“Hope
deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a
tree of life.”
(Proverbs
13:12)
Desire Cometh
***
CBNNEWS.COM
UN Leader's Support for Jewish Temple a 'Breath of Fresh Air'
03-24-2017
Tzippe Barrow
Western Wall, Courtesy GPO, Mark Neyman
JERUSALEM, Israel – After years of denying the historic Jewish connection to Israel, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres' statements confirming a Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount are like a "breath of fresh air," World Jewish Congress President Ron Lauder said.
At a meeting in New York this week, Guterres repeated what he said in an interview with Israel Radio, the World Jewish Congress reported.
"It is completely clear the Temple that the Romans destroyed in Jerusalem was a Jewish temple," Guterres said.
Lauder told Guterres he found it "obscene" that 20 out of 26 resolutions passed last year by the U.N. General Assembly were against Israel. Only three were against Syria, where more than a half million people have died, one each against Iran, North Korea and Crimea.
"The UN was built on the broken bones of the Jewish people after World War II," Lauder told Guterres. "It is an institution dedicated to making sure that what happened in the Holocaust never happens again…so it is particularly outrageous that the UN has been hijacked by Israel's enemies to delegitimize the Jewish state."
Guterres said while he couldn't prevent the U.N. Human Rights Council from passing anti-Israel resolutions, he's "committed to act with impartiality" on all matters relating to Israel and the Middle East."
Lauder also spoke positively about the U.S. administration.
"We are also very encouraged by the United States' commitment to the goal of honesty and change and support its stance that bodies such as the United Nations Human Rights Council must consistently be condemned as long as anti-Israel bias reigns free."
Israelis were particularly encouraged with the secretary general's stance on the U.N. report labeling the Jewish state "racist" and "apartheid."
A spokesman for Guterres said the report did not reflect the views of the secretary general.
The report was withdrawn and Rima Khalaf, who chaired the committee responsible for the report, resigned. Even after her resignation, she insisted the report exposed Israel's "war crimes against humanity."
Khalaf served as undersecretary general and executive secretary of the UN's Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ECSWA), which published the report.
***
BREAKINGISRAELNEWS
Rabbi Advises: Invest in Israeli Real Estate, Prices Will Soar When Messiah Comes “Very Soon”
By Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz March 23, 2017 , 1:30 pm
“The stone which the builders rejected is become the chief corner-stone.” Psalms 118:22 (The Israel Bible™)
(Breaking Israel News/Shutterstock)
The Israeli real estate market will explode upon the coming of the Messiah, so buyers should invest now, as the Messiah could arrive “literally at any moment”, advised a prominent rabbi recently.
“When the Messiah comes, the land will be enormously valuable, “ said Rabbi Yitzchak Zilbershtein, adding that in the Messianic period, common stones will gain wondrous qualities making them more precious than gold.
The suggestion came as a result of a question posed by a man who had inherited a parcel of vacant land in Israel and wanted a rabbinic legal ruling on what he should do with it, as the rocky plot was difficult to access for commercial or domestic use and, in its current state, was essentially useless.
Rabbi Zilbershtein, a well-respected religious scholar in Bnei Barak, responded that the inheritor should not sell the land. The rabbi quoted his brother-in-law, the esteemed Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, who has said that the Messiah is expected to arrive “literally at any moment”.
Though the land seemed worthless now,
the rabbi assured the owner that very soon it would jump in value and
be worth many times its current market price. He quoted a midrash
(homiletic teaching on the Bible) which stated that every single
stone in the Land of Israel has a specific mystical attribute to be
revealed in the end of days.
The rabbi said that some stones will
bring peace and others will heal wounds or have other wondrous
medicinal properties. One stone called ‘carneola’ is alleged to
ease tooth pain and stop bleeding. Another stone called ‘shamir’
is enormously strong and can break other stones. Yet another heals
kidney stones. Another stone called ‘achlama’ will improve the
eyesight of the elderly.
Rabbi Kanievsky, one of the most prominent rabbis of the generation, has shocked many with several uncharacteristic declarations over the past two years that the Messiah would arrive very soon. He has never made such declarations before in his long and illustrious career.
Rabbi Zilbershtein’s financial advice is sound. Real estate investor Guy Amit has built his company, Tova HaAretz (the good of the land), on the belief that the holiness of the land and God’s promise concerning are worthy investments.
“The real-estate market in Israel is going up and everyone wants a piece of land here: Jews, Christians, and Muslims,” Amit told Breaking Israel News. “There is no question that the price will go up. The only question is how much, and like the rabbi said, when the Moshiach (Messiah) comes, the sky is the limit.”
***
BREAKINGISRAELNEWS
Seismic Rumblings, Blood-Red Sea, Radioactive Fish and Mysterious “Blob” Appear in North Pacific
By Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz March 22, 2017 , 12:30 pm
(Shutterstock)
A series of unusual and threatening phenomena including volcanoes, radioactive waste, and a mysterious marine anomaly called ‘the Blob’ have all appeared in the waters of the Pacific Northwest in the last month. Something is brewing in the cold coastal waters, and though scientists are struggling to understand, one rabbi sees right through it all.
Trouble bubbled up from the bowels of the earth last month as volcanic activity increased off the coast of Alaska. Bogoslof volcano, about 60 miles northwest of Dutch Harbor, erupted more than 37 times in the last three months, sending volcanic ash up to 30,000 feet. The eruptions are accompanied dramatically by violent lightning strikes.The volcano remains in a heightened state of unrest and could erupt again at any time.
In the Bible, volcanoes and seismic activity are connected with God’s anger, especially in the context of the End of Days.
“Therefore I will make the heavens to tremble, and the earth shall be shaken out of her place, for the wrath of Hashem of hosts, and for the day of His fierce anger”. Isaiah 13:13
The Bogoslof volcano is one of the 160 active volcanoes in that section of the Pacific Ring of Fire, the world’s most seismically active region. This section also includes Mount St. Helens, which erupted cataclysmically in 1980, in the deadliest and most economically destructive volcanic event in the history of the United States.
Though most of the volcanoes in the region are in relatively unpopulated areas, many of Alaska’s volcanoes are in the major trans-Pacific aviation lanes. Volcanic eruptions can shut down overhead air-traffic as the abrasive ash may cause jet engine failure and interfere with electronics.
Science has made great advances, but volcanoes, along with the other phenomena that struck recently, bear the clear message that much of nature is beyond our control. Rabbi Yosef Berger, the rabbi of King David’s Tomb on Mount Zion, notes that this is a particularly relevant message in our era.
“What is happening is very clear,” Rabbi Yosef Berger told Breaking Israel News. “Men of science think they govern the world, but these events show how much that is not true. The Messiah will be God revealing that fact in the most undeniable manner, so that men will see this with their very eyes. The word olam (world) comes from the root ‘hidden’. God hides behind the veil of nature. We see nature, but we don’t see the One who actually rules over and guides nature.”
As if volcanoes are not enough, meteorologists are gravely concerned about what they have called ‘the Blob’, an unusual lingering mass of warm water 310 miles off the Oregon coast. The Blob appeared in late 2014 and was welcomed by residents of the chilly Northwest, as it was linked to unusually warm and sunny weather. But a recently released study revealed that what first seemed like a blessing was actually a curse.
Dan Jaffe, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington Bothell, reported last week in a study of the Blob in Geophysical Research Letters that record levels of ozone have been registered throughout the West Coast. He attributed the phenomenon to the unusual weather conditions caused by the warmer ocean temperatures by the Blob.
“Ultimately, it all links back to the Blob, which was the most unusual meteorological event we’ve had in decades,” Jaffe said in an interview with UW Today, the news source for the University of Washington.
The Blob brought with it a disturbing Biblical phenomenon: the warm waters created some of the worst-ever toxic red tide algal blooms.
“And the fish that were in the river died; and the river became foul, and the Egyptians could not drink water from the river; and the blood was throughout all the land of Egypt.” Exodus 7:21
As in the Biblical plague, the red tides led to massive numbers of marine mammals dying, as they are unable to find their cold-water food, normally plentiful in the Pacific Northwest.
A third plague has also struck the region. It was announced last month that nuclear waste has finally made its way from Japan to the United States coastline. Officials revealed that Cesium-134 from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster was detected off the coast of Oregon and has been found in seafood from that area.
The nuclear reactor in Japan suffered a catastrophic meltdown after being hit by an earthquake-generated tsunami, spewing nuclear-tainted water into the ocean. Despite public alarm, officials insist the radioactive pollution is not a cause for concern. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said in a 2015 report that evidence showed the levels “fall well short of posing any U.S. health or environmental risk.”
The list of problems grows, but scientists are coming up short in their search for answers. Biologists are still scratching their heads over a massive die-off of marine birds in Alaska last year. In a report released last month, Heather Renner, a supervisory wildlife biologist, told KTUU that the birds died from starvation, but they had no idea what brought this famine on.
“Seabirds are top predators,” Renner said. “They’re sort of sentinels for our environment. They have definitely let us know that there’s change going on in the ocean ecosystem.”
Renner inadvertently paraphrased the sentiments of Job, who warned that birds can serve as messengers bearing a divine message.
“Who teacheth us more than the beasts of the earth, and maketh us wiser than the fowls of heaven?” Job 35:11
“In the days before messiah,” Rabbi Berger concluded, “God is going to be revealed through nature in exactly this manner: one event after another.”
***
THE WASHINGTON POST
The first solar eclipse to cross America in 99 years is coming. To some, it’s an act of God.
By Julie Zauzmer March 15
Everyone in the continental United States will need safety glasses for looking at the sky during the August 21 eclipse. (Mark Margolis / Rainbow Symphony)
On Monday, Aug. 21, in the middle of the day, the sky will go dark. The temperature will suddenly get several degrees colder. Birds will stop chirping and retreat to their nests. And tens of millions of people, crammed into a 60-mile-wide path that crosses from Oregon to the Carolinas, will stand in America looking up at the sky.
It’s easy to understand why many people will view this as an act of God.
The total solar eclipse that will cross America this summer — an event that last happened 99 years ago — will be an important moment for scientific observers and a massive nationwide spectator event. It will also, for many people of faith, be evidence of God’s majesty — and even, to a few, a harbinger of the coming end of the world.
“I don’t think it’s an accident that God put us human beings here on Earth where we can actually see total solar eclipses. I think God wants us to make these discoveries,” said Hugh Ross, who is both an astronomer and a minister. “I would argue that God on purpose made the universe beautiful, and one of the beauties is a solar eclipse.”
Ross will be leading a trip to watch the eclipse for about 80 people interested in finding spirituality in science. They’ll travel down a dirt road into a field in Eastern Oregon, where they will wait for the sun to be blotted out. Across the country, other church groups will do the same.
A solar eclipse isn’t all that rare. The moon is always revolving around the Earth, while the Earth revolves around the sun. Usually the moon appears slightly higher or lower than the sunlight hits the Earth. But twice a year, it’s right smack in front of it, and the moon blocks out the sun during the daytime, and that’s at least a partial solar eclipse.
When a total eclipse occurs, the shadow falls on just a tiny part of the Earth, about 60 to 100 miles wide, and then moves about a thousand miles over the course of a few hours. Because so much of the Earth is water, this almost always happens over an ocean.
The eclipse will cross America, from Oregon to the Carolinas. (Courtesy of NASA)
The last total solar eclipse visible from the continental United States was in 1979, and it was only over a corner of the Pacific Northwest.
Something like this summer’s event, where so many people on land can see a total solar eclipse, is exceptionally rare — although the United States actually will experience another one, crossing an opposite diagonal swath of the country, in 2024.
This August, the “path of totality” cuts across the entire country, and every single spot in the continental United States will see an eclipse up to 60 percent.
That means that anyone in the country can step outside and see some darkness on that Monday in August. But eclipse-watchers — including Jay M. Pasachoff, a Williams College astronomer who has traveled around the world to witness an astonishing 65 eclipses — say that one truly has to see totality to really grasp the awe-inspiring nature of an eclipse. Even 99 percent, Pasachoff said, is nowhere near as dramatic as the moment it totally goes dark, which will last for up to two minutes and 40 seconds.
“You have to be in totality to do it. Basically the universe gets a million times darker,” Pasachoff said. “It is absolutely necessary to be in the path of totality. It’s a poor second to be off to the side.”
For Ross and other clergy planning to showcase the eclipse as both a scientific and a religious event, that stunning experience of seeing totality is an opportunity for discussing God’s handiwork. When Ross was a researcher at the California Institute of Technology, he would take his fellow scientists on hiking trips in the Sierra Nevada, he said.
“When they would say, ‘Yeah, it’s gorgeous,’ I would say, ‘Why is it so beautiful?’ It would always lead to a discussion about the Christian faith,” he said. For that reason — the opportunity to use natural beauty as a tool for evangelism — he thinks this eclipse will be a popular Christian event. “A lot of leaders of churches are going to be encouraging people,” he said, to go see the eclipse in August.
It’s certainly not just church leaders who have that idea. Visitors from as far as Europe and Asia started booking hotel rooms months ago in sleepy little corners of Wyoming and Idaho where they will be able to see the eclipse.
The population living in that long path of totality, from Oregon to the Carolinas, is about 12 million people, by the count of Angela Speck, co-chair of the American Astronomical Society’s task force on the 2017 eclipse. Speck says another 12 million or many more could easily visit for the eclipse date. Nearly everyone in the continental United States lives within one day’s drive of the eclipse path — so if 4 percent of the country decided they wanted to drive to the right spot that day and see the sun go dark, 12 million would turn to 24 million overnight.
There’s precedent: In 1991, Speck said, so many people tried to enter Mexico to see a total eclipse that the country closed parts of its borders.
Speck and others involved in this year’s eclipse preparation are concerned that rural communities on the eclipse path won’t be prepared for the massive traffic jams, the food and water needs of the hordes of visitors, or the safety glasses that every eclipse-watcher should have. (They cost about a dollar, but supplying one to every American who may look up at the total or partial eclipse is a staggering task.)
In certain religious communities, the talk surrounding the eclipse has to do with a different sort of preparation. Gary Ray isn’t worried about just travel plans and adequate eye protection. He’s focused on the Rapture.
Ray, a writer for the evangelical Christian publication Unsealed, views this eclipse as one of several astronomical signs that the day when Christians will be whisked away from the Earth is fast approaching.
“The Bible says a number of times that there’s going to be signs in the heavens before Jesus Christ returns to Earth. We see this as possibly one of those,” Ray said about the eclipse.
He is even more interested in another astronomical event that will occur 33 days after the eclipse, on Sept. 23, 2017.
The Book of Revelation, which is full of extraordinary imagery, describes a woman “clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head” who gives birth to a boy who will “rule all the nations with an iron scepter” while she is threatened by a red, seven-headed dragon. The woman then grows the wings of an eagle and is swallowed up by the earth.
Ray says that image will be created in the sky on Sept. 23. The constellation Virgo — representing the woman — will be clothed in sunlight, in a position that is over the moon and under nine stars and three planets. The planet Jupiter, which will have been inside Virgo — in her womb, in Ray’s interpretation — will move out of Virgo, as if she is giving birth.
Astronomers don’t see this as a particularly unusual event. But to Ray and others, it could be the sign that the Rapture is ready to happen: “We think it’s God signaling to us that he’s about to make his next move.”
And Ray thinks the two eclipses that are slated to travel across the United States in 2017 and 2024, together marking an X across the nation, could be the starting and ending signs bookmarking a seven-year period of awful tribulations that Revelations says waits in store for nonbelievers who are left behind on Earth when the Rapture occurs.
“That time frame is speculative, 2017 to 2024. But it makes a lot of sense. There are a lot of things that really point us to that,” he said.
Therefore, the eclipse preparation that Ray recommends is a bit different from the scientists’ association’s advice.
“My number one encouragement to people would be to just trust God. More importantly, to trust the right God,” he said, warning that those who do not believe when the day of the Rapture comes will be left behind to face the tribulations. “If people want to be ready, the one thing you can do is accept what He has offered, which is the gift of grace and forgiveness. That’s all we have to do to be ready.”
University of Redlands astronomer Tyler Nordgren, who is advising the National Park Service on handling this eclipse, looked at prior events. Just a partial eclipse, not a total one, set visitor records in 2012 when it crossed through National Park Service sites in the Southwest. For this summer, he told the Park Service, “Imagine the biggest event you’ve ever had, and double it.”
So come August, even nonbelievers looking out at the crowds on the eclipse path may find themselves comparing it to an apocalyptic event. For one Eastern Oregon park, Nordgren predicts 25,000 to 50,000 sky-watchers. The park has one toilet.
***
***
BREAKINGISRAELNEWS
New Star to Appear in Night Sky, Heralding Balaam’s Prophecy of Messiah
By Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz January 10, 2017 , 12:30 pm
“He counteth the number of the stars; He giveth them all their names.” Psalms 147:4 (The Israel Bible™)
(Shutterstock)
Five years from now, the light from the ancient collision of two stars will reveal a brand-new star in the night sky. According to Jewish esoteric sources, this is precisely the celestial phenomenon which will accompany the arrival of the Messiah.
The new star, expected to appear in 2022 in a blaze of light called a nova, will be the brightest heavenly body visible in the nighttime sky for six months. It will be the first time in recorded history that a celestial event of this kind will be witnessed by the naked eye.
Beyond its scientific uniqueness, the appearance of the new star could have much bigger implications for the earth-bound, one prominent rabbi told Breaking Israel News, pointing to a Biblical prophecy of Balaam which hails the appearance of a new star as the precursor to Messiah.
“I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not nigh; there shall step forth a star out of Yakov, and a scepter shall rise out of Yisrael, and shall smite through the corners of Moab, and break down all the sons of Seth.” Numbers 24:17
Rabbi Yosef Berger, rabbi of King David’s Tomb on Mount Zion, cited Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, known by the acronym Rambam, the foremost Torah authority of the 12th century, whose rulings are still used as the basis for much of Jewish law.
“The Rambam brings this verse about a star appearing as proof that the Messiah will come one day,” Rabbi Berger told Breaking Israel News. “But he says it will come from Jacob, and not from Esau. More specifically, from the tribe of Judah.”
Even more incredibly, the Zohar, the foundational work of Jewish mysticism predicts, in detail, the color and type of stars which will appear. “The Zohar states explicitly that the Messianic process will be accompanied by several stars appearing. The Zohar goes into great depth, describing how many stars, and which colors they will be,” Rabbi Berger explained.
The new star, announced last week by Larry Molnar, a professor of astronomy at Calvin College in Michigan, will certainly be unusual. It is a binary star, or two stars orbiting a central point. Molnar described it as “two peanuts sharing a single shell.”
In his observations, Molnar noted that the orbital period was decreasing at an accelerating rate, leading him to understand that the two stars were moving closer to each other. Based on a previous case of binary stars, Molnar predicted the two stars stars would collide in 2022, resulting in a massive explosion.
“[The collision] will release as much energy as the sun releases in its entire lifetime,” Molar said in a video about the discovery.
When the two finally collide, it will create a new star, a red nova. The star’s brightness will increase ten-thousandfold, making it one of the brightest points in the heavens for six months, after which it will fade and remain as a smaller dot in the sky. It will be the first time in history that the creation of a new star will be visible with the naked eye.
“It’s a one-in-a-million chance that you can predict an explosion,” Molnar said. “It’s never been done before.”
Ira Machefsky, an amateur astronomer with 60 years of experience who runs stargazing tours in Mizpeh Ramon, a town perched on a huge crater in the Negev desert, has been following the story closely. He described the delicate balance between science and faith to Breaking Israel News.
“The Heavens, especially unique phenomena like this nova, are a manifestation of God’s intellect. But this has to be understood in a specific manner in Judaism,” Machefsky warned. “Astronomy and astrology are prominent in Jewish mysticism, since God works through nature. But at the same time, the term for pagan idol worship is avodat cochavim o’mazalot (serving stars and signs).”
Machefsky quoted the Talmud (Sukkoth 29a).
“Thus saith HaShem, ‘Learn not the way of the nations, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven, for the nations are dismayed at them, the idolaters will be dismayed, but Israel will not be dismayed.’”
“According to Hasidic philosophy, the wellsprings of knowledge will be opened up In the times of the Moshiach (Messiah),” Machefsky said. “It is truly amazing that astronomers can predict this when just a few years ago we wouldn’t have known about this until the star suddenly appeared. Science has enabled us to share in God’s natural processes.”
For stargazers, the nova will be visible as part of the constellation Cygnus, adding a star to the Northern Cross star pattern. Though the nova will appear in a few years, the actual event took place 1,800 years ago. It has taken nearly two millennia for the light from the collision to reach earth.
WND
STUNNER ABOUT PASSION WEEK AND GOOD FRIDAY
New book breaks down the most important days in human history
Published: March 26, 2017
For Christians around the globe, Good Friday is one of the most important days of the year. And the Easter resurrection of Jesus Christ is not just the foundation of the entire faith, but a cultural touchstone.
But a new book that investigates Passion Week has reached the shocking conclusion Jesus Christ wasn’t actually crucified on that Friday at all.
“The Great Christian Lie,” by James C. DeSelms, argues Christ was crucified on Wednesday, the 13th of Nisan on the Jewish calendar.
DeSelms presents a detailed breakdown of everything Jesus and His disciples did during Passion Week, including an in-depth medical examination of exactly what Messiah endured during His crucifixion. He argues the resurrection took place on the Feast of First Fruits, showing a deep connection between the life of Christ and the biblical calendar and indicating the Passion of Messiah was the culmination of many of the biblical feasts.
Indeed, “The Great Christian Lie” is an invaluable guide for any believer who wants to understand the most important week in human history. It’s also a formidable assemblage of many of the prophetic proofs Jesus was the Jewish Messiah.
At the same time, the book explains why many Jews were so excited upon Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, believing He was about to liberate them from Roman control. It additionally shows how the position of the Jewish religious leaders was profoundly threatened by His ministry, fueling the hatred that led to Jesus’ execution.
Through both close textual reading and complimentary historical research, DeSelms gives Christians a fresh perspective on the events surrounding Jesus’ death and His return to life. Many believers may find they can truly understand Passion Week for the first time.
An increasing number of Christian leaders believe Christians are celebrating the resurrection on the wrong day.
“The Council of Nicaea, in 325 AD, agreed that all churches should celebrate Easter (the resurrection) on the same day, but did not designate the date,” DeSelms writes.
“Over time, various dates were used, and today Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the full moon following the Vernal Equinox. If the full moon occurred on a Sunday, and thereby coincide with the Passover, Easter was celebrated on the following Sunday. This deliberately ensured that Easter would never be celebrated on Passover.”
But why was this so important to the early church? Why wouldn’t Christians want to keep the biblical calendar and show how the life of Jesus was so deeply linked to the Jewish feasts?
As DeSelms shows, many Jerusalem Christians actually did want to preserve these links. However, the anti-Semitism present in the early church led to a deliberate effort to sever Christianity from its Jewish roots.
“He writes: “[W]e can clearly see that the early church would do whatever was necessary to eliminate any Jewish influence on the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. It is important to remember that Jesus was a Jew, followed Jewish customs, and obeyed Jewish law. When we remember this fact, and quit trying to apply Christianity to these events, the picture becomes clearer.”
“The Great Christian Lie” blows apart some of the greatest deceptions in the history of the Christian faith. It’s a text no believer genuinely curious about the passion, death and resurrection of the Messiah should ignore.
WND
HERE'S EPIC EMAIL SUSPENDED CHRISTIAN SENT ISLAMIC PROF
'A Muslim cracks a joke about chopping someone's body parts off and you do nothing'
Published: March 28, 2017
BOB UNRUH
The full email a now-suspended student sent a Muslim professor at Rollins College who had openly used her class time to undermine Christianity by declaring the biblical and historical accounts of Jesus’ crucifixion were a hoax has been released.
And it reveals that the student was critical of the professor, but his only “threat” was to “contact … some national media personalities” or “pursue legal options if you don’t stop your harassment toward me.”
The student, Marshall Polston, 20, was ordered suspended March 24 by the Winter Park, Florida, school when his Middle Eastern humanities professor, Areej Zufari, claimed harassment, “although video surveillance obtained by a local paper suggests otherwise,” the Washington Times said.
Polston apparently repeatedly had challenged the Muslim’s claims that the Bible was false, and school officials claimed they never would suspend a student over such challenges, nevertheless took action against Polston.
The Orlando Sentinel said the school president, Grant Cornwell, defended the professor and claimed there were “other factors” involved in the suspension, but refused to provide those.
A disciplinary hearing was held by the school for Polston on Tuesday, but officials said the results may take days.
The professor had claimed Polston “disrupted” class and had a “contemptuous” attitude.
But Polston’s email revealed many more details, including that, “On the one hand you report me to the dean for correcting you while you were indoctrinating students with false information. On the other hand a Muslim student in class cracks a joke about chopping someone’s body parts off and you do nothing.”
He charged that the professor was incompetent, and the professor, who admitted in a statement to Winter Park police that Polston “has not threatened to harm her in any physical manner,” was unable to function after getting Polston’s email and canceled a subsequent class.
The College Fix obtained a full copy of the email from the student to the professor, which was written a month after the teacher said the “crucifixion of Jesus Christ was a hoax and that his disciples did not believe he was divine,” the report said.
The email followed shortly after the professor’s slam on his first assignment for the class, a 52 percent grade.
The full email:
We need to talk as soon as possible over phone or in your office because you have been extremely unfair to me and pursuit a ruthless program of hostility in your recent grading simply due to the fact that I disagree with you on your inherent bias and clandestine theological apologies. I’m actually a nice person but not when I’m viciously attacked. I’d be just as happy to go to the dean about this issue.
I’m emailing you about the first essay in your Rollins class. You recently failed me with a 52% despite the fact that I followed all the guidelines listed, covered all the topics and asked you directly about the problem areas. I specifically asked you about sources in person as a result of your request that the paper be an analysis and not research. Everything I wrote came from personal memory and research or first hand experience in my travels with the government, personal visits with friends, teaching experiences or philanthropic efforts in the Middle East.
Quite frankly the grade you assigned to me exposes your a true agenda which is to silence me in class. As I told you before I’m not interested in speaking anymore. But since you’ve decided to carry a blitzkrieg out against me, I may have to speak up in regards to your extreme bias and not necessarily to the class but to the dean. You’re one of the most incompetent professors I have ever seen in my entire life.
It’s very clear you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. You may have a college degree but you belong in a reform school.
First you conflate the immaculate conception and virgin birth which are totally different. Then you state that middle eastern Jews were Sephardic when in fact they are mostly Mizrahi Sephardic Jews only emigrated from Spain to North Africa and Istanbul and we’re NEVER native.
I could go on and on and on. Everybody knows that you’re a failure as a Professor — Rest assured I’m not the only one!!! I have dozens of examples to pull from that I’ve noticed during the class.
I think it’s great to be a theological apologist but not in a secular setting — I don’t know whether this was just a mistake or not so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. In order to stop a textual embarrassment in the Quran from coming to light in class you proceeded to ignore the facts when I asked a pertinent question about Mohammed. He had an adopted son which divorced his wife so he could marry him and although you finally admitted it was twisted, it took until I looked up the verse that you believed me.
Your bias is blatantly evident in your misinformation about the historical Jesus and moreover manifested in the lack of discussion about Wellhausen’s documentary hypothesis (with you taking the theological position that Moses wrote the first five books of the Torah). No one takes either position that you gave in the archaeological or secular biblical fields.
Also your brainwashing session about sharia law at the United States of Rollins ignores what the vast majority of people in countries like Egypt and Iraq really believe in regards to misogyny, homophobia or religious freedom.
I agree that sharia law can be reformed but in the context of the seventh century, let’s not jump to utopian conclusions about sharia law’s original implementation in society. I understand that you are much more liberal Muslim which is great but quite frankly it astonishes me your hypocrisy. On the one hand you report me to the dean for correcting you while you were indoctrinating students with false information. On the other hand a Muslim student in class cracks a joke about chopping someone’s body parts off and you do nothing. Yes I have witnesses – I’m not the only one who has a concern about your agenda and overt bias.
It’s really cowardly of you to shut me down in the middle of class or lie to the dean but I should be careful when saying that because that would be insulting to cowards. There’s something seriously wrong and depraved about you when you think my intellectual conversation is more threatening than the despicable comments about decapitation made by the student in question! SICK!
I hope we don’t have to escalate this issue and you’ll stop this crusade against me. I would really hate to get in contact with some national media personalities that I’m good friends with but I’m going to have to take it there or pursue legal options if you don’t stop your harassment toward me.
The Fix reported it repeatedly tried to obtain an explanation from the college, and eventually a statement came that the school welcomes “all religious and cultural beliefs” and how it values “diversity of opinions.”
It concluded, “There will be no further statement.”
A police report from Zufari complained the professor had been having problems with Polston, “who has disagreed with her teachings.”
“Zufari stated Polston has not threatened to harm her in any physical manner, but wrote her a lengthy email which concluded that he ‘would hate to get in contact with some national media personalities that I’m good friends with. I’m going to have to take it there or pursue legal options if you don’t stop your harassment towards me,'” the report said.
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21stCENURYWIRE
DANGEROUS: Turkey’s Erdogan to End Secular Democracy, Invoking New Holy War Between ‘Cross and Crescent’
MARCH 24, 2017 BY 21WIRE
21st Century Wire says…
Earlier this week, 21WIRE outlined how the current Turkey government is about to bring an abrupt end to country’s secular democratic government in favor of political Islam and one-party rule.
Turkey is about the pass over a very dangerous threshold…
Unknown to the US media, who is intoxicated with Russian conspiracy theories and the running joke which is US healthcare, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (image, above) is instituting the final phase in his Stalinization transformation of Turkey from a secular democracy – to a Neo-Ottoman religious fiefdom.
On April 16, Erdogan will hold a new Referendum to change the country’s constitutional, giving the government sweeping new legal powers – including a provision that would allow him to be ‘President for Life‘ – potentially ruling until 2029.
Last week, the Turkish autocrat dispatched his emissaries to European countries to help campaign to Turkish voters in countries like the Netherlands and Germany. After Germany cancelled various rallies organized by Turkish ministers, Erdogan accused Germany of “fascist actions” reminiscent of “Nazi practices.” The Dutch government saw what was coming and proceeded to ban Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu from flying to Rotterdam to attend a Turkish rally in support of Erdogan’s new powers, Reuters reported.
“Listen Netherlands, you’ll jump once, you’ll jump twice, but my people will thwart your game,” Erdogan said. “You can cancel our foreign minister’s flight as much as you want, but let’s see how your flights come to Turkey now. They don’t know diplomacy or politics. They are Nazi remnants. They are fascists.”
Erdogan’s then went on to threaten Europe, saying, that they “won’t be secure on their streets anymore.”
In reality, more than any other single figure on the greater European geopolitical scene today – it is Erdogan who has the closest resemblance to Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler. There are a few eerily similarities to their consolidations of power. Two charismatic leaders, using crisis to physically transform the structure of government, and both instituting a brutal crackdown on the press in their country. Both deeply engaged in undeclared wars of aggression and invasions against their neighbors, and both openly trumpeting aspirations of regional hegemony and dominance and actively pursuing additional territory for their homeland. More importantly – both invoking exceptionalist themes – in Hitler’s case it was race, religion and über nationalism. In Erdogan’s case, emotive religious identity politics and invoking Ottoman imperial nostalgia and crusade-era themes like ‘a battle between‘Crescent and Cross.’
Erdogan, even invoked the crusades last week – appearing to call for a renewed intercontinental religious war between Islamic world and Europe. Erdogan, as rendered by Hurriyet Daily News. stated, “Where is the liberty of religion? They have commenced a struggle between the cross and crescent. There is no other explanation than this. I am saying this clearly: Europe is heading toward the days just before World War II.”
Since the Coup-the-Wasn’t in July 2016, Erdogan used the alleged political crisis to institute a brutal purge that would impress Josef Stalin’s.
After taking to his media’s airwaves encouraging political foot soldiers to go out and dispense violent ‘street justice‘ to his designated opposition, Erdoğan instituted one of the most systematic and brutal crackdowns on civil society seen in recent years. What started as a purge of 7,000 suspected military plotters, judges, politicians, journalists has expanded, bringing the total to upwards of 100,000 people – all suspended and arrested by the government for either treason or “having terrorist ties.” Included in the purge were some 28,000 teachers who it deems as having “links to terrorism,” along with 785 members of the Ministry of Labour, and 24 elected mayors.
Any normal media pundit would call this the totalitarian antics of paranoid megalomaniac – but not the Western media. As a NATO member state it should shock every US and European citizen that their governments are military partners with this type of government in Turkey.
“The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I’ve just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.“―Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin.
Erdogan’s new Turkey very much resembles a scene of our Star Wars, where emperor Palpatine suspended the Republican government in a state of emergency – to fight an ‘terrorist’ enemy created by him in a clandestine fashion.
This story line virtually mirrors Erdogan’s facilitating and supporting of ISIS and Al Nusra terrorists groups operating freely, in and out of Syria using Turkey as a safe haven with medical triage for fighters, training grounds, and even a supply and financial hub based in the Turkish city of Gaziantep.
What’s most shocking about this however, is how the US media will provide more headline space and hours of ‘expert panel’ analysis in CNN for a tweet from Donald Trump – rather than to cover this disturbing development in Turkey which could very trigger the balance of nations in the Middle East.
In a recent interview with Free West Media, Independent Syrian MP from Aleppo, Fares Shehabi (photo, above) announced, ‘We want Turkey to withdraw its invading forces.’
Presently, both Turkey and the US are amassing their military assets and troops on the ground inside Syria, in preparation for big media event in April, which will be marketed in the West as “The Battle for Raqqa.”
Shehabi believes the Turkish leadership is chasing an Ottoman-style hegemony in the region:
“I am not surprised, of course! Erdogan’s behavior is well expected by us Syrians because we were the first to suffer from his Ottoman ambitions. As you know, the Ottoman Empire expanded into our country Syria after sacking Aleppo and also expanded westward into Romania, Austria and Hungary. We defended our city Aleppo against his piracy and looting and against his terror mercenaries,” said MP Shehabi.
On Turkey’s looting of Aleppo since 2012, Shehabi explains, “He robbed more than 30 000 factories, our grain, wheat, cotton, oil and most importantly our historical monuments. He also gathered, harbored, trained, armed and sent tens of thousands of jihadi terrorists via his borders into our main cities.”
“We just want Turkey to withdraw its invading forces from our land and implement international laws for preventing the flow of terrorists and their weapons into our sovereign country. We don’t have any problems with the Turkish people, but we have a big problem with Erdogan and his ruling Islamist gang, for they wrongly believe they are the only people who know God.”
“Regarding Turkey’s support of ISIS, Shehabi stated, “Here are the facts: Most of ISIS fighters came to Syria through Turkish airlines. Erdogan’s troops used to walk side by side with them in many border towns in Northern Syria. Erdogan also facilitated the creation of other Al-Qaeda offsprings such as Al-Nusra-Front and Ahrar Al-Sham and he still regards the latter a legitimate Syrian opposition group, even when the group itself admits to embrace the well known al-Qaeda agenda and ideology. Moreover, Erdogan built tens of training camps for jihadi mercenaries to serve his agenda in Syria,” added Shehabi.
21WIRE has also reported on the Turkey’s role in helping violent Uygur fighters who make up a portion of the ISIS ranks – an ethnic group of Muslims living near the far west frontier of China and they speak the ancient Turkic language.
The case against Turkey is damning, and all we can hear is slience from the US, UK, France and the ‘great European powers.
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AP
15 felony charges for 2 who secretly filmed Planned Parenthood
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS • 3/28/17 11:20 PM
LOS ANGELES — California prosecutors on Tuesday charged two anti-abortion activists who made undercover videos of themselves trying to buy fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood with 15 felonies, saying they invaded the privacy of medical providers by filming without consent.
State Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a former Democratic member of Congress, announced the charges against David Daleiden of Davis, California, and Sandra Merritt of San Jose. The two operate the Irvine-based Center for Medical Progress.
The allegations say the pair filmed 14 people without permission between October 2013 and July 2015 in Los Angeles, San Francisco and El Dorado counties. One felony count was filed for each person. The 15th was for criminal conspiracy to invade privacy.
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CROSSMAP
Canon Lawyers and Theologians to hold Conference on ‘Deposing the Pope’
By Pete Baklinski, LIfe Site News On March 21, 2017
PARIS, March 17, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) -- Canon lawyers, theologians, and scholars will be meeting in Paris in two weeks to discuss a topic that has never been the focus of a Catholic conference before: How to depose a heretical pope.
Titled Deposing the Pope: Theological Premises, Canonical Models, Constitutional Challenge, the conference seeks to explore the mechanisms that are built into the Catholic Church for dealing with a pope who openly teaches falsehood and even heresy.
Speaking at the conference will be University of Paris Professor Laurent Fonbaustier who published a 1200 page book last year on the topic that was titled The Deposition of the Heretical Pope.
The conference includes 15 speakers who will be giving a range of talks on the subject matter with titles such as "Conciliarism and the Deposition of a Pope Through the Prism of Gallicanism," "The Downfall of the Pope: Between Renunciation and Deposition," and "The Deposition of John XXII and Benedict XIII at Constance, 1415-1417."
Brochure from the 'Deposing the Pope' Conference
Speaking at the conference are Professors Nicolas Warembourg and Cyrille Dounot, two of the 45 Catholic academics who last June submitted an appeal to the Dean of the College of Cardinals in Rome requesting a repudiation of erroneous propositions they found in Pope Francis' exhortation Amoris Laetitia.
The group of 45 Catholic academics said the Pope's exhortation presented "dangers to Catholic faith and morals" since it "contains a number of statements that can be understood in a sense that is contrary to Catholic faith and morals."
The conference comes after four years of Francis at the helm of the Barque of Peter. During this time the Pope, and the people he has put into key positions, have steered the Church in a direction that would have been unthinkable to faithful Catholics under the two previous pontiffs of John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.
Francis' ambiguous speeches and especially his papal writings have turned cardinal against cardinal, bishop against bishop, and lay-faithful against lay-faithful. Doctrinal confusion has resulted in pastoral guidelines being issued based on his writings that allow Holy Communion to be given to those living in adultery.
Last November Vaticanist Giuseppe Nardi reported that a 1975 theological study by the learned Brazilian layman Arnaldo Vidigal Xavier da Silveira was making the rounds in the Vatican. The layman examined in his work titled The Theological Hypothesis of a Heretical Pope whether it is possible for a pope to be or become a heretic, and if so, what consequences would follow from this.
Reported Nardi: "Three-and-a-half years after the start of his pontificate, Pope Francis is reaching his limits. The impression, given by means of gestures and words, of a latent intention to change the doctrine of the Church must at some point either take on definite form or else it must collapse," he wrote at that time.
"Francis finds himself cornered by means of the very atmosphere he himself is responsible for creating. It's no longer about a spontaneous utterance on this or that, which remains improvised and non-binding. His pastoral work and his leadership skills, which demand a sense of responsibility and an exemplary character, are reaching their limits. This could cause Francis ['s pontificate] to fail," he added.
The conference comes three months after Cardinal Raymond Burke gave an interview in which he explained that if a pope were to "formally profess heresy he would cease, by that act, to be the Pope."
virool
Burke said in the December 2016 interview that there is a process within the Church for dealing with such a situation, adding his hope that "we won't be witnessing that at any time soon."
Also in December American canon lawyer Dr. Edward Peters addressed the question of what could be done if a pope were found to be heretical.
Peters writes that the "crucial question" from a canonist's perspective is "who would determine whether a given pope has fallen into heresy" since Canon 1404 states that the "First See is judged by no one."
He found in canonical tradition, however, the position that if a general council determined that a pope had committed heresy, by that very fact he will have effectually cut himself off from the true vine, thereby forfeiting his office.
Comments Peters: "...however remote is the possibility of a pope actually falling into heresy and however difficult it might be to determine whether a pope has so fallen, such a catastrophe, Deus vetet [God forbid], would result in the loss of papal office."
The location for the upcoming conference is significant, reports Church Militant. It was in the 1300s the University of Paris explored the question of what could be done with the possibly heretical Pope John XXII, who denied the doctrine that the souls of the just are admitted to the beatific vision after death, a position he retracted on his deathbed.
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WND
'BULLETIN: EARTH CREATES WATER – FROM SCRATCH'
Scientific studies push theory, but at least one, lone geologist dissents
Published: March 26, 2017
Headlines in the popular press and science journals have been screaming the claim since January: “Planet Earth makes its own water from scratch deep in the mantle.”
The claim, based on a new computer modeling study that suggests massive reserves of water, presumably fresh, have been produced by the planet itself – possibly more than is found in the world’s oceans – is sensational enough.
The news reports were all based on a study published by Earth and Planetary Science Letters based on new research by Zdenek Futera at the University College Dublin in Ireland and several collaborators. It backs up previous work by others published in 2014 in the Scientific American and the theory known as “primary water.”
“It’s actually the confirmation that there is a very, very large amount of water that’s trapped in a really distinct layer in the deep Earth,” said Graham Pearson, lead author of the 2014 study and a geochemist at the University of Alberta in Canada. “It translates into a very, very large mass of water, approaching the sort of mass of water that’s present in all the world’s oceans.”
The controversy, however, is over how the water got there, since it is inconceivable it could have dripped beneath the heavy rock layer above it from the surface. That leaves evolutionary scientists with a problem.
They have theorized that water came to the planet aboard asteroids and comets to fill the surface oceans, rivers and streams – making life possible.
But how does one explain oceans deep within the Earth’s surface?
The latest studies have attempted to explain that problem with complex formulas that suggest the Earth itself is making the water – from scratch.
If true, the news would be startlingly good for an increasingly fresh-water-starved world.
While about 71 percent of the Earth is covered with water, 96.5 percent of it is saline and undrinkable ocean water. Surface water is constantly being recycled through evaporation and rainfall. Even the water we use from wells is recycled as part of this process.
But if, as more scientific studies suggest is correct, “primary water” deep beneath the mantle or crust of the Earth exceeds the amount found in all the planet’s oceans, there is hardly a shortage, especially if it can be brought to the surface through natural processes, such as earthquakes and volcanoes, or through deep-well drilling.
Few in the scientific community have questioned the notion that the Earth can actually create water.
But, at least one, Andrew Snelling, a Ph.D geologist from Australia who serves as director of research for Answers in Genesis, thinks the idea is desperate theorizing by secular scientists who understand the massive water find threatens evolution.
“It is ironic that secularist scientists are still seeking to explain where the Earth’s water came from.” he writes. “For many years now they have endeavored to fill in the difficult-to-explain pieces of their ‘story’ about how our home Earth ‘just happened’ to become so habitable for life over the course of its supposed billions-of-years history. Secularists believe the Earth condensed from clumpy matter flung out of the solar nebula 4.56 or so billion years ago. It was thus originally a hot molten blob that cooled. They used to suggest that most of the water came from inside this cooling Earth, but not enough to fill the oceans we have on the Earth’s surface today. A once popular theory was that comets (which are essentially large, dirty snowballs) collided with the Earth and deposited their water on its surface.”
That explanation, he says, could not possibly account for the oceans of water deep beneath the surface of the planet. With the new evidence for just that, a new explanation was needed, Snelling suggests.
“Of course, these same secularists and Bible skeptics say, as predicted in 2 Peter 3:3–6, that there never was a global flood on the Earth, even though it is still 70 percent covered in water, which averages more than two miles deep,” writes Snelling. “But ironically, they also say that, due to the many evidences of massive water erosion on Mars, there was a watery flood ‘of Biblical proportions’ on that planet in the past, even though that planet’s surface is dry today!”
Snelling sees the recent studies as clear evidence of the biblical Flood account. He points to Genesis 7:11, where the Bible says that on the day the Flood began “were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.”
“The Bible’s description of that outbursting event is merely confirmed by the latest findings of the secular scientists,” he writes.
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theguardian
Rise of Hindu ‘extremist’ spooks Muslim minority in India’s heartland
In Gorakhpur, the power base of a firebrand monk, religious tension grows with Uttar Pradesh’s 40 million Muslims
Supporters of the BJP celebrate a stunning election victory in Uttar Pradesh. Photograph: Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images
Michael Safi in Gorakhpur
Sunday 26 March 2017 00.02 GMT
Last modified on Sunday 26 March 2017 10.00 BST
Pastor Ritesh Joshua had just called a tea break when he saw the men in the saffron scarves. More than a hundred, some wielding sticks, had massed outside his white stucco church on the outskirts of Gorakhpur, a temple town in eastern Uttar Pradesh. It was three days after Christmas.
“They started shouting, ‘You are converting people. We will not allow any conversions here’,” he says. “They shoved people, turned over furniture, and told me, ‘You are the main culprit’.”
The men, allegedly part of a religious activist group called the Hindu Yuva Vahini, cornered one of the parishioners. Smartphone footage shows the woman pulling her blue shawl tightly around herself as she answers questions about her involvement with the church. “No one is forcing me to convert,” she insists.
“If the police hadn’t arrived, we don’t know what would have happened next,” Joshua says. “After the men left, everyone in the church was silent, so frightened. This is a time of testing for us.”
Last week, the monk who founded the HYV, and whose firebrand Hindu supremacist vision guides the organisation, was selected by the party of prime minister Narendra Modi to lead the most populous state in India – the equivalent of the sixth largest nation on earth.
Yogi Adityanath’s appointment as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, about a fifth of whose 200 million people are Muslim, is “stunning”, says Milan Vaishnav, at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a foreign policy thinktank. “He is an extremist in terms of his speeches, a very proud rabble-rouser, and somebody who doesn’t have a claim to fame other than a dedication to a strident form of Hindu nationalism.”
“It is an important and disturbing moment,” agrees Ramachandra Guha, an author and historian. “It is the fringe moving to the mainstream.”
The boyish face of Adityanath, 44, beamed down on Gorakhpur last week from thousands of green-and-saffron banners plastered along its main road. On Sunday, tens of thousands of people are expected to line the road for his triumphant return to Gorakhpur, the electorate he has represented for almost two decades in the Uttar Pradesh parliament.
Another addition to the city streets last week were squads of police officers hunting so-called “Romeos”. Along with a ban on buffalo slaughter, cracking down on amorous young men was a key campaign promise of the ruling Bharatiya Janata party. Officially, the police are targeting “Eve-teasing”, the endemic sexual harassment that blights some Indian streets. But critics instead see a crackdown on mixed-religion couples, in line with Adityanath’s fevered, baseless warnings that Muslim men are trying to seduce Hindu women as part of “love jihad”.
Yogi Adityanath, the hardline Hindu leader, prepares to meet party leaders. Photograph: Manish Swarup/AP
The surprise appointment of Adityanath to run the state has deeply rattled Manoj Singh, a Gorakhpur journalist who has spent the last two decades tracking the new chief minister and the HYV men he labels a “private army”. He recalls, 10 years ago, when the city boiled with religious tension after the murder of a Hindu man, and Adityanath rose to address a crowd of HYV supporters outside the Gorakhpur railway station.
“We cannot tolerate such incidents any more,” he told the men. “It has crossed all limits. If someone sets ablaze the houses and shops of Hindus, then I do not think that someone stops you from doing such things.
“Get ready for a final battle,” he says. Court documents allege Adityanath’s followers then went on a rampage, burning Muslim-owned properties and an Islamic mausoleum. “I saw the burned shops,” Singh says. “I saw the Muslim men who ran the shops trying to douse the fire. I knew one of the shopkeepers. He was very emotional. He said, ‘Look what has happened to me. I’m ruined’.”
Adityanath was arrested and imprisoned for 11 days. He broke down in parliament recalling the ordeal. But, Singh says, his fiery rhetoric was unchanged. “If [Muslims] kill one Hindu man, then we will kill 100 Muslim men,” he has said since. But Adityanath began to distance himself from frontline violence. “He took a political turn,” Singh says. “He started having political dreams.”
Hinduism is a poor soil for fundamentalists such as Adityanath to grow. The world’s third most-practised religion has no pope, no mandatory scripture, no impulse to convert new believers. The caste system has sown division deep into its DNA. Wherever Hinduism has taken and flourished across Asia it has blended with and infused local cultures, forming what author Sunil Khilnani has called a “bewildering internal pluralism”.
It was contact with more rigid doctrines, first the Islam of the Mughals, then the Christianity of the British, that first planted the seeds of political Hinduism. They grew with demands for Indian independence, as those who sought freedom for the extraordinarily diverse subcontinent grappled with the question: what was an Indian, anyway?
Jawarharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, opted for the broadest possible answer. The India his Congress party advocated was, he wrote, proudly plural: “An ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously”.
But Hindu nationalists such as Vinayak Savarkar, discerned in the countless communities that populated modern-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh an essential “Hindutva”, or Hindu-ness, that persisted no matter what faith an Indian practised.
“Religious minorities will all have the right to practise their religion”, Savarkar wrote of the India he envisioned – but they were inescapably citizens of a Hindu “rashtra”, or nation.
“This vision of Indian history is one of victimhood,” says Guha. “That Hindus were first persecuted by the Muslims, then the British, and they can only recover when they repudiate all that is Muslim and British in their past.”
The elevation of Adityanath is part of that “old battle between the Congress and the rightwing Hindu parties”, he says. For the first 40 years after independence, Hindu nationalists struggled to summon more than 10% of the national vote. But their appeal has surged in the past quarter-century, culminating in the election three years ago of Modi, the staunchest Hindutva flag bearer ever to occupy the prime minister’s residence.
Other than Modi’s political talents, Guha says the growth of Hindu nationalism is partly down to poor leadership in the Congress party, whose most prominent leader is Nehru’s great-grandson, Rahul Gandhi.
“But it is also part of a regional and global phenomenon of religious nationalism. You see it now in Turkey, and in our neighbourhood, with Pakistan and Bangladesh. There are parallels with Sri Lanka. And even in America, when George Bush said Jesus was his favourite philosopher,You can’t blame Rahul Gandhi for everything,” he says.
Modi was briefly an international pariah over his Gujarat state government’s alleged role in ignoring, and possibly abetting, deadly Hindu-Muslim riots in the state in 2002. But he assiduously reinvented his image in the decade before winning power in 2014, projecting himself as a pro-business, Apple Watch-sporting statesman obsessed with economic development.
In power, Modi has been coy about his Hindu nationalist agenda, prioritising issues such as tax reform and corruption crackdowns over the national ban on cow slaughter his party championed on the campaign trail.
With the selection of Adityanath, “the veil has been lifted”, says Vaishnav, from the Carnegie Endowment. “It answers one of the questions that we had about Modi all along,” he says. “Is this guy’s project about development or Hindu nationalism? What this pick reaffirms is that it’s not an either/or question. He has two faces: one is Modi the great economic moderniser, and the other is one of muscular nationalism – and Adit is its starkest manifestation,” he says.
In Zafara Bazar, a Muslim district of Gorakhpur, Gulshan Ali is talking bitterly near the butcher shop where he worked until last Monday: “They talked about ‘development for all’, but the moment Adityanath became chief minister he started taking away our jobs,” he says. That was when – less than 24 hours after Adityanath was sworn in – police officers told him the business was being shut. “We didn’t get any notice,” another butcher, Jawad Ali, says. He pleaded that his shop sold only buffalo, not the cow meat that many Hindus eschew. “But they told me, ‘From today, your business is closed’.”
A thick blanket now hangs over Jawad Ali’s shopfront, and he passes his days with other out-of-work butchers reading the newspaper and gossiping darkly about what might be coming next. “For several generations we’ve been butchers,” he says. He admits he has been operating his shop unlicensed for the 15 years – but not for lack of trying. “Since 2002 the government stopped renewing meat licences because of Yogi Adityanath and his movement,” he says.
A previous government, one that relied on Muslim votes to hold office, worked out a compromise between its voter base and the growing clamour to ban cow and buffalo meat in the state: butchers such as Ali would be denied licences, but allowed to continue running their businesses.
The bargain held until Adityanath’s unexpected ascension. The crackdown on butchers has left up to 2,500 families in Gorakhpur without an income.
Heightening their frustration is that India is the world’s largest exporter of buffalo meat, with most of the companies run by Hindus who see no clash with their beliefs. “Here they’ve found a new god in buffalo,” one of the meat-workers mutters.
The chief preoccupation for many Muslims in the city is what comes next for the HYV. A few kilometres from Zafar Bazar is the resplendent Gorakhnath Mutt, a campus of ornate, chalky white temples interspersed with manmade ponds and patches of yellow and saffron marigolds.
The temple, which Adityanath oversees as chief priest, was buzzing this week with political officials and HYV men basking in the glow of their leader’s sudden promotion. “You talk to many Muslims, in and around the campus here, they all appreciate that Yogi Adityanath has become chief minister,” says Pramod Kumar Mall, the officer in charge of the HYV.
The role of the HYV, now that its leader is the most powerful man in Uttar Pradesh, will not change, says HYV officer Pramod Kumar Mall. “We are working for the nationalist movement. We don’t want this country to disintegrate. There are so many movements who want to disintegrate the system, and we want to stop them and make people understand about it,” he says.
Regrettably, he says, there are “many” Muslims in the country working against Indian interests. “Just as President Trump has found so many, in India you will find so many.” But he is adamant that minorities in the state have nothing to fear from Adityanath’s rule. “This country belongs to them,” he says. “[As long as] they feel they are citizens of this country and feel they should respect the national religion – just as Hinduism has accepted many religions.”
Despite Mall’s assurances, Muslim community leaders in Gorakhpur are well aware of the new reality in their state. Over tea at his home, surgeon Wijahat Kareem, 62, describes his own political philosophy as “Gandhian”. “But Gandhi is losing his sheen,” he says. He chooses his words carefully. “You cannot change his heart,” he says of the new chief minister. “He will definitely favour Hindus over Muslims, but we can’t complain. This is what he has been since the beginning. You know with whom you are talking But there is hope that because of his past record he will be more cautious, more liberal than he was earlier on,” he says.
Hope, he concedes, is all Uttar Pradesh’s Muslims have left to rely on. “Politicians cannot win on the basis of Muslim votes,” he says. “So we have to keep believing in the right-thinking Hindus. That’s what we are all hoping for. Our staying in the mainstream of the country depends on them.”
He insists, repeatedly, that he is “not concerned”. But as he goes to say goodbye he pauses in the door frame. For a moment he is silent. “Let us pray for the Muslims of Gorakhpur,” he finally says. “Even if Yogi is harming Muslims in other parts of the country, he won’t do anything to Muslims in Gorakhpur. Of that I’m very sure.”
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THE SUN
SAS ON THE STREETS
SAS troops ‘to be deployed to London’s streets permanently’ in wake of Westminster attack in bid to bolster security in capital
Elite officers will reportedly be on an "immediate notice to move" and be armed with special "take-down" bullets
By Gemma Mullin
26th March 2017, 10:28 am Updated: 27th March 2017, 7:13 pm
SAS TROOPS are to be deployed to London’s streets permanently in the wake of the Westminster attack to bolster security in the capital, it’s been reported.
Specialist soldiers will reportedly be placed on standby at a secret location in the city centre for at least the next year.
SAS troops are set to be deployed to London’s streets permanently for the next year, according to reports
It comes as a ring of steel was erected around London’s landmarks to strengthen defences and prevent another attack.
Elite officers, normally based in Hereford, will be on an “immediate notice to move” and be armed with special “take-down” bullets, according to the Daily Star.
They’ll also reportedly be able to enter buildings using explosives or “fast-rope” from helicopters on to roofs.
MPs are also said to be getting SAS training following the atrocity in Westminster, which left three people and unarmed police officer PC Keith Palmer dead.
Escape tactics for cabinet members is set to be reviewed after footage of Prime Minister Theresa May being scrambled to her car by armed cops emerged in the moments after the attack.
A security source told the Star: “Incidents such as last Wednesday’s attack always highlight weaknesses in any security system.
“No system is perfect but it’s important that any perceived weaknesses are addressed. People need to know how to react in an emergency.”
It's also claimed MI5, which is believed to be reviewing its intelligence gathering following the Westminster attacks, will increase its recruitment drive to monitor potential lone wolf attacks.
The number of cops have almost doubled around London and throughout the country after terrorist Khalid Masood drove his car across Westminster Bridge, ploughing through crowds before stabbing a police officer.
Part of the response to the terror attack includes huge seven-tonne cars that can withstand bomb blasts and machine gun fire put onto London’s streets, with the vehicles able to plough through barriers.
The huge Jankel armoured vehicles, manufactured in Weybridge, Surrey, include a V8 turbo-diesel engine, as well as with bullet proof glass and tyres and bulletproof glass.
The heavy-duty machines, known as “The Guardians” can also punch through barricades while being fully protected with blast resistant floors.
When asked where the vehicles are deployed and what they are armed to repel, a Scotland Yard spokesman told The Sun: "We're not prepared to discuss".
Meanwhile, the number of armed police is set to be boosted by 1,500 personnel.
Authorities have vowed to ensure London is safe - and open for business - as the capital struggles to come to terms with the terror that threatened the heart of democracy.
Acting Deputy Commissioner, Mark Rowley, said: "More widely - the police service will sustain an enhanced armed and unarmed presence over the next few days.
"London, and the UK, are open for business, and we are out there in greater numbers to make sure that the public see a highly visible presence to help reassure them as they go about their daily lives."
The top anti-terror cop added: "In London the number of armed officers remains at near double strength, while in other parts of the UK there are up to a third more armed officers on duty."
He said that the current arrangements had been developed to ensure the safety of the public without being "overly intrusive".
***
MailOnline
China builds a mega-city larger than Britain with over 100 million people
Nation combines its capital with nearby cities to form a 'megatropolis'
The region would cover 83,403 square miles and have 100 million people
Rail network has been planned to realise a 'one-hour commute zone'
Another mega-city is forming in southern China with 64 million residents
By Tracy You For Mailonline
PUBLISHED: 17:14, 28 March 2017 | UPDATED: 17:35, 28 March 2017
A mega-city is set to appear in China, which would be home to around one-tenth of the country's population.
More than 100 million residents would be living within the 'megatropolis', which is larger than Britain, or some 137 times the size of London.
The authority plans to build an extensive network of high-speed railways and motorways to make sure that by 2020, residents of the humongous Jing-Jin-Ji urbanised region would spend less than an hour on their commutes.
A massive urbanised region is forming around the Chinese capital city of Beijing (pictured)
The mega-city, 137 times the size of London, is set to consolidate Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei
Situated in the north-east part of China on the coast of Bohai Sea, the planned mega-city is set to consolidate some of China's most populous urban areas.
It's set to include Beijing and Tianjin, with 20 million and 13 million residents respectively, as well as Hebei, the province that surrounds them and has 74.2 million residents.
The massive urbanised region, known as Jing-Jin-Ji, would cover a whopping 83,403 square miles (216,020 square kilometres), about 3,000 square miles larger than Britain.
It's also about 137 times the size of Greater London, which occupies 607 square miles (1,572 square kilometres).
Other major cities in Jing-Jin-Ji region include Shijiazhuang, the provincial capital of Hebei with around 10 million people, Chengde, the summer retreat of ancient emperors and Qinghuangdao, the eastern end of the Great Wall of China.
Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei are known as Jing, Jin and Ji in short.
Vast resources have been poured into the mega-city.
Last year, more than 340 billion yuan (£40 billion) was invested in Jing-Jin-Ji's five pillar industries, namely education, health, transport, ecology and human resources, reported China's Economic Information Daily.
By 2020, eight new intercity railways would be completed; and by 2050, a further 16 would appear on the map.
In November, the Chinese government approved some 250 billion yuan (£29 billion) for the region to build 700 miles (91,126 kilometres) of railways within three years, according to an article on NBC News.
Jing-Jin-Ji would cover a whopping 83,403 square miles with Beijing (pictured) at its core
The major part of the mega-city would be the current Hebei Province, whose Hebei Academy (pictured) looks like Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
The development of the Jing-Jin-Ji mega-city was first approved by China's National Development and Reform Commission in 2014, which called for a 'new capital economic zone'.
According to the vision, Beijing will remain as the Chinese capital and the political and financial centre. The city is set to cut down its manufacturing industry and focus on the energy-saving and environmental sectors.
Some of the manufacturers are due to be moved to harbour city Tianjin, which would also focus on its Free Trade Zone.
On the other hand, Hebei would expand its clean manufacturing and wholesale trading industries.
Although the government planned to develop the three regions on a collaborative effort, it's understood that up until now authorities from Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei have been drafting their administrative plans separately.
However earlier this month, the China's National Development and Reform Commission said they are due to break the administrative barriers between the three regions, reported Xinhua News Agency.
According to Minister He Lifeng, the Commission is preparing a plan to officially combine Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei.
It's also thought that the plan could facilitate the 2022 Winter Olympics, which will be jointly held by Beijing and Zhangjiakou, both in the Jing-Jin-Ji mega-city.
Jing-Jin-Ji is not the only super urban region in China. In Pearl River Delta Region another mega-city measuring some 180,000 square kilometres (70,000 square miles) is forming.
With an estimated population of 64 million people, the southern China's financial and manufacturing hub stretches from Guangzhou to Shenzhen, which borders Hong Kong.
***
SHFTplan.com
Claim: Russia Has Created A Devastating Zircon Hypersonic Missile That Will Rip Right Through U.S. Warships: “Unstoppable… Unbeatable… Undefendable”
Author Mac Slavo
Date March 27th, 2017
As President Trump ratchets up the U.S. military in his latest budget proposal, his counterpart, Russian President Vladimir Putin, has reportedly created a hypersonic missile with such devastating implications for the U.S. Navy, that it is being called “unstoppable.”
Russia claims to have created a devastating hypersonic missile that travels five times faster than the speed of sound and could rip through navy warship defences because it’s too fast to stop.
The Kremlin’s Zircon missile has been called “unstoppable”, “unbeatable” and “undefendable” with a 4,600mph speed that only one defence system in the world can destroy – that system is owned by Russia.
The missile employs revolutionary scramjet technology to reach its hypersonic speeds whereby propulsion is created by forcing air from the atmosphere into its combustor where it mixes with on-board fuel – rather than carry both fuel and oxidizer like traditional rockets. This makes it lighter, and therefore much faster.
…
The US Navy warns it could be fitted to Russia’s nuclear-powered Kirkov warship, where it would have a range of up to 500 miles.
In comparison, the Royal Navy’s Sea Ceptor missile, which is designed to destroy incoming missiles can only travel 15 miles and hit top speeds of 2,300mph.
Full report: International Business Time
Reports indicate that no counter measures for the Zircon missile exist. If true, then the majority of the U.S. Naval fleet has just been rendered obsolete.
***
All News Pipeline
How Will 260 Million Americans 'Disappear' In Less Than 8 Years? Deagel Has America Sitting Just Above Venezuela By 2025 With Purchasing Power Of US Dollar Ranked 78th In The World
By Stefan Stanford
March 24, 2017
'The purchasing power of the US dollar will continue to plummet like a corrupt banker wearing cement shoes dropping to the bottom of a river as long as the Federal Reserve keeps printing money, backed by nothing, like it's toilet paper'.
Last updated on March 23rd of 2017, the 'country' page for the United States of America over at Deagel.com seen in the screenshot above still shows a forecast population for the US for the year 2025 to be 61 million people. Much more than just a 'significant' drop from the 321 million living in America in 2015, we've asked in stories on ANP time and again what they expected to happen to 260 million Americans and where they were going to go in less than 10 years.
While the forecast population drop is shattering, maybe even more doom-portending are the forecast financial numbers outlined by Deagel with a gross domestic product drop from $18 trillion in 2015, #1 in the world, to a forecast of only $949 BILLION in 2025, ranked only 11th in the world. The drop in forecast military budget from $781 billion a year in 2015 to only $8.2 billion a year in 2025 shows that according to some, President Donald Trump's increased military budget might be a temporary thing.
Meanwhile, with 2025 less than 8 years away, the GDP per capita drop from $55,855 in 2015 to a forecast of only $15,517 in 2025 shows us many more Americans will be living in poverty in less than 8 years from now than are here now. What does Deagel know that we don't know? This new story from Zero Hedge reports the 'retail apocalypse' has officially descended upon America as Dave with the X22Report also expands upon in the 1st video below. And as we read in the new SQAlert republished below videos, everything happening now geopolitically and financially is tied together quite tightly with Deagel's 2025 forecast which still shows a forthcoming collapse for America despite President Trump.
While Deagel admits their numbers are only a 'forecast', we should keep in mind the sources for their information are the United States government, the CIA, the US Department of State, the US Department of Defense, the World Bank, the European Union, the US Army, the US Navy, the US Marines, the US Air Force, and the US Coast Guard among others.
Many people have asked, what does Deagel.com do? Deagel keeps track of numbers. For example, as seen in the screenshot below, if you want to know how many B-1B Lancer Long Range Attack Aircraft the United States of America had in their possession, we'd go to Deagel which has numbers for everything 'military industrial complex' related. And as we also see, they update their website quite regularly as seen in several March and February 2017 entries.
So, with strong ties to the US government and US military as sources, what does Deagel know that we don't know? Besides the other huge drops in population, GDP, and military budget, the Deagel category for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) tells us exactly what the mainstream media won't: Very difficult times are ahead if Deagel's forecast for 2025 is correct.
In 2015, the United States stood at #16 in the world for PPP at $55,800. In comparison, the failing socialist nation of Venezuela stood at #89 in PPP at $16,700.
For 2025, Venezuela is forecast to be #86 in the world at a PPP of $9,108, a big drop from 2015. The US's forecast PPP for 2025? $10,345 for a ranking of #78 in the world.
Quite a steep drop when you consider Venezuela's PPP in 2015 was $6,000+ more than they are forecasting the US's PPP to be in less than 8 years from now! What might happen to cause such a HUGE drop in the US dollar's purchasing power? It's clear to us that Deagel's forecasts show an America in 2025 in total collapse with the purchasing power of the US dollar worse than what is happening in Venezuela right now. You can see the US in the chart from Deagel below, sitting only 8 spots above Venezuela in Deagel's 2025 PPP forecast. This chart shows the US approaching 3rd world nation status by 2025.
Why is such a huge drop in our PPP forecast for 2025 for the US, dropping from $55,800 to $10,345? Of course, the purchasing power of the US dollar will continue to plummet like a corrupt banker wearing cement shoes dropping to the bottom of a river as long as the Federal Reserve keeps printing money like it's toilet paper. For even the people in Venezuela have recently figured out it's much cheaper to use money there as napkins or toilet paper than actually having to go out and buy the products.
Similar to what happened during the 1930's and the Weimar Republic which printed so much money it became completely worthless, what we are watching unfolding is the globalists long held plans to destroy our sovereignty and nation state by spending us to the point we are now at, with a national debt clock ticking onwards approaching $20 trillion and a possible hard debt limit ahead of us.
Are there any answers and might 'gold' be the way America has to go? The recent stories from across the world and the internet prove to us that the 1% are preparing for 'the apocalypse', with many believe there is no turning back and danger is ahead as Erin Elizabeth over at Health Nut News recently reported. Whether North Korea brings global war or what is happening now in Venezuela comes home to America, there's never been a more important time to prepare for possible 'dark times ahead'.
Deagel also answered for us in a statement why they forecast America to have 260 million less people by 2025 than there were in 2015, a 'confluence of crisis with devastating results' that leaves America a broken, dying nation. Just what the globalists have been trying to do to our nation all along - neuter us, financially destroy our sovereignty to complete their 'totalitarian new world order'. We'll close here with this brief excerpt of Deagel's explanation with the important previously mentioned SQAlert below videos.:
There have been many questions about the countries forecast specially the one focusing on the United States of America (USA). They won't be answered one by one but below you can find some explanation, thoughts and reflections. We are going to keep this as short as possible.
The majority of the economic and demographic data used in the making of the forecasts is widely available by institutions such as the CIA, IMF, UN, USG, etc. You can see the most relevant data at every single country's page. There is a tiny part of data coming from a variety of shadow sources such as Internet gurus, unsigned reports and others. But all these sources are from the internet and are of public domain for at least a minority.
The key element to understand the process that the USA will enter in the upcoming decade is migration. In the past, specially in the 20th century, the key factor that allowed the USA to rise to its colossus status was immigration with the benefits of a demographic expansion supporting the credit expansion and the brain drain from the rest of the world benefiting the States. The collapse of the Western financial system will wipe out the standard of living of its population while ending ponzi schemes such as the stock exchange and the pension funds. The population will be hit so badly by a full array of bubbles and ponzi schemes that the migration engine will start to work in reverse accelerating itself due to ripple effects thus leading to the demise of the States.
This unseen situation for the States will develop itself in a cascade pattern with unprecedented and devastating effects for the economy. Jobs offshoring will surely end with many American Corporations relocating overseas thus becoming foreign Corporations!!!! We see a significant part of the American population migrating to Latin America and Asia while migration to Europe - suffering a similar illness - won't be relevant. Nevertheless the death toll will be horrible. Take into account that the Soviet Union's population was poorer than the Americans nowadays or even then. The ex-Soviets suffered during the following struggle in the 1990s with a significant death toll and the loss of national pride. Might we say "Twice the pride, double the fall"? Nope.
The American standard of living is one of the highest, far more than double of the Soviets while having added a services economy that will be gone along with the financial system. When pensioners see their retirement disappear in front of their eyes and there are no servicing jobs you can imagine what is going to happen next. At least younger people can migrate. Never in human history were so many elders among the population. In past centuries people were lucky to get to their 30s or 40s. The American downfall is set to be far worse than the Soviet Union's one. A confluence of crisis with a devastating result.
***
INDEPENDENT
FBI has uncovered 'evidence of treason' among alt-right websites, says George W Bush's ethics lawyer
Richard Painter, who was part of George W Bush's team says there is "no other word for it'
Peter Walker@petejohn_walker
Friday 24 March 2017 10:45 GMT
Donald Trump and with adviser, and former executive Breitbart chairman, Steve Bannon MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
The man who served as former president George W Bush's most senior ethics lawyer has suggested that the FBI is "uncovering evidence of treason" by far right US news websites over their links with Russia.
Richard Painter tweeted a link to an article suggesting that the Bureau was looking into news outlets like Breitbart News, InfoWars and the Kremlin-backed RT News and Sputnik News, to see whether they worked with Russian-backed operatives to disseminate stories favouring Donald Trump during the presidential election at times when his campaign appeared to be struggling.
Sources told US publisher, McClatchy that online "bots" had created created millions of social media posts linking to articles on the sites, some of which were completely false, while other contained a mixture of fact and fiction.
Investigators are now trying to establish whether the websites were complicit with the people managing the "bots" or the operatives were controlling them without their knowledge - which is entirely possible.
Above the article on his Twitter post, Mr Painter said: "FBI uncovering evidence of treason. There is no other word for it."
Currently a professor of corporate law at the University of Minnesota, he served as Mr Bush's most senior ethics lawyer between 2005 and 2007.
His comment came within days of FBI director James Comey's revelation that the Bureau was investigating Russia’s alleged interference with the 2016 election and possible links between Moscow and Donald Trump’s campaign team.
Spokespeople for RT and InfoWars have all vehemently denied links to Russia.
A Sputnik press office spokesperson said: “Sputnik has nothing to do with bots and will take whatever legal action may be necessary to protect its reputation from defamation caused by anyone arguing to the contrary.”
The Independent contacted Breitbart, the FBI, the Russia’s foreign ministry and Mr Painter for comment, but none had responded at the time of publication.
***
RT
Internet privacy rules removed by Congress
Published time: 29 Mar, 2017 01:31
Edited time: 29 Mar, 2017 09:14
Internet providers will not be required to ask permission to sell customers' browsing habits, including medical information, shopping habits and even pornography preferences after Congress voted to roll back Obama-era regulations.
The House of Representatives voted 215 to 205 in favor of eliminating restrictions of internet service providers (ISP) and their ability to sell their customer’s information on Tuesday. The protections were planned to be enacted by the end of 2017 and would have forced ISPs to get permission from their customers before selling their internet browsing and app habits to advertisers.
The vote was largely bipartisan, with those in favor being exclusively Republican. However, several Republican lawmakers crossed over to vote against eliminating the privacy measures. Last Thursday, a Senate vote set the stage for the House of Representatives to send the bill to President Donald Trump’s desk after they voted exclusively on party lines against the measures.
The planned protections were proposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and would have prevented ISPs and broadband providers from selling information, including where customers bank, shop, browse, their political views and even sexual orientation.
Those in favor of eliminating the protection measures have claimed that preventing ISPs from requiring consumer consent for customer information will eliminate competition among providers.
In a press release, Senator Jeff Flake (R-Arizona) defended rolling back the protections, saying the FCC's privacy policy "has the potential to limit consumer choice, stifle innovation, and jeopardize data security by destabilizing the internet ecosystem."
Supporters of the FCC regulations believe the repeal will only benefit broadband providers.
“Instead of making the industry more competitive, what this bill wants to do is give these four or five ISPs even more power,” Representative Ro Khanna (D-California) told The Guardian.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting privacy on the internet, released a statement saying “should President Donald Trump sign S.J. Res. 34 into law, big Internet providers will be given new powers to harvest your personal information in extraordinarily creepy ways.”
For internet users who want to protect their privacy from ISPs, the options are slim going forward. Some may choose to utilize a virtual private network (VPN), a frequently paid service that routes all internet traffic through one server not directly connected to the user. However, many sites like Netflix try to ban VPN users from utilizing their services.
Others may move over to using Tor, a more complex server that could leave users open to malicious servers.
Repealing the FCC’s regulations is not a done deal, yet. President Trump has yet to sign off on SJ Res 34, leaving opponents room for a Hail Mary. The EFF’s Jeremy Gillula told the Guardian, “I think we’d try to convince President Trump that signing a bill that helps big corporate interests by eliminating Americans’ privacy and weakening their cybersecurity isn’t exactly ‘draining the swamp.’”
The Daily Bell
What Everyone Should Know About The New Quarantine Regulation
Wednesday, 22 March 2017 13:18 The Daily Bell
Imagine men in bleach white bio suits with medical masks show up at your door. You are suspected of carrying a communicable disease. You will now be arrested and held without due process, indefinitely.
The government could do this any day.
They have the “authority”. They have the personnel. They have the funding. Now all they need is the excuse.
The Authority
The federal government claims the right to quarantine anyone who they suspect has or has come into contact with a communicable disease.
On January 19th of this year, a regulation was passed by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The regulation is meant to allow the HHS and other departments of the federal government to stop the spread of contagious diseases, like Ebola or bird flu. But the regulation is obscure enough to be a serious threat to liberty.
Because the government does not consider quarantine an arrest, those being detained are not afforded the same rights and due process that criminals are supposed to get through the U.S. Justice system.
Apprehension and detention of persons with quarantinable communicable diseases.
(a) The Director may authorize the apprehension, medical examination, quarantine, isolation, or conditional release of any individual for the purpose of preventing the introduction, transmission, and spread of quarantinable communicable diseases, as specified by Executive Order, based upon a finding that:
(1) The individual is reasonably believed to be infected with a quarantinable communicable disease in a qualifying stage and is moving or about to move from a State into another State; or
(2) The individual is reasonably believed to be infected with a quarantinable communicable disease in a qualifying stage and constitutes a probable source of infection to other individuals who may be moving from a State into another State.
That pretty much covers everyone, in a sly little trick to make this regulation somehow apply to interstate commerce. Anyone living in America risks coming into contact with someone who might physically move into another state.
And a person must simply be “reasonably believed” to be infected or have come into contact with an infection, which again is a very low standard that could easily apply to almost anyone who has recently gone out in public. Even when they define “reasonably believed,” the CDC and HHS use obscure language so that the definition could basically fit anyone.
Reasonably believed to be infected, as applied to an individual, means specific articulable facts upon which a public health officer could reasonably draw the inference that an individual has been exposed, either directly or indirectly, to the infectious agent that causes a quarantinable communicable disease, as through contact with an infected person or an infected person’s bodily fluids, a contaminated environment, or through an intermediate host or vector, and that as a consequence of the exposure, the individual is or may be harboring in the body the infectious agent of that quarantinable communicable disease.
Indirectly being exposed to a contaminated environment could get you quarantined. That doesn’t sound like a very strict standard, nor does it sound like a well defined parameter for apprehension. Basically anyone could think up a “reasonable” suspicion that someone has been exposed to a disease that would require quarantine.
The regulation says those quarantined will be allowed representation, but what good will this representative do? The government has all the obscure “authority” they need to keep you on lock down.
The regulation also allows the government to conduct screenings “through non-invasive procedures determined appropriate” at airports, bus stations, and other public places, where people may be required to provide contact information.
And there is the obscure limit again: “determined appropriate.” It is a safe bet that the government will determine any action it takes as “appropriate”.
This means people will be compelled to answer the government’s questions and provide information against their will. Since carrying a disease is not guilt of a crime, the CDC and HHS believe that this does not violate the Fifth Amendment protections against being compelled to give testimony that may incriminate you.
As for how this doesn’t violate the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure, the regulation sites some legal precedents for how the government can legally violate your rights.
And the same will apply after apprehension where during a forced medical exam, you may also be required to provide further health details about yourself to the authorities.
The Personnel: Who Will Enforce This?
The group capable of large scale detainment and quarantine was authorized under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).
A thousands strong army of medical police is ready to be activated by the government, and spring into action in case of an epidemic.
SEC. 5210 ESTABLISHING A READY RESERVE CORPS
Section 203 of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 204) is amended to read as follows:
SEC. 203 COMMISSIONED CORPS AND READY RESERVE CORPS
‘(a) Establishment-
‘(1) IN GENERAL- There shall be in the Service a commissioned Regular Corps and a Ready Reserve Corps for service in time of national emergency.
‘(2) REQUIREMENT- All commissioned officers shall be citizens of the United States and shall be appointed without regard to the civil-service laws and compensated without regard to the Classification Act of 1923, as amended.
Notice that officers are appointed “without regard to the civil-service laws.” These are laws designed to remove politics as a consideration when hiring in the public sector. They also establish guidelines based on merit, impartial hiring criteria, and safety from arbitrary firing and unwarranted disciplinary action.
Officers are also chosen “without regard to the Classification Act of 1923,” which established merit pay and compensation based on performance.
To be clear, the bill states these laws will be disregarded when appointing this police force. So these officers have been hired based on no known criteria, without any defined qualifications, can be denied for no particular reason, can be fired for any reason whatsoever, paid without regard to merit, and punished or rewarded independently of performance.
That section basically ensures the Ready Reserve Corps can be a politicized group that will follow orders of whoever appoints them.
The Funding
Most of the provisions discussed are already well funded through the Centers for Disease Control, and Department of Health and Human Services. But another source to bolster the government quarantine capabilities is making its way through congress.
The bill, which has passed the House and is now in the Senate, wants the government to be able to deal with “surge capacity” in the event of an epidemic.
It would use certain Homeland Security grants and funds for “enhancing medical preparedness, medical surge capacity, and mass prophylaxis capabilities.”
The Excuse
We’ve heard about some disease every year with the potential to cause mass casualties in the event of an outbreak. It is difficult to tell sometimes how much of the hype is media driven, versus which diseases are of real concern.
But there is actual risk for an eventual epidemic. In China, a particularly deadly strain of bird flu is more prevalent this year than in the past four years.
The Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 which killed tens of millions of people worldwide, is believed to have started in China in a similar fashion. All it takes is the right mutation of the flu virus to become deadly.
So in a sense, the government should be prepared for such an event, but that doesn’t mean they have to violate rights in order to keep the public safe.
It is important to remember that when protecting the public health, the concern is for the general population and not individuals. That is why regulations like this one open up the possibility that individuals will be severely mistreated, in the name of stopping a contagious outbreak.
If the government does implement the forced quarantine of individuals, whether the excuse is real or fabricated, individuals have cause to fear for their safety under government detainment.
The Economic Collapse
The Worst Retail Cataclysm Ever: Sears Warns It Is On The Verge Of Collapse As Payless Prepares To File For Bankruptcy
By Michael Snyder, on March 22nd, 2017
More than 3,500 retail stores are going to close all across America over the next few months as the worst retail downturn in U.S. history gets even deeper. Earlier this week, Sears shocked the world when it announced that there is “substantial doubt” that the company will be able to “continue as a going concern” much longer. In other words, Sears has announced that it is on the verge of imminent collapse. Meanwhile, Payless stunned the retail industry when it came out that they are preparing to file for bankruptcy. The “retail apocalypse” that I have been warning about is greatly accelerating, and many believe that this is one of the early warning signs that the economic collapse that is already going on in other parts of the globe will soon reach U.S. shores.
I have repeatedly warned my readers that “Sears is going to zero“, and now Sears is officially saying that it might actually happen. When you file official paperwork with the government that says there is “substantial doubt” that the company will survive, that means that the end is very near…
The company that operates Sears, the department store chain that dominated retail for decades, warned Tuesday that it faces “substantial doubt” about its ability to stay in business unless it can borrow more and tap cash from more of its assets.
“Our historical operating results indicate substantial doubt exists related to the company’s ability to continue as a going concern,” Sears Holdings said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Sears Holdings operates both Sears and Kmart stores.
In the wake of that statement, the price of Sears stock dipped 13.69% to $7.85 a share.
Personally, I am going to miss Sears very much. But of course the truth is that they simply cannot continue operating as they have been.
For the quarter that ended on January 28th, Sears lost an astounding 607 million dollars…
The company said it lost $607 million, or $5.67 per diluted share, during the quarter that ended on Jan. 28. That compared with a loss of $580 million, or $5.44 per diluted share, a year earlier. It has posted a loss in all but two of the last 24 quarters, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.
How in the world is it possible for a retailer to lose that amount of money in just three months?
As I have said before, if they had employees flushing dollar bills down the toilet 24 hours a day they still shouldn’t have losses that big.
This week we also learned that Payless is heading for bankruptcy. According to Bloomberg, the chain is planning to imminently close at least 400 stores…
Payless Inc., the struggling discount shoe chain, is preparing to file for bankruptcy as soon as next week, according to people familiar with the matter.
The company is initially planning to close 400 to 500 stores as it reorganizes operations, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations aren’t public. Payless had originally looked to shutter as many as 1,000 locations, and the number may still be in flux, according to one of the people.
Of course these are just two examples of a much broader phenomenon.
Never before in U.S. history have we seen such a dramatic wave of store closures. According to Business Insider, over 3,500 retail locations “are expected to close in the next couple of months”…
Thousands of mall-based stores are shutting down in what’s fast becoming one of the biggest waves of retail closures in decades.
More than 3,500 stores are expected to close in the next couple of months.
Once thriving shopping malls are rapidly being transformed into ghost towns. As I wrote about just recently, “you might be tempted to think that ‘Space Available’ was the hottest new retail chain in the entire country.”
The demise of Sears is going to be an absolute nightmare for many mall owners. Once “anchor stores” start closing, it is usually only a matter of time before smaller stores start bailing out…
When an anchor store like Sears or Macy’s closes, it often triggers a downward spiral in performance for shopping malls.
Not only do the malls lose the income and shopper traffic from that store’s business, but the closure often triggers “co-tenancy clauses” that allow the other mall tenants to terminate their leases or renegotiate the terms, typically with a period of lower rents, until another retailer moves into the anchor space.
Years ago I wrote of a time when we would see boarded-up storefronts all across America, and now it is happening.
Instead of asking which retailers are going to close, perhaps we should be asking which ones are going to survive this retail cataclysm.
In the past, you could always count on middle class U.S. consumers to save the day, but today the middle class is steadily shrinking and U.S. consumers are increasingly tapped out.
For instance, just look at what is happening to delinquency rates on auto loans…
US auto loan and lease credit loss rates weakened in the second half of 2016, according to a new report from Fitch Ratings, which said they will continue to deteriorate.
“Subprime credit losses are accelerating faster than the prime segment, and this trend is likely to continue as a result of looser underwriting standards by lenders in recent years,” said Michael Taiano, a director at Fitch.
The last time so many Americans got behind on subprime auto loans was during the last financial crisis.
We are seeing so many similarities to what happened just prior to the last recession, and yet most Americans still seem to think that the U.S. economy is going to be just fine in 2017.
Unfortunately, major red flags are popping up in the hard economic numbers and in the financial markets.
The last recession probably should have started back in late 2015, but thanks to manipulation by the Fed and an unprecedented debt binge by the Obama administration, official U.S. GDP growth has been able to stay barely above zero for the last year and a half.
But just because something is delayed does not mean that it is canceled.
All along, our long-term economic imbalances have continued to get even worse, and a date with destiny is rapidly approaching for the U.S. economy.
***
RUSSIA INSIDER
US Forces Block Syrian Army Advance in Preparation For Syria Partition
A U.S.-backed operation near Raqqa aims to "block any advance by Syrian government forces from the west". The Balkanization of Syria begins
RI Staff Mon, Mar 27, 2017
The road to Raqqa is now blocked by U.S. forces and their allies. The chances that Raqqa (and the surrounding region) will be returned to Syria are now slim to none. Foreign armies and their proxies are sharpening their carving knives.
U.S. Special Forces and Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighters have just captured a "strategic air base" from Islamic State in northern Syria; in doing so, they have also "blocked" the advance of the Syrian Army as it approaches Raqqa from the west:
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) announced on Sunday that they captured the Tabqa air base, 45km west of Raqqa, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group's de facto capital in Syria.
Earlier this week, US forces airlifted SDF fighters behind ISIL lines to allow them to launch the Tabqa assault, and on Friday the alliance reached one of the dam's entrances.
SDF forces were within 10km of Raqqa from the north, and aimed to effectively surround the city before launching an assault.
Besides recapturing the dam, SDF said the U.S.-backed operation also aimed to block any advance by Syrian government forces from the west.
The landing forces airdropped into Syria seized four small villages in the area west of Tabqa and cut a main highway that links the provinces of Raqqa, Deir al-Zor, and Aleppo, Scrocca said.
The SDF cut the last main road out of Raqqa earlier this month, narrowing in on the city from the north, east, and west.
The only way in or out of Raqqa now is over the Euphrates River that borders the city to the south.
Incredible, isn't it? A foreign army that is illegally operating in a sovereign nation can just march in and cut off the legitimate army of said sovereign nation from liberating its own city from terrorists.
What a world — and so much for international law.
It will be interesting to see Moscow's reaction. Was this always part of the "deal" in Syria? Or is Washington hoping that Syria, Iran and Russia will accept Raqqa's U.S.-ordained fate?
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YAHOO! NEWS
Hungary ready to detain all migrants: ministry
March 27, 2017
Soldiers patrol along the border fence on the Hungarian-Serbian border in February 2017 (AFP Photo/ATTILA KISBENEDEK)
Budapest (AFP) - Hungary said Monday it was ready to begin detaining asylum-seekers in camps on its southern border with Serbia after passing a law this month that has drawn criticism from rights groups and the UN.
Hungary's parliament approved on March 7 the systematic detention of all asylum-seekers in camps on the border composed of converted shipping containers.
The move was part of policies by hardline anti-immigration Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a strong admirer of US President Donald Trump.
From Tuesday, asylum-seekers entering Hungary as well as those currently in the country will be confined in camps at the its southern borders while their applications are processed.
"The border protection agencies are fully prepared for the entry into force of the reinforced legal border closure on March 28," said a statement by the interior ministry.
"The police, the defence forces and the Immigration and Asylum Office have made the necessary preparations for the implementation of the required measure," said the statement.
The ministry said the purpose of the restrictions is to "prevent migrants with an unclear status from moving freely around the territory of the country and the European Union, and to thereby reduce the security risk of migration".
According to the government 324 shipping container homes have been installed at two separate locations called "transit zones" built into a fence that Hungary erected along the 175-kilometre-(110-mile)-long border in 2015.
EU member Hungary previously systematically detained all asylum applicants but suspended the practise in 2013 under pressure from Brussels, the UN refugee agency and the European Court of Human Rights.
Rights groups like Amnesty International have condemned the new rules for failing to meet Hungary's international obligations to asylum-seekers.
The UNHCR also said that systematic detention will "have a terrible physical and psychological impact on women, children and men who have already greatly suffered".
According to refugee rights group the Hungarian Helsinki Committee (HHC) some 400 asylum-seekers are currently housed in the country's internal camp network, and now face relocation to the border camps.
A second "smart fence" complete with night cameras, heat and movement sensors, and multilingual megaphones warning against crossing the barrier is also under construction, with completion scheduled by May.
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EXPRESS
Poland vows to veto plan for EU future unless it includes more power back from Brussels
STORM clouds are already gathering over the European Union’s planned 60th birthday celebrations after Poland said it would veto any plan for the bloc’s future which does not include repatriation of powers from Brussels.
By NICK GUTTERIDGE, BRUSSELS CORRESPONDENT
PUBLISHED: 08:37, Thu, Mar 23, 2017 | UPDATED: 09:06, Thu, Mar 23, 2017
Polish PM Beata Szydło is involved in a row with the EU over the re-election of Donald Tusk ENDMAINIMAGE
Warsaw continued its recent bitter war of words with eurocrats as it threatened to veto the proposed Rome Declaration, which is meant to pave the way forward for the project after Brexit.
Prime minister Beata Szydło said she would not hesitate to vote down the document if it does not match Poland’s priorities as her country takes an increasingly hard line towards European integration.
Such a move would spark pandemonium amongst other member states at what is supposed to be a carefully choreographed and painstakingly stage-managed display of unity during the bloc’s darkest hours.
Eurocrats have repeatedly talked up the summit in Rome, to be held on March 25, saying it will be a display of “solidarity” between the remaining member states and a “birth certificate for the EU at 27”.
But those plans now appear to be in disarray amid a brutal and escalating diplomatic crisis with Warsaw, which has been infuriated by the re-election of Donald Tusk as EU Council president.
After the decision was made in Brussels earlier this month Polish ministers issued a series of extraordinary attacks on their fellow member states and vowed to take revenge by blocking future EU initiatives.
And now it appears they have the much-vaunted Rome Declaration, which is legally of no consequence but which could not be more symbolically important to Brussels, firmly in their sights.
Ms Szydło said: “If the declaration does not include the issues which are priorities for Poland, we will not accept the declaration.
“The unity of the European Union, defence of a tight NATO cooperation, strengthening the role of national governments and the rules of the common market which cannot divide but unite – these are the four priorities which have to be included in the dec
Her open threat will provoke fury in Europe’s other capitals where for some senior leaders patience with Warsaw’s political grandstanding is growing increasingly thin.
Earlier this month Francois Hollande appeared at the end of his tether with Poland when he said EU funding to the country - the bloc’s biggest recipient - should be pulled until it rows into line.
Those remarks sparked a blazing row over dinner with Ms Szydło, who subsequently called an extraordinary press conference at which she accused the rest of Europe of bullying and "blackmailing" her country.
The summit descended into acrimony after Warsaw vetoed the conclusions of the EU Council summit in protest at the re-election of Mr Tusk and of plans to pursue a “two-speed” Europe in which it fears it will be left behind.
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INDEPENDENT
Tasmanian tiger: 'Sightings' of extinct animal spark hunt in Australia
Carnivore hunted to extinction by European settlers may have survived in isolated wilderness area, if sightings by park ranger and tour guide are genuine
Matt Broomfield@hashtagbroom
Saturday 25 March 2017 15:45 GMT
The last known thylacine died in captivity in 1936, but there have been thousands of unconfirmed sightings since then
Apparent sightings of the Tasmanian tiger in northern Australia have sparked a search for the long-extinct carnivore.
The wolf-like predators were the largest known carnivorous marsupial to have existed alongside human society, but the last known specimen died in a zoo on the island of Tasmania itself in 1936.
However, based on eyewitness evidence provided by a tourism operator and a former park ranger, 50 camera traps will be set up across the Cape York Peninsula in the hope of finding a surviving population.
Professor Bill Laurance will be heading the survey, which will take place across remote locations in Australia's largest wilderness area.
He told the Telegraph: “All observations of putative thylacines to date have been at night, and in one case four animals were observed at close range, about 20 feet away, with a spotlight.
“We have cross-checked the descriptions we received of eye shine colour, body size and shape, animal behaviour, and other attributes, and these are inconsistent with known attributes of other large-bodied species in north Queensland such as dingoes, wild dogs or feral pigs.”
Sightings of the 30 kilogram carnivore properly known as the thylacine are common, but are generally written off as cases of mistaken identity. Feral cats and dogs are the most common lookalikes.
But the two latest observations, whose exact location is being kept a secret by the researchers, are considered plausible. Patrick Shears, a qualified ranger, added that Aboriginal locals also reported sightings of the beast.
"They call it the 'moonlight tiger'," he told the Telegraph. "They're curious. If you're not moving and not making a noise they'll come within a reasonable range and check you out then just trot off.”
The thylacine was not actually related to Western carnivorous dogs or cats, but evolved its teeth, claws and characteristic striped back in isolation.
The Tasmanian tiger had a distinctive large bite, shown here in a still from one of the few videos shot of the extinct beast
It is depicted in Aboriginal rock art from at least 3,000 years ago. However, by the time Western explorers arrived in the Australian continent it was extinct on the mainland and increasingly rare in Tasmania itself, losing out in competition with dingos and human hunters.
Bounties worth £100 a head in today's money fuelled an intensive hunting drive, while diseases and dogs imported from Europe further contributed to its apparent obliteration from Tasmania.
Since the last captive thylacine died, there have been nearly 4000 reported sightings on mainland Australian soil. Tasmanian tour operator Stuart Malcolm has offered an A$1.75 million (£1 million) reward for proof the thylacine has survived to the present day.
However, professor Laurance and his team are not expecting to claim any reward, emphasising that the chances of any tigers surviving on the Australian mainland remain very slim.
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Until
next week...keep on believing.
Almondtree Productions
“Thus
saith the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, and a path in the mighty
water; who brought forth chariots and horse, and a mighty multitude:
but they have lain down, and shall not rise: they are extinct, as
quenched flax.”
(Isaiah 43:16-17)