOWN 'mass death events' spread over 81 countries. In 2015 there were 828 known 'mass death events' spread over 96 countries. In 2014 there were 651 known 'mass death events' spread over 76 countries. In 2013 there were 798 known mass death events in 93 countries. In 2012 there were 465 'mass death events' documented across 67 countries while in 2011, the year of the disaster, hundreds of mass death events also happened across the planet.

Dr. Caldicott, author of the book "Sleepwalking To Armageddon", also warns us that if another massive earthquake over 7.0 magnitude strikes Fukushima, we could witness not only the 'end of Japan' but the need for parts of the Northern hemisphere to be evacuated after recent photos of Fukushima #2 showed structural damage and a massive hole.

As Dane Wigington over at his Geoengineering Watch Blog recently reported,"the triple meltdown nuclear volcanoes at Fukushima continue to dump unimaginable amounts of radiation into the atmosphere and oceans". If the mainstream media doesn't report upon the mass deaths due to Fukushima and this still unfolding tragedy, does that mean it never happened?

As we learn in this brand new story from ENENews, every day since the tragedy now over 6 years ago, the Pacific Ocean has been completely pummeled while the mainstream media has nearly completely ignored the death and destruction that radiation from Fukushima has brought to the Pacific Ocean and the West coast of America.

As we hear in the 1st video below featuring nuclear activist Kevin Kamps, the government of Japan is now forcing some residents of Fukushima to move back into their homes or they'll lose their compensation for suffering through the disaster. Mothers who are concerned about the health of their children are being accused by the Japanese government of suffering from 'radiophobia' - the government of Japan is telling them that "it's all in their heads".

According to a new study reported in Science Mag, it's now safe for Fukushima residents to return to their radioactively contaminated homes. Later in March, 6 years after the catastrophe, nearly 52,000 evacuees from Fukushima will be invited to go back to the Fukushima prefecture. We hear directly from one 'refugee' from Fukushima who tells us that she'll never be going back as her home was completely contaminated. Japanese activist Setsuko Kida, who lost everything but her life to radioactive poisons from the Fukushima meltdown, shares with us how she overcame that very real tragedy and became an advocate for radiation refugee rights.

So, why is the Japanese government so eager to get residents of Fukushima to move back into their radioactively poisoned homes? Might the upcoming 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Japan have anything to do with that ludicrous decision? Please keep in mind that more than 30 years after Chernobyl, it remains a ghost town.

As the previously cited recent story from ENENews that Steve Quayle linked to on March 10th reports, according to Dr. Caldicott after a recent conversation with nuclear engineer Arnie Gunderson:

The robot did pick up structural damage to the building of Unit 2, which means it makes it unstable should there be another earthquake greater than 7 on the Richter scale — which then means the building could collapse, which then means that would collapse onto the molten core, and also with the spent fuel rods which are incredibly radioactive in the spent fuel pool, they would go down as well.

A huge amount of radiation would be released, such that it would be the end of Japan and certainly, very much radioactive fallout in the Northern Hemisphere such that I would probably get my family from Boston to come straight away to Australia.”

In fact, the Japanese government has increased allowable radiation exposure more than 20X since the meltdown. Hence, Kamps warns us in the 1st video below, radioactive food from Japan is certainly being sold not only in Japan but America and elsewhere across the world as well. Why would government's raise the safety level of radiation in foods unless they KNEW that radiation was in our foods?

As Mike Adams over at Natural News reported back in February, the mainstream media blackout over “unimaginable” radiation levels detected at Fukushima is akin to a suicide death wish.

We are all trapped in a planet-wide SUICIDE CULT run by incompetent morons.

It is at moments like this that I seriously feel like humanity has become a planet-wide suicide cult run by incompetent morons. If they all want to drink the Kool-Aid, that’s their choice, but I would prefer they don’t take me with them. For my part, I would actually like to live on a planet that isn’t contaminated and condemned by plutonium-239, cesium-137 and strontium-90.

According to the insanely stupid mainstream media, that somehow makes me crazy. But you and I both know that conforming to the stupidity of the delusional masses has never been a measure of sanity.

Back on February 26th we reported on ANP about a mysterious phenomenon scientists were calling 'radiation clouds' that may pose health risks to airline passengers and cause pilots to detect and avoid them in the future. As we reported then, Steve Quayle had himself recently flown through such a cloud as he documented in this video. We also reported then there was evidence that radioactive rain from Fukushima was falling on America. If that warning is true, are the large population hubs along the East coast of America and 50 million Americans about to be thrashed by a massive, 'radioactive snowstorm'?

On March 4th we reported we were watching a slow-motion disaster movie unfolding before our eyes with mass animal deaths continuing unabated while the mainstream media continued to remain silent. The silence from the MSM not only remains but has become deafening. With the Japanese government now forcing Fukushima residents to move back into a radioactive wasteland, we get more evidence we'll NEVER get truth from government.

And while a complete investigation of the radioactive fallout at Fukushima remains impossible due to one robot after another 'dying', we see in this brand new story from ENENews why we should all be concerned about Fukushima as fish leaking pus and covered in lesions have been found all up and down the US West Coast according to fishermen, deformed, starving and dying. But of course, if the msm doesn't report upon it, it's just 'fake news', right? Just ask the fish and sea life.

ENENEWS

Nuclear Engineer: Fukushima is “worst industrial cataclysm in history of world… As close to hell as I can imagine” — Melted fuel ‘disappeared’ — Contamination will go on for hundreds of thousands of years… “No one knows when it’ll end” — Gov’t perpetrating ongoing cover-up

#

Report: Nuclear fuel still burning through bottom of Fukushima plant? — Expert: Corium likely melted into earth… Will pour highly radioactive waste into ocean “for rest of time” — NYTimes: Fuel may never be removed, reactors to be entombed like Chernobyl

#

Expert warns of collapse at Fukushima reactor: “It would be the end of Japan”… New photos show serious structural damage at Unit 2… “It’s a fantasy” that they can decommission plant — AP: Melted fuel has broken pieces of structure in containment vessel

***

ENENews

Expert warns of collapse at Fukushima reactor: “It would be the end of Japan”… New photos show serious structural damage at Unit 2… “It’s a fantasy” that they can decommission plant — AP: Melted fuel has broken pieces of structure in containment vessel

Published: March 10th, 2017 at 1:44 pm ET

Interview with Dr. Helen Caldicott on Nuclear Hotseat hosted by Libbe HaLevy, Feb 22, 2017 (emphasis added):

• Dr. Caldicott: “Those incredibly high measurements [of radioactivity recently detected in Fukushima Daiichi's Reactor No. 2 containment vessel] mean, I think almost certainly, that they will never be able to clean it up or decommission it… Talk about decommissioning and cleaning it up in 100 years… I think it’s a fantasy.”

• Host: “What was also revealed in these new photos is what appears to be a hole in a grate at the bottom of the Unit 2 reactor containment vessel. It’s variously been described as one meter or two meters in diameter. What does that mean?”

• Dr. Caldicott: … “I spoke to Arnie Gundersen, who’s a nuclear engineer, and he said that the robot did pick up structural damage to the building of Unit 2, which means it makes it unstable should there be another earthquake greater than 7 on the Richter scale — which then means the building could collapse, which then means that would collapse onto the molten core, and also with the spent fuel rods which are incredibly radioactive in the spent fuel pool, they would go down as well. A huge amount of radiation would be released, such that it would be the end of Japan and certainly, very much radioactive fallout in the Northern Hemisphere such that I would probably get my family from Boston to come straight away to Australia.”

Yomiuri Shimbun, Mar 7, 2017: On the floor under the pressure vessel of the [No. 2] reactor, a large hole was discovered. It is believed to have been created when nuclear fuel fell down.

AP, Mar 2, 2017: A robot sent inside the Unit 2 containment vessel last month could not reach as close to the core area as was hoped for because it was blocked by deposits, believed to be a mixture of melted fuel and broken pieces of structures inside… [TEPCO] needs to know the melted fuel’s exact location as well as structural damage in each of the three wrecked reactors… Earlier probes have suggested worse-than-anticipated challenges… “We should think out of the box so we can examine the bottom of the core and how melted fuel debris spread out,” [TEPCO's Naohiro] Masuda told reporters… [E]xperts are still trying to figure out a way to access the badly damaged Unit 3. TEPCO is struggling with the plant’s decommissioning.

***

Freedom’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose ...

- Kris Kristofferson

By J. Speer-Williams

“Violence is the last refuse of the incompetent.” Isaac Asimov

Their game is relentless agitation, of the sort that disrupts society for most everyone.

There are two kinds of spirits that pass on to the next world: those who are truly free and those who suffer over their material losses. One is ready for whatever comes its way, and the other is already lost, lost in a dark past it cannot recover.

The lost souls (those who had souls) lived their mortal lives for themselves with little or no empathy for others.

Unfortunately, it is estimated that about twenty percent of the souls in America are the lost ones who derive great pleasure from the disruption and destruction of others, with about one percent of those souls funding and directing the others toward mayhem.

Then there are the snow akes of college campuses, who are largely ignorant, but young and innocent.

The one percenters, who operate the Deep States* of the world are mostly psychopaths) who think they must cause human misery and death in order to survive.

Deep States are largely composed of intelligence agencies and are unelected and unaccountable to the electorate of a nation. Deep States go untouched by the rule of law; but are ruled by beings without souls. These other-worldly denizens comprise a small fraction of one percent of our worlds’ population.

There is a supreme Deep State, which is international and includes all countries except Russia, Iran, and so far Syria. Is there any wonder why the those three countries have been so demonized by the Western press?

The one percenters are psychopaths, who can pretend to be normal, can be

found in abundance in the boardrooms of large banks, mega-corporations, and in high-level governmental positions. *

Psychopaths are not limited to high- level positions, however, and can be found in many families.

Under the direction of the Deep State, these psychopaths direct the negative twenty percenters, and the snow akes, to invade and infect our streets and college campuses. From there, they move inexhaustibly from one issue to the next, with concocted objections. Never do they have the intention of resolution. Chaos is their aim – all under the pretense of combating hate with love.

Their subversion is not mere political expediency, clothed in tolerance and love, but the long-term preplanned undermining of any logical or prudent actions by their ruling government.

They are simply iconoclasts, people who attack cherished beliefs and institutions without ever knowing why.

Their most willing, effective, but ignorant partners in this clandestine operation are the mainstream media and academia, with our elected leaders being blackmailed or bribed to go along or be unseated.

Their game is relentless agitation, of the sort that disrupts society for most everyone. Diplomacy and compromise are not to be used, as resolution is not their goal – their aim is widespread chaos.

These insurgents are not builders; they are the destroyers of beauty, the annihilators of rationality, and the promoters of the profane. And sadly, they are the uneducated as to what is in our best national interests.

Revolutionaries against tyrannies are admirable. The renegades we have on our streets today, however, are far from commendable, because they are rebelling against Logos. *

Logos is a Greek word meaning logic, divine reason, creative order, and perhaps the mind of God. Research E. Michael Jones for a full explication of Logos.

Today’s revolutionaries are trying to do away with our workable Christian mores, customs, and traditions of the past. Political correctness is one of the tools being used by the rioters to make criminals out of those who exercise their First Amendment rights, while abusing those rights themselves. Their efforts, however, would amount to nothing without the constant ow of canards and fake news from the corporately owned and controlled media, which works to enforce all forms of political correctness.

We are left to surmise that political correctness sprang from the public conscience of the masses.

This is an uneducated guesstimate and could not be more incorrect: all forms of political correctness were created by the corporately owned tax-free think tanks of the United States and Europe to disenfranchise man. *

Foremost of these think tanks is the Tavistock Institute in Great Britain, with hundreds of allied organizations in America and Europe – all dedicated to formulating our thoughts and opinions along self-destructive lines.

Tavistock and its a liates (such as the Rand Corporation) all have a principal goal: to eliminate individual emotional strengths. Their success has rendered many Americans defenseless with no free will, and all but incapable of resisting the ruling oligarchs of our county.

Individuality is to be done away with, rst by peer pressure, then by laws, and nally with forced re-education.

Still, the Tavistock is not a dictatorship; the nancial oligarchs who fund and control the Institute are the dictators. Does the Rothschild crime family come to mind? You know, the ones who have shaped the cultural, economic, political, moral, and spiritual decline of America.

They are the ones who control the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, and all the so-called “free” trade deals Presidents Clinton and Obama opted for.

Nevertheless, the Institute, played its role in bringing about the catastrophic blood baths of WWI, WWII, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, the Korean War, the Cold War, Vietnam, and the Serbian, Iraqi, Afghani, and Syrian wars.

The Tavistock is a six billion dollar network of foundations: 10 institutions, 400 subsidiaries, and 3,000 think tanks and study groups. The Institute is the nerve center of a global apparatus that relentlessly attacks our individual and collective psyche through television, advertising, propaganda, psyops, social engineering, and covert psychological warfare.

In the United States, the Institute employs full-spectrum dominance with their control over Microsoft, IBM, CNN, CBS, ABC, AT&T, Westinghouse, ACORN, Shell, Mobil, Exxon, DuPont, Eli-Lilly, Nestle, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Bechtel, Halliburton, Hewlett Packard, the US Army/Navy/Air Force, US Civil Service Commission, US Post O ce, US Department of Defense, US State Department, all American intelligence agencies, the pharmaceutical/medical monopolies, and others.

Their secret plan is to signi cantly reduce the population of mankind by means of diseases, medicines, vaccines, drugs, foods, air/soil/water, plagues, famines, and wars.

Long ago, the Institute discovered man’s breaking point, which will be fully exploited on what is left of humanity: our boiling point comes when nothing works or makes sense.

Two current worldwide nonsensical Tavistock projects being pushed by the United Nations and the World Health Organization are the deadly Codex Alimentarius and Agenda 21 (updated to 2030 Agenda).

Codex Alimentarius is the proposed worldwide agreement that seeks to make all vitamins and minerals require a doctor’s prescription, all with daily allowances far below what would be therapeutic.

2030 Agenda seeks to make fty percent of the American landscape o limits to its citizens. Private vehicles are to be limited with most of the American public living in “stack-n-pack” high- rises along railroad tracks.

To ensure multiculturalism, Muslims, sub-Saharan Africans, and possible terrorists will be placed with White families in units too small for one person.

As John Lennon said ... “Our society is run by insane people ...”

The major attack point of these think tanks has been individuality and the traditional family unit; next comes the degradation of sexual ethics.

Once an individual sexually degrades themself (with enough brief and/or perverted sexual encounters) they become adrift emotionally, with no stabilizing in uences in their lives. This whole process is often abetted with pornography and illegal drugs, along with the constant media mantra of ... Society has victimized you in one form or another.

Many Americans have purposely been made to believe they are victims, as when one professes victimhood, they are helpless to help themselves.

Soon, the drug-addled and sexually crazed can be used as foot soldiers to carry placards and chant mindless slogans, none of which could ever be defended in a civilized or educated debate.

Many of the rioting college students are so smart they will leave school with worthless degrees and struggle for the rest of their lives deep in debt. Some of these students will run up their college debt by borrowing more money from the government to spend in Florida over Spring Break. *

The government will lend untold amounts of taxpayers’ money (money with usurious interest rates attached that in most case will never be paid back) for worthless degrees, but they make few

loans to young people to attend trade schools.

Which do we need more, plumbers or sociologists? Which career path has the most job availabilities, carpentry or community organizing? Electricians or Racial Studies majors? Mechanics or Theater Majors? Stone masons or the thousands who unk out of college, but are left deeply in debt?

Certainly, the Tavistock, or one of their hundreds of think tanks, was behind the insidious push to indebt so many young Americans – perhaps for the rest of their lives.

Where are the war protesters of the ‘60s?

Under the control of the banking oligarchs, the Tavistock Institution, (and its allied think tanks), comes up with the ideas to suppress mankind, which are then passed on to the CIA and other intelligence agencies to enforce. From there the corporate media has the job of selling these self-defeating concepts to the general public.

Even after Wikileaks released over 8,700 CIA documents that explained how that agency has been hacking and spying on all of us, no demonstrations have taken place.

These dystopian invasions of our once cherished privacy have today not only become commonplace, they will likely expand to become ever more intrusive, disturbing, and omnipresent.

While the CIA hacks into our phones, computers, smart phones, routers, television sets, and even our vehicles, there is little to no television coverage of this governmental crime. *

We do, however, have politicians who cry for Julian Assange’s hide, calling him a traitor. The traitors, my friends, are those in Congress and in the American intelligence agencies.

It should be clear that the protests and demonstrations the media covers so well, today, are all contrived events, populated by those who have no real understanding of what they or their friends are involved with. People such as these have no idea of how they have been forged and used by the funders and controllers of hundreds of think tanks, both in the United States and Europe.

These mental and emotional juveniles are psychological shock troops used to alter societal thinking. They scream for the insane, the outrageous, and we settle for a more tame form of their horrendous demands. In this fashion individuals, families, societies, and whole nations degenerate rapidly.

Personal test: Can you think of something you accept today as normal, which you would have considered as ridiculous seven, ve, or just three years ago?

How about men marrying men, or women marrying women, or a couple of the same gender being allowed to adopt children?

How about men being allowed to use public restrooms strictly meant and designed for women?

If you think I’m being homophobic by asking such “bigoted” questions, I would respectfully suggest you may have been in uenced in your thinking by the covert machinations of the infamous foreign institute known as the Tavistock.

If you have followed the controlled mainstream media for the last few years, you probably think that the laws denying men, who identity as women, the use of women’s public bathrooms to be discriminating.

Additionally, you likely think that the transgender population of America is 5%, or 10%, or perhaps 15% and is a pressing social problem. Not so.

In a 2011 survey conducted by the Williams Institute of UCLA, ninety-nine point seven percent of Americans are not transgendered. *

*With the control Tavistock has over US academic and media resources, expect that 99.7 percent to be falsi ed by an decrease of ve to ten points or more.

Crime against humanity

The mindless street rioters who set cars on re, break windows, and steal goods have all been handicapped by years of mandatory public schooling, wherein they were conditioned as to what to think, rather than how to think.

Today’s campus and street whiners are snow akes who were denied an accurate high school class in Civics, American History, basic math, or English.

Our country does not merely su er with substandard education, but with child abuse, with law-abiding property holders forced to pay for those crimes against humanity.

The Tavis-stalkers of the Tavistock want us all to expire quietly or become comfortably numb, dumb, and without recourse.

Do you feel their warmth? Do you love your servitude? If so, you will languish for your lost materiality once you pass from this world.

Remember ...

Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.

J. Speer-Williams

Jsw4@mac.com

***

Constitution

New York About to Eliminate Test Meant to See if Teachers Can Read… because RAAAACISM!

By Warner Todd Huston March 13, 2017

There would have been a day when a story saying that teachers were about to be excused from requirements that they be able to read just to avoid charges of racism would have been an entry in an issue of the National Lampoon or even on TheOnion.com. But today, in this day of truly insane liberalism, the idea that liberals don’t care if teachers can read just to avoid charges of racism in hiring is… well, sadly, it’s not even a little surprising.

New York’s Board of Regents is expected to adopt the new recommendation of an education standards task force espousing that the state dump a teacher candidate literacy exam known as the Academic Literacy Skills Test, according to ABC News.

Sadly, that is where we are in the extreme, left-wing state of New York where state education officials are actually contemplating eliminating a reading test to determine if applicants applying for teaching positions can read at sufficient levels.

So, why would a state board of education want to hire teachers too ill-educated to be a teacher? Why would a state want to put teachers in the classroom who can’t read? Simple, it’s all to satisfy the left’s fanatical, self-destructive obsession of seeing racism in every single aspect of life.

According to ABC News, supporters of the recommendations say that eliminating the testing wouldn’t change the “high standards” required for teaching candidates.

“We want high standards, without a doubt. Not every given test is going to get us there,” said Leslie Soodak, a professor of education at Pace University who was part of the task force that looked at the tests.

Detractors of the test claim it is all about racism because fewer African American and Hispanic candidates pass the literacy tests compared to whites. According to the state, 46 percent of Hispanic candidates and only 41 percent of blacks pass the test. That compares to the 64 percent of white candidates who pass. Their conclusion is unsurprising: the test is racist.

It couldn’t be that our educational system is so bad that even people smart enough to qualify as a teacher can’t read. No, it HAS to be that the test is racist.

Even more absurd, New York administrators don’t want to hire those evil white people. “Having a white workforce really doesn’t match our student body anymore,” the racist Soodak admitted.

But, yeah, it’s all about the test.

No ad requested because of display:none on the adsbygoogle tag

Here is the stupidity as reported by ABC…

Kate Walsh, the president of National Council on Teacher Quality, which pushes for higher standards for teachers, said that blacks and Latinos don’t score as well as whites on the literacy test because of factors like poverty and the legacy of racism.

“There’s not a test in the country that doesn’t have disproportionate performance on the part of blacks and Latinos,” Walsh said.

She is telling you that reading is racist.

Let that sink in.

These liberals are seriously telling you that minorities shouldn’t be expected to be able to read because reading is for evil, racist white people.

So, because no minority should be expected to be able to read, these liberals are saying that they have no problem with teachers who also cannot read at sufficient levels.

ABC goes on to reveal one of the questions.

A practice test available for $20 on the New York State Education Department website features John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address as one of the reading passages and asks questions like this one: “In which excerpt from the passage do Kennedy’s word choices most clearly establish a tone of resolve?”

This test is meant to see if an applicant can read at a 12th-grade level — something a high schooler is supposed to be able to comprehend.

ABC’s story goes on to quote several more people denigrating the test, most of whom apparently could not pass it. The report also says that the literacy test does not cover things that aren’t covered in other tests, so it is unnecessary, they claim.

Sadly, this is all just another example of the liberal establishment dumbing down our educational system.

Before we go further, we have to recognize that everything of the American educational system of yore was not perfect and we can’t say that every last part of today’s education is a liberal bastardization of yesterday educational system. There were a lot of problems early in the 1900s in American education. It was often uneven for females and minorities, and standards for teachers weren’t exactly ideal from one state to the next.

Still, despite the failings of the education system of a country that was often thought of as a third world nation prior to World War Two — that would be America, folks — there is no doubt at all that students in “the good old days” were expected to know far, far more than students are today.

A perfect example of this fact turned up in 2013 at a county historical society in rural Kentucky. A local resident gave the organization a copy of a test given to eighth graders in 1912. Any look at this hundred-year-old test will reveal just how incredibly hard that test would be for today’s students, even if similar questions for today’s current events were used as the basis of some of the questions that appeared on the 1912 test.

Education has been failing since the 1960s when the far left finally finished invading and taking over America’s educational system from kindergarten to each school board, all the way to the Department of Education in Washington, and every grade school, high school, and college in between. This has all gotten worse as the power of the teachers union has grown.

Many on left insist that we don’t put enough money into education. This is total BS. America spends more per student than nearly every single nation on the planet but a few. The U.S. spends between $12,000 to $15,000 per student to get a child out to college. Countries including Norway and Switzerland spend a bit more, but 95 percent of the world’s nations spend far less.

So, what has this spending given us? Literacy rates at below the standards of the industrialized world. And falling.

Nice going, liberals. Nice going.

***

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INDEPENDENT

Turkey threatens severe retaliation against the Netherlands as diplomatic crisis escalates

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte condemns 'bizarre, irresponsible and unacceptable' behaviour

Kim Sengupta

Sunday 12 March 2017 19:59 GMT

Turkish supporters of President Erdogan protest outside the Dutch Consulate in Istanbul Reuters

Riot police using mounted charges and water cannons to disperse protestors in Rotterdam; a Turkish minister expelled after trying to enter her country’s consulate in the city; Ankara expressing outrage and threatening severe retaliation. The diplomatic crisis between the Netherlands and the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which has blown up so suddenly continues to escalate swiftly.

There is no sign at present of the situation defusing. In Ankara, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim reiterated that “strong countermeasures” will be taken. The homes of the Dutch ambassador and senior diplomats were sealed off in what was described as security measures.

In the Hague, the Netherlands Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, condemned Turkey’s behaviour as “bizarre, irresponsible and unacceptable.”

The current confrontation started with the refusal of the Dutch government to allow Mevlüt Cavusoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, to come to the country in order to address a campaign rally in support of President Erdogan in Turkey’s referendum next month.

However, the Turkish family affairs minister, Fatma Betül Sayan Kaya, arrived unannounced, to be detained and then expelled amid recriminations and accusations.

The referendum in question is about concentrating sweeping new powers into the hands of Mr Erdogan, a process which started in the aftermath of last year’s attempted coup. The opposition is effectively hamstrung with MPs, journalists and activists among those detained.

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the largest opposition party CHP, complained: “This is definitely not going to be a fair referendum. We know that the pro-Erdogan media will have a broadcasting policy that completely ignores the opposition. It will be presented as if we are running against the state,” he warned.

But the outcome remains uncertain and the President’s camp claim there is a concerted campaign to attempt to deny him victory with a “foreign hand” playing a part – a supposed threat which has been much discussed attempt to seize power by, allegedly, the followers of Fethullah Gulen, the exiled cleric living in the US.

There are 5.5 million Turks living outside the country and the President needs their vote to make sure he wins. However, attempts by his supporters to hold rallies have been blocked by the authorities in some western European countries, mainly citing security reasons.

This has led to Mr Erdogan accusing Germany of “reverting to fascism” and the Dutch to “Nazi remnants”. The foreign minister, Mr Cavusoglu, speaking in Hamburg last week, held the German government was “applying systematic unacceptable pressure on our citizens”.

He was speaking at the home of the consul-general after a rally on the referendum was blocked from its original venue by the authorities.

Today, in response to the Dutch measures he declared: “What steps they take, we will take ten times more action. We are not afraid of this, but their doings are really inhuman.”

Turkey is not the only party in this impasse to be guided to a large extent by domestic political considerations. Elections are due to take place in the Netherlands, France and Germany, in which nationalist parties are expected to do well, and taking a tough stance against Muslim Turkey may be regarded by governments to be strategically advantageous in trying to stem the right-wing advance.

Mr Rutter has noticeably hardened his language about immigrants and refugees with elections due there on Wednesday.

The far-right leader Geert Wilders, whose campaign has been flagging, has seized on what has happened. “The Netherlands can see that these people are Turks, not Dutch” he said. “They have Dutch passports but they do not belong here.”

The mayor of Rotterdam, Ahmed Aboutaleb, held a press conference in the early hours of this morning to stress that Ms Sayan Kaya has been asked to leave the country after the Turkish consul-general gave him false assurance that the minister would not be going to the consulate.

“He lied flat out. He called on people to come to the consulate where the minister would be giving a speech”, he stated.

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STRATEGIC CULTURE

Syria’s Civil War Is Almost Over… And Assad Has Won

Patrick COCKBURN

10.03.2017

Winners and losers are emerging in what may be the final phase of the Syrian civil war as anti-Isis forces prepare for an attack aimed at capturing Raqqa, the de facto Isis capital in Syria. Kurdish-led Syrian fighters say they have seized part of the road south of Raqqa, cutting Isis off from other its territory further east.

Isis is confronting an array of enemies approaching Raqqa, but these are divided, with competing agendas and ambitions. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), whose main fighting force is the Syrian Kurdish Popular Mobilisation Units (YPG), backed by the devastating firepower of the US-led air coalition, are now getting close to Raqqa and are likely to receive additional US support. The US currently has 500 Special Operations troops in north-east Syria and may move in American-operated heavy artillery to reinforce the attack on Raqqa.

This is bad news for Turkey, whose military foray into northern Syria called Operation Euphrates Shield began last August, as it is being squeezed from all sides. In particular, an elaborate political and military chess game is being played around the town of Manbij, captured by the SDF last year, with the aim of excluding Turkey, which had declared it to be its next target. The Turkish priority in Syria is to contain and if possible reduce or eliminate the power of Syrian Kurds whom Ankara sees as supporting the Kurdish insurrection in Turkey.

Turkey will find it very difficult to attack Manbij, which the SDF captured from Isis after ferocious fighting last year, because the SDF said on Sunday that it is now under the protection of the US-led coalition. Earlier last week, the Manbij Military Council appeared to have outmanoeuvred the Turks by handing over villages west of Manbij – beginning to come under attack from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) militia backed by Turkey – to the Syrian Army which is advancing from the south with Russian air support.

Isis looks as if it is coming under more military pressure than it can withstand as it faces attacks on every side though its fighters continue to resist strongly. It finally lost al-Bab, a strategically placed town north east of Aleppo, to the Turks on 23 February, but only after it had killed some 60 Turkish soldiers along with 469 FSA dead and 1,700 wounded. The long defence of al-Bab by Isis turned what had been planned as a show of strength by Turkey in northern Syria into a demonstration of weakness. The Turkish-backed FSA was unable to advance without direct support from the Turkish military and the fall of the town was so long delayed that Turkey could play only a limited role in the final battle for nearby east Aleppo in December.

Turkey had hoped that President Trump might abandon President Obama’s close cooperation with the Syrian Kurds as America’s main ally on the ground in Syria. There is little sign of this happening so far and pictures of US military vehicles entering Manbij from the east underline American determination to fend off a Turkish-Kurdish clash which would delay the offensive against Raqqa. The US has shown no objection to Syrian Army and Russian “humanitarian convoys” driving into Manbij from the south.

There are other signs that the traditional mix of rivalry and cooperation that has characterised relations between the US and Russia in Syria is shifting towards greater cooperation. The Syrian Army, with support from Russia and Hezbollah, recaptured Palmyra from Isis last Thursday with help from American air strikes. Previously, US aircraft had generally not attacked Isis when it was fighting Syrian government forces. Seizing Palmyra for the second time three months ago was the only significant advance by Isis since 2015.

Turkey could strike at Raqqa from the north, hoping to slice through Syrian Kurdish territory, but this would be a very risky venture likely to be resisted by YPG and opposed by the US and Russia. Otherwise, Turkey and the two other big supporters of the Syrian armed opposition, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are seeing their influence over events in Syria swiftly diminish. Iran and Hezbollah of Lebanon, who were the main foreign support of President Bashar al-Assad before 2015, do not have quite same leverage in Damascus since Russian military intervention in that year.

American and British ambitions to see Mr Assad removed from power have been effectively abandoned and the Syrian government shows every sign of wanting to retake all of Syria. If Isis loses Mosul and Raqqa in the next few months there will be little left of the Caliphate declared in June 2014 as a territorial entity.

The remaining big issue still undecided in both Syria and Iraq is the future relations between the central governments in Baghdad and Damascus and their Kurdish minorities. These have become much more important as allies of the US than they were before the rise of Isis. But they may not be able to hold on to their expanded territories in post-Isis times – and in opposition to reinvigorated Syrian and Iraqi governments.

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BREITBART

Increasingly Violent Migrants Attacking Border Guards with Iron Bars, Spanish Minister Says

by NICK HALLETT8 Mar 2017

Attempts by migrants to break through the border into the Spanish exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla are becoming increasingly violent, the country’s security minister has warned.

José Antonio Nieto said attempts to cross the border fence at Ceuta had become “more dangerous and violent” in recent months, with migrants not only using sticks but even iron bars and wire cutters to attack border guards.

The Interior Ministry revealed 3,144 immigrants had illegally entered Spain so far this year, half of them by crossing into Ceuta and Melilla, which have the European Union’s only land border with Africa.

In one incident last month, 496 immigrants managed to get across the border fence leaving 15 police officers injured.

However, TV station Cuatro reports Mr. Nieto said there would be no radical change in migration policy to deal with the influx. Instead, the Interior Ministry will consider using drones to patrol the border and increasing the number of officers in each of the territories.

Footage released in February showed migrants celebrating in the streets of Ceuta after breaking through the fence, some holding EU flags and others chanting “Freedom! Freedom!”.

The territory’s migrant processing centre was already struggling to cope with the heavy number of new arrivals and had to put up tents at a local sports centre to deal with the influx.

Analysts believe thousands of sub-Saharan Africans may have travelled up through Morocco in a bid to reach the Spanish exclaves. Once on EU territory, it becomes much easier for them to travel across Europe.

In January, more the 1,000 tried to storm the border in a single night. However, none successfully managed to break through.

Spanish government officials at the time reported migrants trying “to force open some of the doors in the external fence, using iron bars, wire cutters and large stones with which they assaulted Moroccan forces and (Spanish) Guardia Civil (police) agents”.

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Natural News

Want to live longer? Eat spicy food

Sunday, March 12, 2017 by: Vicki Batts 


(Natural News) Many people enjoy spicy foods for a variety of reasons: the flavor, the heat, the rush. But if you’ve got a penchant for hot peppers and all things spicy, it seems that you could be reeling in quite the health benefits along with that punch of heat. Earlier this year, research on the benefits of hot pepper consumption found that spicy peppers could boost longevity and reduce mortality risks. It may not feel like it when your mouth is on fire, but it seems that spicy foods can actually help you live longer.

While peppers and spices have been considered to be beneficial for the prevention and treatment of diseases for thousands of years, not much research has been done. Only one other study — pioneered by Chinese researchers and published in 2015 — has specifically examined the relationship between chili pepper consumption and mortality. This most recent study out of Vermont supports the previous findings.

Research demonstrates hot pepper benefits for longevity

A team of scientists from the Larner School of Medicine at the University of Vermont found that regular consumption of hot red chili peppers reduced mortality risks by up to 13 percent. Most of this benefit was attributed to a reduction of heart disease- and stroke-related deaths. Their research was published in the journal PLoS ONE. (RELATED: Read more news about longevity at Longevity.news)

The researchers used the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (NHANES) III to collect data from over 16,000 Americans who were followed for up to 23 years. Medical student Mustafa Chopan and Professor of Medicine Benjamin Littenberg, M.D. worked together to examine the baseline traits of the participants according to their level of hot red chili pepper consumption. In general, they found that the most frequent consumers of hot peppers tended to be “younger, male, white, Mexican-American, married, and to smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, and consume more vegetables and meats . . . had lower HDL-cholesterol, lower income, and less education,” when compared to those who didn’t eat hot red chili peppers.

Data from a median follow-up of 18.9 years was also analyzed, and the researchers were able to observe the number of deaths as well as the specific causes of death. Overall, they found that consuming hot red chilies reduced mortality risks by up to 13 percent — mostly by way of heart disease or stroke. The team stated, “Although the mechanism by which peppers could delay mortality is far from certain, Transient Receptor Potential (TRP) channels, which are primary receptors for pungent agents such as capsaicin (the principal component in chili peppers), may in part be responsible for the observed relationship.”

Capsaicin is thought to be the primary culprit behind the health benefits of hot peppers, and is believed to play a role in cellular and molecular mechanisms that help prevent obesity and regulate blood flow, among other things like altering the bacteria populations of the gut.

Health benefits of capsaicin

Research continues to demonstrate that capsaicin — which is a compound found in peppers that makes them spicy — has a wide variety of health benefits. Capsaicin is even used topically to help relieve pain. Creams made from the compound are often used to help treat arthritis, sore muscles and even nerve pain. The structure of capsaicin allows it to excite pain-sensitive nerve endings. As Dr. Daniel Zagst explains, as you are feeling a burning sensation, “the excited neurons release a neurotransmitter called Substance P that transmits the feeling of pain to the brain.” Capsaicin works as a natural pain reliever by depleting Substance P, and consequently decreasing the number of pain signals that are being sent to the brain.

Studies have also shown that consuming capsaicin raises your body temperature temporarily. This increase in temperature may also correlate with a bodily shift from carbohydrate oxidation to fat oxidation, which may explain why consuming cayenne pepper appears to help regulate blood sugar levels. Consuming capsaicin also helps promote feelings of fullness and satiety, which can help reduce total calorie consumption and fat intake.

Beyond that, capsaicin is thought to be able to help fight off or even prevent cancer, heart disease and likely, much more.

Sources:
ScienceDaily.com
NaturalNews.com
ABCNews.go.com

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Until next week...keep on believing.
Almondtree Productions

“If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.”
(John 8:36)