“Let
us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain
mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.”
(Romans
4:16)
Throne Of Grace
WND
WHAT NOW FOR 'MESSIANICS' IN OFFICIALLY JEWISH STATE?
Israeli followers of Jesus-Yeshua increase in numbers, face challenges
August 4, 2018
Erez Soref, a native-born Israeli, wandered the world studying Buddhism and Eastern religions searching for “truth.”
What he found, after receiving a Hebrew-language copy of the New Testament, was a life-changing faith experience that led him back home to Israel – the land of Abraham, Moses, David and Jesus.
Today he heads an organization called One for Israel that produces compelling video testimonies of Jews (and Arabs) who don’t see any contradiction between their ethnic and cultural roots and a fervent faith in the most famous Jew in world history – Jesus, or as He is known in Hebrew, Yeshua. Soref is also the president of the Israel College of the Bible, training both Arabs and Jews as ministers of their faith in the land of the Bible.
Under his direction, the most recent survey of messianic believers and congregations shows what he calls “exponential” growth of a movement that in 1948 numbered just 23 people in all of Israel skyrocketing now to some 30,000 with at least 300 congregations throughout the land – 20 in Jerusalem alone.
But while messianic Jews in Israel often describe their belief and faith in Jesus-Yeshua as “the most Jewish and Israeli thing” about them, there is increasing pushback from Orthodox Jews who see them as traitors to their Jewish faith, in league with Jewish persecutors of the past. Many Orthodox believers don’t think you can be both Jewish and a follower of Jesus-Yeshua.
Just last month, the Israeli Knesset narrowly passed what is called the “Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People,” formal legislation that officially makes Israel a Jewish state.
“Very little of Israel’s new Nation-State Law is actually new,” says Robert Nicholson, executive director of the Philos Project. “The mere statement that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people is hardly novel; it’s what Israelis have been saying since 1948. In fact, the best critique of the law may be that it doesn’t really do anything besides stir up unnecessary trouble.”
First proposed in 2011, the basic law draft was contested strongly by left-wing Jewish groups. But with its passage, sponsoring Knesset member Avi Dichter celebrated within his original vision.
“We are enshrining this important bill into a law today,” he said, “to prevent even the slightest thought, let alone attempt, to transform Israel to a country of all its citizens.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emphasized the reality of Israel – including equality.
“We enshrined in law the basic principle of our existence,” he said. “Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people, that respects the individual rights of all its citizens.”
But what about the rights of messianic Jews?
It’s more difficult for messianic Jews to become citizens in the country – something that is a basic right of other Jews, even those who follow other messiahs, such as Lubavitchers who believe the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson was. Some Jewish followers of Jesus-Yeshua have even been deported. Israeli couples who are messianic believers cannot marry in a traditional Jewish ceremony, despite Israel’s laws proclaiming religious freedom for all.
Also, last month, another survey was published on Jewish millennials found 21 percent believe Jesus-Yeshua was “God in human form who lived among people in the 1st century.” And 28 percent “see him as a rabbi or spiritual leader, but not God.” Forty-two percent said they celebrate Christmas. A majority says one can hold other faiths and still be Jewish. And the survey found that one-third of Jewish millennials believe “God desires a personal relationship with us.”
Zero Hedge
"Step Back From The Brink" UN Warns As Major War Looms After Overnight Gaza Airstrikes
By Tyler Durden
August 9, 2018
In the third serious flare-up of violence in the last month, a major escalation began between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza overnight, which involved approximately 180 projectiles fired towards Israeli territory, and more than 150 Israeli airstrikes on targets inside Gaza, according to statements by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
Overnight strikes on Gaza. Image source: AFP/Getty
A number of smaller scale and sporadic tit-for-tat incidents led to the start of the late Wednesday night massive exchange of rockets. These escalating incidents began Monday when an Israeli tank fired on a northern Gaza Hamas border post, killing two Hamas members. Israel claimed Hamas had fired on Israeli positions first, while a Hamas statement said the fighters had merely been involved in a military exercise and not an act of aggression against Israeli soldiers.
Another Israeli tank attack followed on Wednesday in response to what the IDF described as shots fired at civilian workers constructing an underground barrier on the Israeli side of the border wall. After sunset, the first significant barrage of rocket and mortar fire was unleashed from Gaza on southern Israel, sending civilians in the town of Sderot and other close southern settlements running for shelters while alarms across the region sounded.
Reports citing Israeli sources say of about 180 projectiles launched from Gaza overnight, the Iron Dome defense system intercepted over 30, while most hit open fields. However, official statements also noted strikes on playgrounds, houses, cars, and factories.
“IDF fighter jets targeted over 20 terror sites in military compounds and in a Hamas training camp. Among the sites targeted were a weapons manufacturing and storage facility, a complex used for the Hamas naval force and a military compound used for rocket-launching experiments,” the IDF said Thursday morning.
The BBC reports up to seven Israeli civilians wounded by the rocket and mortar fire, with Palestinian health officials confirming the death of a pregnant Palestinian woman and a toddler. The AFP identified the victims as 23-year old Enas Khammash and her 18-month-old daughter Bayan, killed in the Jafarawi area of central Gaza.
During the daylight hours early Thursday it appears that rockets and airstrikes have ceased, however, warning sirens have continued to sound in various Israeli communities across the south of the country.
An IDF statement said the overnight strikes successfully targeted "over 140 of Hamas' strategic military sites."
At least one Hamas militant has been reported killed in the fighting, and this is likely not the end of this current round of violence.
Indeed on Thursday a senior Israeli army official warned that a full-blown confrontation is coming in the Gaza Strip while further suggesting the government is prepared to begin evacuations of settlements along the coast and in southern Israel.
“We are rapidly nearing a confrontation,” the IDF senior officer said as cited by the Times of Israel. "Hamas is making serious mistakes, and we may have to make it clear after four years that this path doesn’t yield any results for it and isn’t worth it."
A separate Israeli military official said in an ominous sign of an escalating Israel-Gaza war to come: The current round of violence “is definitely not over."
Meanwhile, a special United Nations envoy for the Middle East Peace Process, Nickolay Mladenov, condemned the voilence, saying in a statement, “I am deeply alarmed by the recent escalation of violence between Gaza and Israel, and particularly by today’s multiple rockets fired towards communities in southern Israel.”
Mladenov urged all sides to step "back from the brink" and restore calm.
***
WND
BILLBOARDS YANKED BECAUSE BIBLE IS SHOWN
'There's such intolerance against Christianity'
August 7, 2018
Banner advertising Harvest Crusade (CBN News)
After multiple complaints, including a “serious threat,” an advertising company removed a series of billboards depicting evangelist Greg Laurie holding a Bible.
The ads posted at a popular mall in Southern California promoted Laurie’s upcoming Harvest Crusade at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, Aug. 17-19, reported CBN News.
The event, in its 29th year, is expected to draw tens of thousands of people.
The Irvine Company, a local real-estate firm, agreed to post large billboards promoting the crusade at Fashion Island, a prestigious outdoor mall in Orange County.
After complaints, the Irvine Company required Harvest to remove the Bible from the artwork, and the evangelical ministry complied. But the change apparently didn’t stop the complaints, and the Irvine Company completely removed all the advertisements and billboards for the crusade, reported CBN.
“There was nothing overtly religious about it,” John Collins, the executive director of Harvest, told CBN News.
The Bible didn’t have any religious symbolism on it nor even the word “Bible.”
Irvine Company officials did not reply to CBN News for comment.
CBN noted the contract between the business and Laurie reads, “Management reserves the right to not display any materials that could be constructed as vulgar or offensive.”
Collins said he’s not upset with The Irvine Company, pinning the blame on “the culture.”
“Obviously, they’re catching heat for allowing us to run these ads,” he said of Irvine. “We feel it is just unfortunate that people are complaining.
“It’s sad that our culture is at this degree of intolerance,” he said. ” … There’s such intolerance against Christianity that we aren’t allowed to state that or to publicly advertise this event. That’s amazing.”
***
MailOnline
China demolishes hundreds of churches and confiscates Bibles during a crackdown on Christianity
Locals in Henan stated concerns of a move by the atheist ruling Community Party to control Christianity
Residents were asked to replace posters of the cross and Jesus Christ with portraits of President Xi Jinping
Experts say the government is waging the most severe systematic suppression of the religion since 1982
Chinese leaders have 'always been suspicious of the political threat' that Christianity poses to the regime
By ASSOCIATED PRESS and KELSEY CHENG FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 11:49, 7 August 2018 | UPDATED: 08:48, 8 August 2018
***
WND
FACEBOOK, YOUTUBE JOIN APPLE IN BANNING ALEX JONES
InfoWars founder eliminated for 'hate speech'
Art Moore
August 6, 2018
Alex Jones
While Apple has drawn attention for banning InfoWars founder Alex Jones from its platform Monday for “hate speech,” tech giants Facebook and YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, made the same move on the same day.
Apple said Monday it had removed five of six InfoWars podcasts, including “The Alex Jones Show,” BuzzFeed News reported.
Facebook removed four pages controlled by Jones, explaining, in part, the ban was for “using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies.”
YouTube said Jones account, the “Alex Jones Channel,” has been “terminated for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.”
Google, CNBC reported, had previously declined to comment on Jones’ standing but said in a statement: “All users agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines when they sign up to use YouTube. When users violate these policies repeatedly, like our policies against hate speech and harassment or our terms prohibiting circumvention of our enforcement measures, we terminate their accounts.”
The Gateway Pundit blog, which noted the convergence of tech giants banning Infowars, said it found in an analysis that Facebook has eliminated 93 percent of traffic to top conservative websites since the 2016 presidential election.
Twitter, meanwhile, effectively has admitted shadowbanning and censoring conservative lawmakers publishers.
Jones, known for controversial claims, including that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, also has been banned from Spotify.
But CNBC noted Apple took down entire libraries of InfoWars podcasts rather than a select few episodes.
“Apple does not tolerate hate speech,” a company spokesman said, “and we have clear guidelines that creators and developers must follow to ensure we provide a safe environment for all of our users.”
Paul Joseph Watson, who writes regularly for InfoWars, tweeted a response to the bans.
“Whether you love or loathe Infowars, this now confirms that Big Tech is working with legacy media to silence independent media,” he wrote. “In places like Russia, the government shuts down the press, in America, CNN, Apple and Facebook fulfil (sic) that role.”
One of the responses to Watson’s tweet, from a Kevin A. Reilly, typified Jones’ detractors, who insist the moves by the tech giants don’t amount to media censorship.
“Infowars is not ‘press’ & Alex Jones is not a journalist,” Reilly wrote. “He’s a flame throwing conspiracy theorist who has hurt people. He doesnt deserve a platform because he doesnt provide a service. He wants to watch the world burn. That has never & will never be protected in this country.”
However, Breitbart News noted Facebook removed Jones for using “dehumanizing language” and “glorifying violence” rather than “false news.” And yet infamous anti-Semite Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan remains on the platform along with the New Black Panther Party and the progressive news outlet The Young Turks, whose founder has denied the historicity of the Armenian Holocaust.
CNN reported Monday that six more families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012 have filed suit against Jones and six related companies for defamation.
The complaint notes “The Alex Jones Show” is broadcast on more than 60 radio stations and his YouTube channel has more than 2.3 million subscribers.
It charges Jones and his companies “concoct elaborate and false paranoia-tinged conspiracy theories because it moves product and they make money.”
“Not because they truly believe what they are saying, but rather because it increases profits.”
(One thing that is puzzeling concerning this situation with Alex Jones is that he professes to be a fervent Christian Zionist strongly supporting the State of Israel. Most of the main stream media in the west as well as most politicians, especially Donald Trump, are of the same opinion.)
***
INDEPENDENT
Terminally-ill children become youngest ever to be euthanised, aged nine and 11
Belgium has world’s only law allowing children in 'unbearable suffering' to end their own lives
Tom Embury-Dennis
August 7, 2018
Two children, aged nine and 11, have become the youngest ever to be euthanised, according to a report.
They were given lethal injections in Belgium, which has the world’s only law allowing terminally ill children in “unbearable suffering” to end their own lives.
Their deaths, which occurred between 2016 and 2017, were revealed in a July report from the CFCEE; the commission that regulates euthanasia in the country.
It detailed how Belgian doctors had given lethal injections to three children over the two-year period, including to one 17-year-old who was suffering muscular dystrophy.
The nine-year-old, who had a brain tumour, and the 11-year-old, who was suffering from cystic fibrosis, were the first children under 12 to be euthanised anywhere, a member of the CFCEE told The Washington Post.
Already one of the most permissive country's in the world regarding euthanasia, Belgium liberalised its law even further in 2014, giving doctors the authority to terminate a child's life if they request it.
Doctors must first ensure that a child is "in a hopeless medical situation of constant and unbearable suffering that cannot be eased and which will cause death in the short term".
The juvenile must make their wish known in writing, before being examined by child psychiatrists to ensure they are intelligent enough to make the decision and are "not influenced by a third party". Parents can overrule the child's wishes.
Once euthanasia has occurred - for a child or adult - a commission examines the case to review if everything was done correctly.
"I saw mental and physical suffering so overwhelming that I thought we did a good thing," Luc Proot, a CFCEE member, told the newspaper regarding the cases of the three children.
Dignity in Dying, a UK charity campaigning for the legalisation of euthanasia, told The Independent it would not campaign to allow children to take their own lives.
"The law change that Dignity in Dying campaigns for would allow terminally ill, mentally competent adults to request life-ending medication that a person would self-administer." a spokesperson said.
"We do not campaign for a law like the one that operates in Belgium."
(First aboration now this. What's next? Ed)
***
(Following on from an article we posted one month ago which received quite a lot of attention,
“IS TIME RIPE FOR ANOTHER JESUS REVOLUTION?”, the following are two more articles
on the same subject. Ed)
Premier CHRISTIANITY
The Jesus People Revolution: the 60s hippies who changed the world
September 2017
It's 50 years since thousands of hippies found Christ on the beaches of California and made their way to the UK. Andrew Whitman traces their legacy
It was 1967, the year of the Summer of Love and the hippy movement was in full swing. Four years earlier, JFK had been assassinated. Protests were raging against the Vietnam War. The Beatles had just released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – the garish myriad of personalities of the album artwork a snapshot of the social upheaval of the era.
In the thick of this, the seed of the Jesus People Movement was beginning to germinate. The ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ counterculture was discovering a new way to live as many hippies began to embrace the gospel. Within four years ‘The Jesus Revolution’ would be Time magazine’s front cover.
Fifty years on seems a good time to reflect on a movement which leading scholar Larry Eskridge estimates saw at least 250,000 people become Christians. The Jesus People Movement has been dubbed the last great American revival, yet the UK also felt its impact in a variety of ways.
From the charismatic Church networks it birthed to contemporary worship styles, the story of the Jesus People has shaped the UK evangelical Church. Indeed, the very magazine you are holding in your hands had its first incarnation as Buzz, birthed as a response to the emerging youth and music culture of the 60s, and featuring the Jesus People Movement prominently.
1967 was also the year that Scott McKenzie’s ‘If you’re going to San Francisco’ had prominent radio airplay.
Ted and Liz Wise were early adopters of the hippy revival in San Francisco that year. Ted was an arty beatnik, grafting on yachts and tripping out on drug highs. Meanwhile, Liz was a regular at the conservative First Baptist Church of Mill Valley (alongside her dope lifestyle). Reading the New Testament Ted says, “Jesus knocked me off my metaphysical ass!” Then, following a bad trip on LSD in early 1965, he responded publicly to a gospel invitation at Liz’s church.
Ted and Liz were soon spreading the word to their contemporaries yet, despite their best efforts to evangelise hippies through their more traditional church, they eventually pioneered an independent Christian commune, The Living Room, in Haight-Ashbury in spring 1967. Located in a 20 foot by 40 foot storefront, they offered food, rest and gospel chat. By the following year they were seeing 20 or more people making commitments to Jesus each week.
Meanwhile, Hare Krishna devotee Dave Hoyt had a revelation of Jesus’ uniqueness. Mentored by theological student Kent Philpott, together they teamed up in evangelism and saw hundreds come to faith. Further down the coast in Costa Mesa, Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel exploded with growth. Five hundred new converts were baptised each month at Pirate’s Cove on the Pacific coast, as the church embraced a wave of hairy, hippy youth turning to Jesus.
Lonesome Stone
Six years later my own story intersected with the movement that first emerged from San Francisco. I was a 20-year-old farmer’s son and middle-of-the-road hippy, studying economics at University of Leeds. My younger brother and sister were brand-new Christians. They dragged me along to the penultimate performance of a Christian rock musical called Lonesome Stone on August Bank Holiday, 1973. I was utterly magnetised by Jesus and his death for me.
A suitably named cast member called Christian prayed with me after the performance, and I felt like God had totally cleaned me up inside. Christian then posted me duplicated scripture sheets and handwritten letters to help me grow as a new disciple. I aspired to join his Jesus Family community after graduation.
The Lonesome Stone musical which changed the course of my life had its roots in another branch of the Jesus People Movement on the west coast of the USA. Disaffected hippies Jim and Sue Palosaari had been powerfully converted at a tent revival, Jim visibly shook and clung to a tent pole as preacher Russell Griggs made his appeal.
They eventually ended up in Jim’s native Milwaukee, where they pioneered the Jesus Christ Power House with five new believers, and launched rock band The Sheep. By late 1971 the community had more than 150 members, but the following year Jim and Sue, along with two dozen others, travelled to Europe.
While roaming around Germany famished, cash-poor, and trying to sell a drum kit at Lautzenhausen’s US Air Force base, they received a surprise telegram. Christian businessman Kenneth Frampton wrote: “Come to England. Posthaste. Money no object.” He provided two communal houses and a coffeehouse for them in south London. With his backing they launched Lonesome Stone at the Rainbow Theatre in London in 1973. A parable of their combined experiences, it was the story of a hippy coming to know Jesus.
The Jesus People Movement in the UK was diverse, decentralised and often controversial. Early on there were three separate incarnations where Jesus’ name featured prominently, the first one imported, the latter two home-grown.
Radical American group the Children of God made their base in Bromley in July 1971 at Kenneth Frampton’s invitation. Frampton quickly severed ties, however, after realising they were a cult, subsequently alleged to practise mind control, religious prostitution, open marriages and child abuse.
Successors of Frampton’s backing, Jim and Sue Palosaari came to Britain in November 1972 with the Jesus Family. They were hot on street witnessing but Lonesome Stone was their main outreach vehicle.
Following London, the show played in Manchester’s rough Wythenshawe estate for four weeks. Afterwards, the only Jesus Family commune outside London was established in an abandoned rectory in Stockport. In September 1974 the American contingent returned home, and the remnant morphed into a Newfrontiers fellowship, eventually called Beulah Family Church.
The Jesus Family shared most marks of the Jesus People Movement, but tried to get new Jesus-followers to settle in local churches rather than forming separate communities.
The Bugbrooke (Baptist) Fellowship in Northamptonshire, founded in 1805, was led into renewal in the 1960s by eccentric pastor Noel Stanton. Soon afterwards, in 1971, they were inspired by the American Jesus People phenomena when cross-carrying evangelist Arthur Blessitt hit town, witnessing and offering Jesus stickers. They renamed themselves the Jesus Army in April 1987, with 800 people involved locally.
The Jesus Army shared most Jesus People marks, with one exception – their prophetic view of community as God’s glorious city, ‘Zion’, believing Jesus’ millennial reign occurs before his physical return, not after it. It wasn’t merely hippies reached, but non-hippies (called ‘straights’ in those days), like Oxbridge graduates and local villagers.
The hairy, bell bottom-wearing believers of Bugbrooke were aiming to model the first-century Church as they lived together in communal houses across Northamptonshire. Latterly the church became part of the Evangelical Alliance, though they were often perceived as cult-like in the 70s and 80s for their insistence on separation from the world.
The third spin off from the Jesus People was the Hemel Hempsteadbased Jesus Liberation Front, launched in the summer of 1971 by Geoff Bone and Chris Boxall.
Street evangelism and an open home quickly meant 40 young people gathering regularly. An advert in Buzz magazine drew 600 replies. A team also joined Youth With A Mission (YWAM) in reaching out at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Again, the 3,000 nationwide members modelled themselves intentionally on the firstcentury Church. The group displayed many of the Californian Jesus Movement’s marks, experimenting unsuccessfully with community living, but also encouraging members to commit to local churches.
In July 1972, Geoff Bone was asked by Arthur Blesssitt to fly to Belfast to discuss new believers’ follow-up. At Watford Junction, hurrying for the appropriate Gatwick train, he fell between the platform and carriage, subsequently having both legs amputated. Amazingly, he was discharged from hospital five weeks later.
He finally left the Jesus Liberation Front in the mid 1970s due to domestic difficulties. Geoff’s current home-based mission is providing wheelchairs for amputees and resourcing his Facebook community.
Elsewhere in Britain, the Jesus People Movement was birthing other youth initiatives.
Musical Gospel Outreach was formed by three friends, Peter Meadows, David Payne and Geoff Shearn in 1965 to utilise contemporary music evangelistically, its newsletter soon becoming Buzz. Later, Christian bands such as the country-rock Mighty Flyers (part of the Manchester Jesus Family) gained strong followings.
Parachurch groups including Youth For Christ and Operation Mobilisation empowered many young people for mission, while Campus Crusade for Christ built on the Jesus People momentum by training a massive 30,000 people in evangelism at Spree 73. The Greenbelt Festival, encouraging creative Christian engagement with the world, was pioneered by Jim Palosaari and musician James Holloway in 1974: the former famously saying to the latter, “If you find yourself a field, you’ve got yourself a festival!”
The USA effect
The UK also received huge inspiration from the American movement. Three successive and connected generations of ‘new paradigm churches’ have made significant waves here in Britain.
Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa was at the epicentre of the west coast revival, mainly due to the combination of Chuck Smith’s Bible teaching with Lonnie Frisbee’s signs-and-wonders evangelism. Surfers, dropouts and hippies would become future leaders in hundreds of other Calvary chapel church plants. The first of 38 presentday British Calvary churches – Church on the Way – was planted in a Bradford living room in 1978.
The Vineyard churches, led by John Wimber, also owed much to the Jesus People Movement. They had a formative moment on Mother’s Day 1980, when Lonnie Frisbee famously concluded his message by calling out, “Come Holy Spirit!” with dramatic effect. In the mid-80s, John and Ellie Mumford trained at Wimber’s Anaheim church, coming home in 1987 to plant the first British Vineyard in Richmond, Surrey.
More recently, Bill Johnson, who pastors Bethel Church in Redding, California, has had a strong influence on the charismatic wing of the British Church, through his Global Legacy movement and the European Leaders Advance conference in Harrogate. Three senior leaders, Kris Vallotton and Steve and Wendy Backlund all trace their spiritual lineage back to the Jesus People days.
Larry Norman, Hal Lindsey and Arthur Blessitt
The UK’s Jesus Liberation Front was largely inspired by the articulate Jack Sparks’ Christian Liberation Front in Berkeley, California. Enigmatic musical troubadour Larry Norman, famous for his anthem ‘I wish we’d all been ready’, was based in Britain after 1971, recording Only Visiting This Planet with legendary Beatles producer George Martin in London the following year.
Jimmy and Carol Owens’ Jesus People Movement-inspired musicals Come Together and If My People performed to full houses at the Royal Albert Hall. Bible teacher Hal Lindsey’s end-times book The Late Great Planet Earth and David Wilkerson’s story The Cross and the Switchblade were read voraciously and widely. Moishe Rosen’s evangelistic Jews for Jesus emerged from the Jesus People Movement in San Francisco in 1973, their current British base being in north London.
Last but not least, Sunset Strip minister Arthur Blessitt “turned people on to Jesus”, while carrying his cross the length and breadth of Britain, having particular evangelistic impact upon London’s historic Westminster Chapel.
Whatever its localised expressions, the Jesus People Movement eventually permeated Christian culture in Britain through the music it brought with it.
Pete Ward, professor of ecclesiology and ethnography at Durham University, claims that the primary influence of the Jesus People Movement in the UK was a change of style: “The effect of the Jesus Movement was to breathe new life into the Church based on the appropriation of aspects of youth culture.” Such culture involved widespread changes in worship style. Out with the hymn-sandwich and in with the (previously sinful) guitar. This was largely the product of the movement’s informal style and the contemporary Christian music it generated.
Recently, the original editor of Buzz, Peter Meadows, spoke encouragingly about a three-fold impact the Californian movement had on Britain: Firstly, it shaped the lives of influential British Christians who went to the States to “look, see” (bringing back musicians like Larry Norman). Secondly, its Pentecostal roots, Californian laid-backness, and lack of religiosity poured more fuel on the charismatic renewal. And thirdly, Meadows says, “It lifted the morale and enthusiasm of the younger generation in the UK churches who, at last, had vivid examples of God at work in the world beyond the Church and in their own culture”.
The young radicals who found faith in the Jesus People Movement are now old enough to be entitled to free bus passes (and probably sport a lot less hair, too). And the movement itself only really burned brightly for as long as the hippy culture was with us. Yet its influence, like the youth counterculture it was part of, has shaped much of the evangelical Church today. Something special was birthed in 1967. It was the Summer of Love that turned into a lifetime of love for so many.
Time Magazine: Whose Children?
Time Magazine/1972-01-24
Jesus did not always speak of love. In his harsher moments, he reminded his disciples that he had come to bring not peace but a sword. He predicted that he would set son against father, daughter against mother. Christianity has often explained those "dark sayings" as angry hyperbole or simple pessimism about the acceptance of his revolutionary teachings, but from time to time a hard core of believers has chosen to take the Nazarene at his grimmest word. The latest group to do so is a controversial sect of young Christians who call themselves, with grand self-righteousness, the Children of God.
The name is meant to describe their single-minded determination to "forsake all" for God—family, friends and personal belongings. The Children of God are the storm troopers of the Jesus Revolution (TIME cover, June 21), its most forceful and most criticized zealots. Though the membership numbers only about 2,000 worldwide, it is vigorous and farflung: about 60 colonies are scattered from Seattle to Essen, Germany, from Jerusalem to Viet Nam. A London colony founded a few months ago has already sent missionaries to Stockholm, Oslo, Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin, Amsterdam and Brussels. Liberia is the next target.
Woe! Woe! The Children attack all worldly society with the fierce zeal of the Weatherman, using the cherished King James Bible as their proof text. They demand a strictly communal life as practiced by the early Christians according to the Book of Acts ("they held everything in common"). They avoid work except as it relates to their own communes, lest their members be forced to choose between God and mammon. Yet they badger businessmen to support them with handouts of money and supplies, while raging against a sinful America and proclaiming its—and the world's—imminent doom. In their most apocalyptic moments, they dress in red sackcloth (a sign of warning), daub themselves with ashes, put yokes around their necks. With the prophet's traditional staff, they stand silent vigils in public places, breaking their silence only to utter an occasional "Woe! Woe!"
Such theatrics might seem merely eccentric to Americans if they came from, say, an exotic sect such as Hare Krishna. When they are presented in the name of Christianity, however, people who consider themselves good churchgoing Christians resent the purer-than-thou attitude—and the appeal it seems to hold for their children. Nonetheless, the group in some cases has had more success than parents in winning young people from drugs, casual sex and drifting. They also have potent precedents in St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas, both of whom had to break with their families over their vocations.
Some of the most vehement parental critics in California banded together in an organization called the Parents' Committee to Free Our Children from the Children of God—a movement that has since spread to other parts of the country. The parents' group charges, among other things, that the Children stoop to kidnaping, hypnotizing and even drugging to keep youngsters in the sect. The outcry has driven many of the Children from California; Ted Patrick, a San Diego aide to Governor Ronald Reagan, has accused them of trying to "destroy the United States."
Not exactly turning the other cheek, the Children have slapped four leaders of the parents' group with a $1,100,000 suit for libel and slander, and have brought a $300,000 suit against Texas officials and a mother for allegedly railroading one 18-year-old member into a mental institution.
While there seems to be no hard evidence of kidnaping, drugging or genuine hypnotism so far, a broader charge of "brainwashing" may be closer to the truth, at least in the sense of relentless exposure to the sect's propaganda. At special communes for "babes" (new converts), the apprentice memorizes the requisite Bible passages by reading them aloud while simultaneously listening to them on tape. Bible texts also blare from loudspeakers all day long. Each new convert takes a biblical name, usually from the Old Testament (Caleb, Shadrach, Deborah), and drops his old name as a remnant of the past.
None except the "elders"—experienced Children who apparently "grow" into authority—goes anywhere alone. Married couples share rooms within the commune, but single members are rigidly separated in male and female dormitories. Letters to and from home are censored by the elders. Many of the Children insist that the rigorous life is necessary to prepare themselves for the Communist takeover that they expect to come before doomsday.
The beginnings of the Children are already obscured by legend. The core of initial apostles seems to have gathered around a fundamentalist preacher named David Berg, now in his fifties, his four children and their mates in 1967-68. As Teens for Christ, they built up a small group of followers in California, where one of their early—and since abandoned —tactics was to disrupt services at local churches. In 1969, after Berg had a vision of imminent earthquake, about 50 of the band embarked on a period of wandering, during which, legend has it, they had to eat grass to survive.
Berg, who had once worked for TV Evangelist J. Fred Jordan, soon secured the use of Jordan's Texas and California properties for the Children of God, as they had come to call themselves. In return, Jordan displayed the youngsters, most of them in their late teens and 20s, in his televised fund-raising pitches. The arrangement lasted about a year and a half. An argument over the properties precipitated a clash, and Jordan ordered the Children off his land last September.
The Children have won over two important figures in the broader Jesus movement: David Hoyt, of Atlanta's street ministries, and Linda Meissner, of Seattle's Jesus People Army. Both apparently decided that their own methods were not producing enough lasting converts; Hoyt pointedly blamed his "watered-down Gospel." When he entered the Children of God, he took many of the Atlanta Jesus People with him. Linda Meissner, however, took far fewer of her Jesus People Army along—and indeed the feud between the mainstream Army (including Linda's husband John Salvesen) and her splinter group has scandalized Seattle's Jesus People.
Founder Berg, under his sect name of Moses, regularly produces a patriarchal stream of crotchety, sometimes profane "Mo-letters" advising his far-flung Children on everything from visa restrictions to buying a boat. A growing consciousness of publicity may modify the Children's behavior in the future —as it has apparently begun to do. To offset attacks by parents, the colonies sent members home for the holidays; while quite a few stayed home, many returned more zealous than before. Berg has also discouraged clashes with other Jesus People.
Not all families, for that matter, are disappointed with the results the Children of God produce. Ed Rees, vice president for public relations of the Flying Tiger Line in Los Angeles, watched his son drift from medical studies into drugs, and finally into the Children sect. Rees still finds "a depressing sameness" in the members, "either sucking up this excessive religion or spitting it out," but he also allows that "they are totally without guile, without games. They really believe. They are prepared to die." So far, however, the question is whether they are prepared to live more fully in the world if doomsday does not come as expected.
MailOnline
Has Egypt's second sphinx been found? Ancient statue with a 'lion's body and a human head' is unearthed by stunned construction workers
The new statue was discovered between the temples of Karnak and Luxor
The 'sphinx' was found on Al-Kabbash Road which connects the two temples
Officials has confirmed the statue has a 'lion's body with a human head'
Great Sphinx of Giza in Egypt was near the Great Pyramids on the west bank
It is the oldest and largest known monumental sculpture in the world
By PHOEBE WESTON FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 17:23, 9 August 2018 | UPDATED: 17:29, 9 August 2018
Reports suggest a sphinx-like statue (stock image) has been discovered between the ancient temples of Karnak and Luxor which date to around 1400BC
Egypt's long-rumoured second sphinx may have been unearthed by construction workers building a new road.
According to local reports, a sphinx-like statue was found on Al-Kabbash Road, which connects the two temples of Karnak and Luxor built around 1400BC.
Officials have confirmed the statue has a 'lion's body with a human head'.
The 'second sphinx' has not yet been lifted from the ground, however, officials said tourists are welcome to visit the construction site to view the ancient statute.
No photographs of the structure have been published, the Director General of Antiquities has confirmed.
The Great Sphinx of Giza was discovered by the Great Pyramids on the west bank of the river Nile. It is the oldest and largest known monumental sculpture in the world.
Excavations first started on the Karnak and Luxor temple complexes, located within the ancient city of Thebes, back in 1884, according to RT.
This led to a flurry of significant archaeological discoveries until around 1960, when excavation work at the sites ceased.
Construction workers uncovered the 'second sphinx' during a roadworks project between the temples of Karnak and Luxor.
The Egyptian infrastructure project has been halted while the statue is examined.
According to the area's Director General of Antiquities, Mohamed Abdel Aziz, the statue can not yet be lifted 'due to the nature of the environment it is in'.
Aziz has confirmed tourists are able to visit the road to see the statue for themselves, however, he confirmed no images of the statue have been released.
The Al-Kabbash Road project to excavate and restore the road first began in 2005 and is scheduled to be finished by the end of this year at a cost of $12.7 million (£10m).
The Al-Kabbash Road project in Luxor is due to be finished by the end of this year at a cost of $12.7 million (£10m)
With the body of a lion and the head of a human, Great Sphinx of Giza measures a grand 239ft (73 metres) long and 65ft (20 metres) high.
Literally translating to 'Father of Dread,' this mythical creature is believed to resemble Pharaoh Khafre, who was the ruler at the time of construction.
It is believed that Djadefre, the elder brother of Khafra, built the Sphinx to honour his father Khufu.
This would place the time of construction somewhere between 2550 BC and 2450 BC.
However the limited evidence linking the Sphinx to Khafra is circumstantial and somewhat ambiguous.
It was constructed around during the reign of Pharaoh Khafra, and it is thought that the face of the statue was modelled on his.
Over time it gradually became buried up to its neck in sand, which helped to preserve it before it was finally excavated in 1925.
It is just next to the Great Pyramid of Giza which was built as a tomb and a symbol of eternity for the Pharaoh Khufu.
It stands 456ft (139 metres) high – just over nine double decker buses stacked on top of one another.
It was the tallest man-made structure on Earth for 3,800 years and is accompanied by the smaller pyramids of Khafre and Menkaure
WHAT IS THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS?
The Valley of the Kings in upper Egypt is one of the country's main tourist attractions, situated next to the Giza pyramid complex.
The majority of the pharaohs of the 18th to 20th dynasties, who ruled from 1550 to 1069 BC, rested in the tombs which were cut into the local rock.
The royal tombs are decorated with scenes from Egyptian mythology and give clues as to the beliefs and funerary rituals of the period.
Almost all of the tombs were opened and looted centuries ago, but the sites still give an idea of the opulence and power of the Pharaohs.
The most famous pharaoh at the site is Tutankhamen, whose tomb was discovered in 1922.
Preserved to this day, in the tomb are original decorations of sacred imagery from, among others, the Book of Gates or the Book of Caverns.
These are among the most important funeral texts found on the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs.
The Valley of the Kings in upper Egypt is one of the country's main tourist attractions, situated next to the Giza pyramid complex***
SCIENTFIC AMERICAN
Brain Gain: A Person Can Instantly Blossom into a Savant--and No One Knows Why
Some people suddenly become accomplished artists or musicians with no previous interest or training. Is it possible innate genius lies dormant within everyone?
By Darold A. Treffert on July 25, 2018
Savant syndrome comes in different forms. In congenital savant syndrome the extraordinary savant ability surfaces in early childhood. In acquired savant syndrome astonishing new abilities, typically in music, art or mathematics, appear unexpectedly in ordinary persons after a head injury, stroke or other central nervous system (CNS) incident where no such abilities or interests were present pre-incident.
But in sudden savant syndrome an ordinary person with no such prior interest or ability and no precipitating injury or other CNS incident has an unanticipated, spontaneous epiphanylike moment where the rules and intricacies of music, art or mathematics, for example, are experienced and revealed, producing almost instantaneous giftedness and ability in the affected area of skill sets. Because there is no underlying disability such as that which occurs in congenital or acquired savant syndromes, technically sudden savant syndrome would be better termed sudden genius.
The Case of K. A.
A 28-year-old gentleman from Israel, K. A., sent his description of his epiphany moment. He was in a mall where there was a piano. Whereas he could play simple popular songs from rote memory before, “suddenly at age 28 after what I can best describe as a ‘just getting it moment,’ it all seemed so simple. I suddenly was playing like a well-educated pianist.” His friends were astonished as he played and suddenly understood music in an entirely intricate way. “I suddenly realized what the major scale and minor scale were, what their chords were and where to put my fingers in order to play certain parts of the scale. I was instantly able to recognize harmonies of the scales in songs I knew as well as the ability to play melody by interval recognition.” He began to search the internet for information on music theory and to his amazement “most of what they had to teach I already knew, which baffled me as to how could I know something I had never studied.”
K. A. has a high IQ, is now an attorney and has no history of any developmental disorder. He makes part of his living now doing musical performances. He described his musical epiphany in much more detail in a posting in the article section of www.savantsyndrome.com
The Case of M. F.
This 43-year-old woman woke up one night in December 2016 with what she called “the urgent need to draw a multitude of triangles, which quickly evolved to a web of complex abstract designs. I stayed up into the morning with a compulsive need to draw, which continued over the next three days at an intense level.” She had no prior interest or training in art. By the third day she was working on a piece of art she named “the Mayan,” which took her two weeks to complete. Three months later she had created 15 pieces whose styles were reminiscent of artists including Frida Kahlo and Picasso. She presently spends about eight hours a day on her craft in addition to her work as a real estate agent. Incorporated into most of her pieces of art is mandalic style of which she was totally unaware prior to her sudden art ability.
The Case of S. S.
When she was in her mid-40s, S. S. began noticing changes in her perception of the physical world around her. She said when she looked at things like trees and flowers, she started to see colors, textures and shadows in ways she had never seen before. This new way of seeing things compelled her to express her “new vision” on paper. She had never painted before in her life and was not comfortable with a paintbrush, so she bought a cheap set of pastel pencils at Hobby Lobby, found a photograph of a gorilla on the cover of an old National Geographicmagazine, and sat down to draw it. The result—a rich, complex pastel painting with uncanny realism—stunned her friends and family, particularly in light of the fact she had never shown an aptitude for art or even an interest for that matter, and she never took an art class growing up.
From that point forward drawing and pastel painting began to consume her every waking moment. Her “new vision” wouldn’t allow her to just sit around and marvel at the beauty of this “new” world. She felt she had to act on it—she must act on it. From the very beginning this gift of seeing things in a new way was inextricably tied to a compulsive desire to reproduce that new world on paper. It became an obsession that all but took over her life. “I found it nearly impossible to put down my pastels and do things I needed to do,” she stated, “I was spending way too much money at Hobby Lobby and art supply stores. I was almost frenzied.”
Even now, when she needs to focus on other more pressing things in her life, S. S. must put the pastels and art aside and store them away in a place where she is not tempted by them, sometimes for months at a time. She worries that “starting a new painting could completely derail her.” In the case of S. S., as with other cases of sudden genius, there is no history of autism or CNS injury.
The Uniqueness of Sudden Genius
Many people pick up a new skill or hobby, especially later in life. So what is different here?
—The skill has an abrupt onset with no prior interest in or talent for the newly acquired ability.
—There is no obvious precipitating event or CNS injury or disease.
—The new skill is automatically coupled with a detailed, epiphany-type knowledge of the underlying rules of music, art or math, for example—none of which the person has studied. They know things without ever having learned them.
—The new skill is accompanied with an obsessive-compulsive (OCD) component; there is the overpowering need to play music, draw or compute. It is as much a force as a gift, as is usually the case with both congenital and acquired savant syndromes.
—There is a fear the gift and OCD is evidence of losing one’s min
—I have 14 such cases now. Ten are female and four are male. Age of onset of the new skill averages 47.2 years. The new skill was art, painting or drawing in nine cases; mathematics or calendar-calculating in four; music in one.
These cases came to my attention via unsolicited e-mails by people seeking explanation or advice from internet searches. We are in the process of exploring these cases further with a detailed survey instrument.
Daniel Tammet, a prodigious savant, is author of Born on a Blue Day. The way Daniel can describe his inner world so articulately has given scientists a personal, verbal window into the brain that they never had before. In a documentary filmed at the Milwaukee Art Museum he states: “The line between profound talent and profound disability seems to be really a surprisingly thin one. Who knows there may be abilities hidden within everyone that can be tapped in some way.”
Indeed, the acquired savant particularly, and now the sudden savant, reinforce the idea that not only is the line between savant and genius a very narrow one but also underscores the possibility such savant abilities may be dormant, to one degree or another, in all of us. The challenge is to tap those special abilities without head injury or CNS incident but rather with some nonintrusive, more readily available methods.
We are working on that.
(“But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” 1 Corinthians 2:9)
***
SPUTNIK
Russian PM Compares Further Anti-Moscow Sanctions to Economic Warfare
August 10, 2018
Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev warned the United States on Friday that sanctions it plans to impose in August over the ex-spy poisoning might be treated as a declaration of economic war.
Russian Prime Minister said that if some sort of ban on banking activities or currency ban was imposed on Russia — it would mean a declaration of economic war.
"All I can say is: if they ban banking operations or the use of any currency we will call it a declaration of economic war. And we’ll have to respond to it – economically, politically or in any other way, if need be. Our American friends should make no mistake about it," he said during a trip to the Kamchatka region.
Earlier, the US Department of State announced new sanctions on Russia over the accusations of involvement in poisoning of former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the United Kingdom in March. However, no evidence to substantiate the case has been presented by the US or the UK.
The Russian Foreign Ministry stated that it would lay out counter-measures to address the new sanctions.
The first package of the newly-announced US sanctions implies will include, according to media reports, a complete ban on the export of electronic devices and dual-use components to Russia, while the second one may imply a decrease in the level of diplomatic relations, a ban on flights by Russia's Aeroflot carrier to the US and almost complete suspension of US exports.
***
RT
Rothschild worried about new world economic order
August 9, 2018
Jacob Rothschild © Ronen Zvulun / Reuters
Jacob Rothschild has voiced concern about the global financial system that was established after WWII. The billionaire banker points to the US-China trade war and eurozone crisis as the key problems putting economic order at risk.
“In 9/11 and in the 2008 financial crisis, the powers of the world worked together with a common approach. Co-operation today is proving much more difficult. This puts at risk the post-war economic and security order,” Rothschild warned in his investment trust's half-year results commentary.
In economics, the post-war order is usually refers to a monetary management system which led to a rise of the US dollar as a dominant currency.
“In the circumstances our policy is to maintain our limited exposure to quoted equities and to enter into new commitments with great caution,” Rothschild added.
Rothschild’s RIT Capital investment has a historically low 47 percent exposure to the stock market. The banking dynasty is concerned that the 10-year stock market rally could be ending.
“The cycle is in its 10th positive year, the longest on record. We are now seeing some areas of weaker growth emerge; indeed the IMF has recently predicted some slowdown,” the investment banker said.
Rothschild pointed at “potentially destructive” debt levels in Europe and trade wars as major problems for the global economy.
He added, “problems are likely to continue in emerging markets, compounded by rising interest rates and the US Fed's monetary policy which has drained global dollar liquidity.”
According to Rothschild, the lack of a co-ordinated, international response to global challenges was unlikely in an era of populist and protectionist leaders such as US president Donald Trump.
***
RT
Trump says anyone trading with Iran will not trade with US as sanctions come into force
August 7, 2018
FILE PHOTO / AFP / © Atat Kenare
US President Donald Trump has warned that any country trading with Iran will “not be doing business with the United States.” The threat comes as sanctions against the country came into effect at midnight.
The announcement came via the president’s usual medium of communication, Twitter, where Trump announced that the sanctions taking hold were “the most biting ever imposed.”
Trump also promised that Washington will “ratchet up” the economic pressure on the Islamic Republic in November, and said that other nations found to be trading with Iran would not find a trading partner in the United States.
“I am asking for WORLD PEACE, nothing less!,” US president concluded.
Tuesday’s sanctions will see Iran prevented from using US currency as well as being barred from trading in cars and metals and minerals that include gold, steel, coal and aluminium, affecting Iran’s ability to buy US and European aircraft.
In November, Trump is expected to ratchet up the pressure on Iran by blocking Iranian oil exports, potentially halting some 2 million barrels a day, or 50 percent of Iran’s output, according to the BBC. (Emphesis added)
(There is absolutely no doubt that this could lead to a major confrontation between the US and Iran and other major nations. Iran has already said they would block the Straits of Hormuz if the US blocked its oil exports. The US and Saudi Arabia have said they will never allow the Straits of Hormuz to be blocked. We need to keep an eye on this to see how this developes. This is not to even mention the economic consequences of such actions. This could prove much more seious then the wars with Libya, Iraq, and Syria. Ed)
Allies China and Russia may intervene to help keep its industry afloat.
The International Monetary Fund said in March that Iran's net official reserves could decline this year to $97.8bn, which would finance about 13 months of imports. And analysts at BMI Research say Iran's economy could contract by 4.3 percent in 2019.
The re-imposed sanctions came into effect overnight, and follow Washington’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, colloquially known as the Iran nuclear deal.
Negotiated by Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama in 2015 and backed by the European Union, Russia, and China, the Iran deal sought to lift economic sanctions imposed on Tehran as part of an agreement to curb the nation's nuclear program.
Trump has previously blasted the accord as skewed in favor of Iran and has labelled the deal as “one of the worst I’ve ever seen.”
His position is a odds with the one held by the EU, who have stood by the deal saying that they would protect firms doing "legitimate business" in the face of US sanctions.
Trump’s latest remarks are likely to further escalate tensions with the bloc, which had seen the easing of sanctions as a way to keep Iran within the diplomatic fold.
Prior to the renewed sanctions taking effect, European Union Foreign Policy Chief Federica Mogherini said the EU is encouraging investors to maintain business ties with Iran to preserve the nuclear deal, despite the US withdrawal.
“We are doing our best to keep Iran in the deal, to keep Iran benefiting from the economic benefits that the agreement brings to the people of Iran, because we believe that this is (in) the security interests not only of our region but also of the world. If there is one piece of international agreements on nuclear non-proliferation that is delivering, it has to be maintained,” she said on Monday.
***
RT
EU blocking US sanctions against Iran to protect European companies
August 6, 2018
© Damir Sagolj / Reuters
The European Union is enforcing the so-called Blocking Statute to protect its firms operating in Iran from looming US sanctions against the country.
The first round of renewed US sanctions will take effect on Tuesday after midnight US Eastern time with the harshest sanctions expected to return in early November. Washington is reinstating penalties that were lifted against Iran after unilaterally withdrawing from the historic nuclear deal reached with Tehran after many years of negotiations.
The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on curtailing Tehran’s nuclear program was signed by Iran, the United States, Russia, China and the European Union. The move by Washington to withdraw from the nuclear agreement has been widely condemned by the EU and other signatories of the deal.
The European Commission has stated that despite US sanctions, European companies will continue doing legal business in Iran under the protection from Brussels.
“The lifting of nuclear-related sanctions is an essential part of the deal – it aims at having a positive impact not only on trade and economic relations with Iran, but most importantly on the lives of the Iranian people. We are determined to protect European economic operators engaged in legitimate business with Iran, in accordance with EU law and with UN Security Council resolution 2231,” the European Commission stated on Monday.
"This is why the European Union’s updated Blocking Statute enters into force on 7 August to protect EU companies doing legitimate business with Iran from the impact of US extra-territorial sanctions," it added.
Brussels announced back in May that it would enable the Blocking Statute starting from August. The law was first adopted in 1996 and forbids EU companies from complying with the extraterritorial effects of US sanctions. It allows companies to recover damages arising from such sanctions, and nullifies the effect in the EU of any foreign court judgements based on them.
The Europeans are “committed to work on … the preservation and maintenance of effective financial channels with Iran, and the continuation of Iran's export of oil and gas,” the EC added.
The bloc said that maintaining the nuclear deal with Iran is a “matter of respecting international agreements and a matter of international security.”
However, the Blocking Statute has never been used in practice and could be difficult to enforce. The law first needs to be updated to include US nuclear-related sanctions against Iran. It then requires the agreement of all 28 EU member states to implement, which could be a lengthy process.
The biggest problem is that European companies are likely to bow to US pressure and leave Iran despite assurances from Brussels. These firms are dependent on the US-dominated international banking system and international financial markets. Already a number of major European firms have reportedly stopped doing business in Iran to avoid becoming targets of US sanctions and fear of losing the American market.
***
RT
‘Truth is treason in empire of lies’: Ron Paul on Big Tech censorship
August 8, 2018
After the executive director of the Ron Paul Institute got suspended on Twitter, the former congressman from Texas told RT that social media crackdowns are part of a broader effort to silence dissent in the US.
While social media could be a “real delight” and very informative, the biggest role social networks are playing is “working with the government,” Ron Paul told RT on Tuesday. The government is indirectly regulating speech through companies like Twitter and Facebook, he added.
“You get accused of treasonous activity and treasonous speech because in an empire of lies the truth is treason,” Paul said. “Challenging the status quo is what they can’t stand and it unnerves them, so they have to silence people.”
Paul served in the House of Representatives for over 25 years before retiring in 2013 and setting up the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. The institute’s executive director, Daniel McAdams, found himself suspended from Twitter on Monday, apparently for retweeting a comment by radio show host Scott Horton.
Horton, who is also the editorial director of Antiwar.com, was suspended for criticizing journalist Jonathan M. Katz, after Katz complained to Twitter and got former former State Department employee and author Peter Van Buren banned from the platform.
“I’m just hoping that technology can stay ahead of it all and that we can have real alternatives to the dependency on Twitter and other companies that have been working hand in glove with the government,” Paul told RT.
“And if we, some of us, tell the truth about our government, they call us treasonous and say we’re speaking out of line and they’d like to punish us, and I think that’s part of what’s happening with social media,” he added.
***
RonPaulInstitute.org.
NEOCONS DEMAND ‘CRUSHING’ SANCTIONS ON RUSSIA
Called ‘the sanctions bill from hell’
August 6, 2018
You can always count on the neocons in Congress to ignore reality, ignore evidence, and ignore common sense in their endless drive to get us involved in another war. Last week, for example, Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-NC), Bob Menendez (D-NJ), and others joined up to introduce what Senator Graham called “the sanctions bill from hell,” aimed at applying “crushing” sanctions on Russia.
Senator Graham bragged that the bill would include “everything but the kitchen sink” in its attempt to ratchet up tensions with Russia.
Sen Cory Gardner (R-CO) bragged that the new sanctions bill “includes my language requiring the State Department to determine whether Russia merits the designation of a State Sponsor of Terror.”
Does he even know what the word “terrorism” means?
Sen Ben Cardin (D-MD) warns that the bill must be passed to strengthen our resolve against “Vladimir Putin’s pattern of corroding democratic institutions and values around the world, a direct and growing threat to US national security.”
What has Russia done that warrants “kitchen sink” sanctions that will “crush” the country and possibly designate it as a sponsor of terrorism? Sen. Menendez tells us: “The Kremlin continues to attack our democracy, support a war criminal in Syria, and violate Ukraine’s sovereignty.”
There is a big problem with these accusations on Russia: they’re based on outright lies and unproven accusations that continue to get more bizarre with each re-telling. How strange that when US Senators like Menendez demand that we stand by our NATO allies even if it means war, they attack Russia for doing the same in Syria. Is the Syrian president a “war criminal,” as he claims? We do know that his army is finally, with Russian and Iranian help, about to defeat ISIS and al-Qaeda, which with US backing for seven years have turned Syria into a smoking ruin. Does Menendez and his allies prefer ISIS in charge of Syria?
And how hypocritical for Menendez to talk about Russia violating Ukraine’s sovereignty. The unrest in Ukraine was started by the 2014 US-backed coup against an elected leader. We have that all on tape!
How is Russia “attacking our democracy”? We’re still waiting for any real evidence that Russia was involved in our 2016 elections and intends to become involved in our 2018 elections. But that doesn’t stop the propagandists, who claim with no proof that Russia was behind the election of Donald Trump.
These Senators claim that sanctions will bring the Russians to heel, but they are wrong. Sanctions are good at two things only: destroying the lives of innocent civilians and leading to war.
As I mentioned in an episode of my Liberty Report last week, even our own history shows that sanctions do lead to war and should not be taken lightly. In the run-up to US involvement in the War of 1812, the US was doing business with both France and the UK, which were at war with each other. When the UK decided that the US was favoring France in its commerce, it imposed sanctions on the US. What did Washington do in response? Declared war. Hence the War of 1812, which most Americans remember as that time when the British burned down the White House.
Recent polls show that the majority of Americans approve of President Trump’s recent meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Among Republicans, a vast majority support the meeting. Perhaps a good defeat in November will wake these neocon warmongers up. Let’s hope so!
***
PRESSTV
Georgian membership in NATO will spark terrible conflict: Russia
August 7, 2018
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is seen speaking at a session of the State Duma, with President Vladimir Putin in the background, in Moscow, Russia, on May 8, 2018. (Photo by AFP)
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has criticized NATO for a decision to accept Georgia as a new member, saying the country’s potential accession to the Western military bloc will trigger “a terrible conflict.”
Medvedev made the remarks in an interview with Russia’s Kommersantnewspaper on Monday, on the eve of the 10-year anniversary of a brief Russo-Georgian war.
Medvedev did not specify whether the conflict that he said would result from Georgian membership in NATO would involve Russia, but he made references to Georgia’s breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and seemed to mean that NATO would become involved in the dispute over those regions.
Russia recognizes those territories as independent states.
Shortly after the Russo-Georgian war back in 2008, NATO agreed to the admission of Georgia, which shares a border with Russia.
Medvedev, who was Russia’s president at the time of the war, called NATO’s decision to admit Tbilisi “an absolutely irresponsible standpoint” and “a threat to peace.”
“We all understand that on Georgia’s territory, there is a sort of pressure. Georgia considers neighboring territories or, from our point of view, states, to be its own territories... And will this country be accepted into the military bloc? Do we understand what it will lead to? It can provoke a terrible conflict,” he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has previously warned NATO about the move, saying it would have unspecified consequences for the Western military alliance.
Georgian politicians are keen for their country to join NATO but have so far been unable to secure accession because under NATO rules, countries with territorial conflicts cannot join the alliance.
‘A threat to the Russian Federation’
In his Monday's remarks, Medvedev also voiced Moscow’s oft-expressed concern about NATO’s eastward expansion — toward Russian borders.
“In this case, this is not only about strategic nuclear weapons but tactical nuclear weapons [which become closer to Russia and], which gain the quality of strategic weapons by moving closer toward the Russian border; and also conventional weapons, which can cause colossal damage because of their high-precision characteristics,” Medvedev said. “In other words, NATO expansion is by no doubt a threat to the Russian Federation.”
NATO has been holding regular military drills in countries near Russia. Moscow considers the drills and the deployments of personnel and materiel as provocations and a threat to its peace.
***
RT
Turkey joining BRICS could be ‘serious shock’ for US & EU, analyst tells RT
August 4, 2018
© Murad Sezer / Reuters
As Turkey seeks to join the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) union, RT has talked to an analyst about what the country brings to the table for the world's emerging economies.
“The economy of Turkey is one of the fastest growing economies in the world, despite the political events of the recent years and its geographical proximity to hot spots in the Middle East,” says analyst Vladimir Rojankovski from the International Financial Center.
“Turkey is a secular state with a predominantly Muslim population, it stands out favorably against other religious Islamic countries and monarchies in the region. Turkey's accession to the bloc of countries with the Russia-China vector is a serious shock for Europe and the United States,” the analyst added.
In terms of GDP, Turkey ranks 17th in the world, Rojankovski notes. In terms of GDP, adjusted for PPP (purchasing power parity of citizens), it is 13th. This means that from the economic point of view Turkey is on par with all BRICS countries and is well ahead of South Africa.
Turkey’s desire to join BRICS was announced by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday. “We are in the G20 with five of those countries. I wish they would take the necessary steps to let us in and we could take our place in BRICS,” Erdogan told Hurriyet on the sidelines of the BRICS Forum in South Africa.
BRICS was founded in 2006 during the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Initially, it was formed by Brazil, Russia, India and China, with South Africa joining the bloc in 2010.
Together, BRICS countries account for 26.46 percent of world land area, and 42.58 percent of world population.
According to IMF estimates, BRICS member states generated almost a quarter of the world’s GDP in 2015 and have contributed more than half of global economic growth in the last 10 years.
***
Zero Hedge
Victor Orban's 5 Tenets To Rebuild Europe
By Tyler Durden
August 3, 2018
Excerpted from Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s speech at the 29th Bálványos Summer Open University and Student Camp:
...I haveformulated five tenets for the project of building up Central Europe.
The first is that every European country has the right to defend its Christian culture, and theright to reject the ideology of multiculturalism.
Our second tenet is that every country has the right to defend the traditional family model, and is entitled to assert that every child has the right to a mother and a father.
The third Central European tenet is that every Central European country has the right to defend the nationally strategic economic sectors and markets which are of crucial importance to it.
The fourth tenet is that every country has the right to defend its borders, and it has the right to reject immigration.
And the fifth tenet is that every European country has the right to insist on the principle of one nation, one vote on the most important issues, and that this right must not be denied in the European Union.
In other words, we Central Europeans claim that there is life beyond globalism, which is not the only path. Central Europe’s path is the path of an alliance of free nations.
+
It’s amazing when you consider that exhibiting common sense now makes you a “right-wing extremist”.
Dave Hodges The Common Sense Show
Where They Burn Books, They Will Soon Burn People
Fact: President Trump is sitting in the White House, today, largely because of the Independent Media.
Fact: President Trump just thumbed his nose to one of his biggest supporters, Alex Jones, when he refused to use the power of the President to reign in the illegal behaviors of the social media monopolies.
Fact: One-time staunch supporter of Trump, Gary Heavin, retired owner of curves, philanthropist and movie producer, stated on The Common Sense Show, that he no longer supports Trump and that he is clearly compromised. In the interview, I was shocked but I could not deny his supporting evidence. I desperately wanted Gary to be wrong! Sadly, everything he said was true.
Is It Time to Forsake Trump?
Am I jumping off of the Trump train? No, I am not, I am being pushed off of the train by his unexplainable inaction in moving to protect the only media that has been friendly to the President.
There is no denying the many great economic accomplishments of the Trump administration. However, and for the time being, he has clearly deserted his base. This is my line in the sand for Donald Trump. If Trump does not move to undo the illegal censorship of the social media giants, it is time for the Independent Media to re-evaluate where we will place our efforts.
The social media giants are low hanging fruit. They are in such blatant violation of Federal law, that prosecuting them is easy. Again, under the open forum laws that all social media giants claim membership status in, they are not allowed to discriminate and censor. Ted Cruz exposed the open forum umbrella that all the social media giants are operating under. Further, there is no question that the social media giants are monopolies. In fact, they are poster-children for this concept. However, monopolies cannot selectively censor without being in violation of anti-trust laws. Again, where is Trump?
Where Will You Go For the Only True Version of the News?
You are on this website, because you know you cannot trust CNN, ABC, MSNBC, the Washington Post, etc. By election day of 2018, you will not have many places to go to find out what’s really going on.
The following entities are actively censoring and banning the Independent Media:
The country of New Zealand for canceling the planned appearances of Lauren Southern
Google which should now be considered the face of the New World Order
Snap Chat
All of the MSM, print, radio and TV.
Patreon
Any and every form of social media….
A man, who I suspect was an AI troll, sent me an email I want to share:
Hodges,
You and your kind are an absolute joke. You poor bastards in the alt right media deserve to go out of business. I am so happy that Alex Jones otherwise known as Bill Hicks is going out of business. Your sorry ass is next. You are lucky that we don’t kill all of you and your families so you cannot reproduce your kind. Very soon you poor bastard you will have nowhere to go to spread your Christian BS. That will indeed be a good day when you are shipped off to a Fema camp……
I get emails like this all the time, but this one is important because it captures what many liberals are feeling in the present moment.
The Goal of Censorship
As I previously said I used to be marginalized by being labeled a conspiracy theorist. After several decades of employing that strategy, it no longer works.
The globalists are attempting to permanently silence the Independent Media once and for all. In the election of 2016, they made a mistake and it cost Hillary the election. They are determined that our influence on the upcoming mid-term elections is negated.
Heed my next words. The globalists have made another miscalculation. Even if every alt right media source was effectively censored the Blue Wave coming from the Democrats will fail. The damage has been done.
What’s Coming?
The answer to that question is another question in response. Blue Dawn, Red Dawn and the destruction of America is on the table. There is no hiding the agenda of the globalists.
Many journalists are predicting widespread violence between now and the November election. Trump will be either a Hillary clone, at this point, or he will just fade away and become another New World Order puppet, or he can take some political viagra and act accordingly.
Trump could still act, but I am not holding my breath. He needs us now in the midterm elections any by October many of us are going to be MIA. Donald Trump Jr. did talk about censorship yesterday, but he’s not his father.
What’s Next for the Media
One must ask, if Trump continues to desert those that brought him to power, what lies next? Will the American people have anywhere to go to learn the truth about what is happening? The answer is yes, because nature hates a vacuum.
Unless Trump acts decisively, and soon, there will be significant changes. You will not see any of us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, etc.
The Independent Media (IM) will change form. The subscription model put forth by John B. Wells will very likely be repeated. With the revenues from Youtube, Facebook, etc., drying up, we will see the IM move to subscription services. At first the public, who are used to getting a free lunch (80%), will yell and scream at having to pay a subscription. However, after watching a week of CNN, they will return and pay a nominal subscription fee. What you will see in the future, if this censorship trend continues, are nothing but websites and radio shows generated from those websites. However, the IM will have to be on a platform that they cannot be removed from such as GoDaddy. I have already positioned myself in this manner and my radio show is not hosted by anyone that can be pressured.
In the final analysis, we are witnessing the Great American Book Burning. Today’s libraries are housed on the Internet. The Alex Jones wing of the library was burned down in this latest purge. And what is that saying…..Where they burn books, they will soon burn people. We are no living under the American version of Maoism. What did Mao do to the Chinese people after the books were all burned and all information was controlled? He murdered 60 million of his own people. This book burning is a precursor to a Maoist style genocide. Look at George Soros, the man who betrayed his fellow Jews to the Nazi and tell me that it cannot happen here. The purge is already underway.
Trump Regime v. Humanity
by Stephen Lendman (stephenlendman.org – Home – Stephen Lendman)
America is a pariah state, a plutocracy, not a democracy. Bipartisan neocons infesting Washington risk humanity-ending nuclear war.
They want sovereign independent Russia, China, Iran, and other nations they don’t control eliminated, pro-Western puppet rule replacing them – naked aggression or coups their favored strategies.
Had Hillary triumphed over Trump, preemptive nuclear on Russia might have already begun, putting humanity’s fate up for grabs like never before.
Rage for global dominance by neocons in charge of Trump’s geopolitical agenda may launch nuclear war to pursue their diabolical agenda – later rather than sooner by Hillary had she become US president.
Imposing unlawful and unacceptable sanctions on Iran, with stiffer ones coming on November 4, two days before US midterm elections, may be prelude to possible conflict with the Islamic Republic.
On Tuesday, Trump tweeted: “The Iran sanctions have officially been cast. These are the most biting sanctions ever imposed, and in November they ratchet up to yet another level.”
“Anyone doing business with Iran will NOT be doing business with the United States. I am asking for WORLD PEACE, nothing less” – while waging endless wars of aggression in multiple theaters and threatening more.
He’s a warrior president like his predecessors, waging permanent wars for unattainable peace he and extremists infesting his regime and Congress disdain.
Unilaterally imposed US sanctions on other nations are flagrantly illegal. Most countries observe what they categorically should reject. Compliance is complicity in wrongdoing.
Washington targeted Iran for regime change since the Carter administration – a failed strategy then and now.
The Islamic Republic’s future is largely East, not West. Brussels’ pledge to continue normal relations with Tehran has been little more than rhetoric without follow-through with teeth so far.
For nearly 40 years, Iran withstood endless US sanctions and other hostile actions, its sovereign independence maintained.
Tehran is committed to the JCPOA if P5+1 signatories (minus America) fully adhere to its principles – what the Obama and Trump regimes failed to do, the latter disgracefully pulling out.
It flagrantly violated international and constitutional law it doesn’t give a hoot about, doing whatever it damn pleases extrajudicially.
The JCPOA can only be saved if EU countries do what they’ve never done before – delink from US domination, abandon their longstanding colonial status, assert their sovereign independence by no longer serving as a US imperial proxy.
It takes a giant leap of faith to believe Brussels will act responsibly for the first time ever.
Europe, Japan, South Korea, and many other nations are occupied US territory – politically, economically and militarily.
When will they assert their sovereign interests above Washington’s? When will they divest from US dominance?
When will they decide colonial status is no longer acceptable? When will they mature and be a mensch? Their sovereign future depends on it.
Stephen Lendman was born in 1934 in Boston, MA. In 1956, he received a BA from Harvard University. Two years of US Army service followed, then an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1960. After working seven years as a marketing research analyst, he joined the Lendman Group family business in 1967. He remained there until retiring at year end 1999. Writing on major world and national issues began in summer 2005. In early 2007, radio hosting followed. Lendman now hosts the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network three times weekly.
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Zero Hedge
Spain: New Gateway To Europe For Mass-Migration
By Tyler Durden
August 3, 2018
Authored by Thomas Paul Wiederholen via The Gatestone Institute,
On July 26, some 800 migrants from sub-Saharan Africa violently stormed the border fence between Morocco, where they were living illegally, and the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. According to Spanish authorities:
"In an attempt to stop the Guardia Civil getting close to the break-in area, the migrants ... [pelted] officers with plastic containers of excrement and quicklime, sticks and stones, as well as using aerosols as flame-throwers."
Many people were wounded in the clash, and 602 migrants succeeded in entering Spanish territory.
Pictured: A section of the border fence between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. (Image source: David Ramos/Getty Images)
Two weeks earlier, the rescue ship Aquarius, operated by the French NGO Sos Méditerranée, picked up 629 Sub-Saharan migrants off the coast of Libya. After both Italy and Malta refused to take in the migrants, with Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini declaring, "No to human trafficking, no to the business of illegal immigration," Spain welcomed the ship, and two other vessels carrying illegal migrants, at the port of Valencia.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, the head of Spain's newly-formed socialist government -- which has promised free healthcareto the migrants and says it will investigate every asylum claim individually – said in mid-June: "It is our duty to help avoid a humanitarian catastrophe and offer a safe port to these people, to comply with our human rights obligations."
According to a July 27 report about Spain in The Telegraph:
"The country is now the largest gateway for migrants crossing the Mediterranean to Europe, with 20,992 people landing on its shores so far this year... Arrivals to Italy now trail Spain by almost 3000 - a gap that just a week ago was 200."
This, the report says, has completely "overwhelmed" the Spanish coastguard, which is issuing an urgent call for additional resources to help deal with the massive influx.
According to a 2017 report by the European Commission:
"The geographic distribution clearly reveals that a majority of irregular migrants rescued in the Central Mediterranean are most likely not refugees in the sense of the Geneva Convention, given that some 70 % come from countries or regions not suffering from violent conflicts or oppressive regimes."
Absorbing the large numbers of migrants is not the only problem that Spain has to contend with, however. According to a December 2016 report in the Financial Times, based on confidential reports it obtained, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) accused some charitable organizations that support rescues in the Mediterranean of collaborating with human traffickers. This claim was also made by the pan-European think tank, Gefira, which posted a YouTube video listing the NGOs that have been abetting – regardless of their "high-minded intentions" – the criminal practice of smuggling people into Europe for financial gain.
According to The Independent:
"At the last European Council summit in Brussels at the end of June, EU national leaders agreed on the need to set up secure centres to process asylum claims, as well as agreeing a raft of hardline stances on migrants – such as condemning NGO-operated rescue boats operating off the Libyan coast."
...
"Leaders also in principle agreed another proposal for "disembarkation platforms" based in North Africa where EU officials could process asylum claims outside EU territory ..."
However, despite the agreement between EU members, "no north African country has yet agreed to host migrant screening centres to process refugee claims," according to Dimitris Avramopoulos, the European commissioner for migration.
The Speaker of Egypt's House of Representatives, Ali Abdel Aal, told the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag on July 1, "EU reception facilities for migrants in Egypt would violate the laws and constitution of our country."
Abd al-Aal recalled that a high number of migrants are already living in his country. "We already have about ten million refugees from Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Palestine, Sudan, Somalia and other countries," said Ab al-Aal. In Egypt, all refugees have a right to health care and education. "This means that our capacities are already exhausted today. It is therefore important that Egypt receives support from Germany and the EU."
In an interview with the German news outlet Bild on July 19, Libyan Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj said:
"We have created refugee shelters for tens of thousands of people, but there are hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants in our country. This has heavily impaired the security situation. They include terrorists, criminals, and human traffickers who do not care about human rights. It's horrible. In order to improve the situation, we must fight these structures. But we also need more international help for this. It begins with our country's borders. It is imperative that they be better controlled."
...
"We are strictly against Europe officially placing illegal migrants who are no longer wanted in the EU in our country. We also won't agree on any deals with EU money about taking in more illegal migrants. The EU should rather talk to the countries that people are coming from and should put pressure on these countries instead. There won't be any deals with us.
"I am very surprised that while nobody in Europe wants to take in migrants anymore they are asking us to take in further hundreds of thousands."
In an article for Gatestone in March 2018, Uzay Bulut sheds light on why the migrant crisis has become a problem that many European governments are beginning to recognize: "demographic jihad."
Bulut cites Turkish MP Alparslan Kavaklıoğlu, a member of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), and the head of the parliament's Security and Intelligence Commission, who stated:
"... Europe is going through a time that is out of the ordinary. Its population is declining and aging... So, people coming from outside get the jobs there. But Europe has this problem. All of the newcomers are Muslim. From Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. Those who come from these places are Muslim. It is now at such a level that the most popular name in Brussels, Belgium is Mohammed... [If this trend continues], the Muslim population will outnumber the Christian population in Europe... Europe will be Muslim. We will be effective there, Allah willing. I am sure of that."
The Turkish leadership's assessment echoes a sermon delivered at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on September 11, 2015 (the 14th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks) by Imam Sheikh Muhammad Ayed, who stated, in part:
"They [Westerners] have lost their fertility... We will give them fertility! We will breed children with them, because we shall conquer their countries. Whether you like it or not, oh Germans, oh Americans, oh French, Oh Italians, and all those like you. Take the refugees! We shall soon collect them in the name of the coming Caliphate... We will say to you: These are our sons. Send them or we will send our armies to you."
The act of migration has a strong basis in the Qu'ran. For example, Verse 9:20states:
"The ones who have believed, emigrated and striven in the cause of Allah with their wealth and their lives are greater in rank in the sight of Allah. And it is those who are the attainers [of success]."
Verse 22:58 states:
"And those who emigrated for the cause of Allah and then were killed or died - Allah will surely provide for them a good provision. And indeed, it is Allah who is the best of providers."
None of the above, however, appears to have put a dent in the policies or ideology of the left-wing parties supporting the new Spanish government. On June 29, following the European summit, Sanchez tweeted:
"...The EU is beginning to move in the right direction: to give a European perspective to a European challenge such as migration."
Sanchez was correct, but for all the wrong reasons. The "European perspective" that he and fellow EU members should be embracing is that of democracy and freedom, not one that allows the unfettered entry of millions of penniless and unskilled illegal migrants, among whom are radical Islamists whose beliefs are antithetical to European values.
In case Sanchez has not been paying attention, the influx of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa has been taking a serious toll on Europe. According to a recent Heritage Foundation report:
"Over the past four years, 16 percent of Islamist plots in Europe featured asylum seekers or refugees... Radicalization of plotters generally occurred abroad although in the most recent plots, more commonly within Europe itself. Europe's response to migration flows has been inadequate and inadvertently increased the terrorist threat dramatically..."
In the book Europe All Inclusive by former Czech President Václav Klaus, co-authored by the Arabic-speaking economist Jiří Weigl, the authors sum up the role that the Left plays in the migrant crisis:
"Europe, and especially its 'integrated' part, is riddled with hypocrisy, pseudo-humanism and other dubious concepts. The most dangerous of them are the currently fashionable, and ultimately suicidal, ideologies of multiculturalism and humanrightism. Such ideologies push millions of people towards resignation when it comes to concepts like home, motherland, nation and state. These ideologies promote the notion that migration is a human right, and that the right to migrate leads to further rights and entitlements including social welfare hand-outs for migrants... Europe is weakened by the leftist utopia of trying to transform a continent that was once proud of its past into an inefficient solidaristic state, turning its inhabitants from citizens into dependent clients."
As the "largest gateway" for migrants now entering Europe, Spain has a particularly great responsibility to wake up to and deal with reality.
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ACTIVIST POST
Reddit Censors Bangladesh Protest As Govt Shuts Down Mobile Internet; Protesters Being Injured and Killed
August 6, 2018
By Aaron Kesel
Bangladesh authorities have shut down mobile Internet across the country, officials and local media said on Sunday, ABS CBN News reported. Meanwhile, Reddit has begun a cardinal sin against free speech and human rights by censoring a user trying to shed light on the horrific human rights abuses happening in their country.
For a week, thousands of students across Bangladesh have been protesting against poor road safety after two teenagers were killed by a speeding bus on July 29th.
But on Saturday the protests turned violent in Dhaka’s Jigatala neighborhood with more than 100 people including 20-25 journalists injured by Chhatra League, according to the Times Of India.
Several witnesses stated that police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at demonstrators. Further, the witnesses alleged pro-government activists attacked young kids.
The ruling Awami League party has denied allegations its cadres beat students up.
Bangladesh authorities ceased access to 3G and 4G Internet services which have been shut down for more than 48 hours since late Saturday, shortly after the violence broke out.
Social media has been filled with videos and comments showing the scenes in Bangladesh. However, it appears Reddit has begun censoring the information coming out of Bangladesh, according to a Reddit user Helphumanity0.
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RT
Cryptic fireball streaking over US base in Greenland puzzles NASA scientist
August 3, 2018
File photo. © Gerardo Garcia / Reuters
A mysterious fireball exploding with the power of a small nuclear bomb, which was detected not far from the US air base in Greenland, has alerted a NASA space explorer. Another called for calm, saying it’s not a Russian strike.
The curious tweet was released by Ron Baalke, a space explorer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in late July. “A fireball was detected over Greenland on July 25, 2018 by US government sensors at an altitude of 43.3 km,” he wrote. The energy from the blast was estimated to be 2.1 kilotons.
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MailOnline
Escape from Indonesia: Thousands of tourists scramble to packed beaches to be rescued from paradise islands amid chaotic scenes as death toll from devastating earthquake 'climbs to 142'
WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES
More than 100 have been killed after a powerful earthquake shook Indonesian islands of Bali and Lombok
There have been chaotic scenes as tourists scramble to beaches to be rescued by boat from paradise islands
Some described fleeing to high ground in the darkness amid fears 7.0 magnitude quake would trigger tsunami
Children's hospital appealed for help as patients are left sleeping outside while desperate locals clean up
Harrowing photos capture the horrific aftermath of Indonesia's earthquake which struck on Sunday evening
The same island was hit by another 6.4-magnitude earthquake which struck just last week, killing 16 people
By JULIAN ROBINSON and KATE DARVALL and MONICA O'SHEA and JORDAN BARNES and JOSHUA FOX FOR DAILY MAIL AUSTRALIA and AFP
PUBLISHED: 08:21, 6 August 2018 | UPDATED: 02:13, 7 August 2018
BBC
In pictures: Australia's drought seen from the air
August 2, 2018
Parts of eastern Australia are suffering their worst drought in living memory as a lack of rainfall in winter hits farms badly.
Reuters photographer David Gray captured the view of the dried earth from the air, finding an often surprising collage of colours.
abc6
Amish man launches "Uber" ride service with his horse and buggy
By Sarah Wynn
August 4, 2018
(WSYX/WTTE)
COLON, Michigan — Colon Michigan's newest taxi service has four wheels, four legs and good gas mileage.
Timothy Hochstedler is adding some horsepower to ride sharing, with his horse and buggy. He spoke with WWMT, and said he calls it Aby mish Uber.
"Uber is a cool thing, every single year something new comes in and Uber is hot right now so we have the Amish Uber we can deliver people to their front door steps," said Hochstedler.
And so far, people are loving it.
"First time Ubering and we're riding in a buggy," said Steve Phelps, an Amish Uber rider.
Bruce Jordan and his grandkids took a ride after traveling from Grand Rapids.
"It was fascinating. It's not an activity you typically associate with the Amish," said Amish Uber rider Bruce Jordan.
Plus, his engine has a lot more character as it has four legs. Hochstedler said his horse his "engine." He even commented on how his horse is very friendly, "He loves people. He's a Morgan. A Morgan is a people's horse they love giving you a kiss or whatever."
So if you're ever in Colon, Michigan, keep an eye out for Hochstedler's Amish Uber. To get a ride you have to flag him down without a cellphone.
(They have a head start on Millinium travel. Ed)
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Until
next week...keep on believing.
Almondtree Productions
“Then
wolves and lambs shall feed together, and the lion shall eat chaff
like the ox, and the serpent earth as bread. They shall not injure
nor destroy in my holy mountain, saith the Lord.”
(Isaiah 65:25)