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Dead Animals Are Not Signs of End-Times, Claims 'Science'
Amplify’d from gawker.com
All these scary bird, crab and fish die-offs have prompted many to wonder if the world was coming to an end, a whole year before it's officially supposed to. But so-called "scientists" say these massive die-offs happen all the time.
Regarding the thousands of birds that just up and died and fell out of the sky, a Department of Wildlife and Fisheries ornithologist told the Daily News: "It does sound bizarre, but it's one of the prevalent ways birds die in the U.S." According to Federal statistics, mass die-offs happen every other day of the year. Famed Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson told the AP that there hasn't been any uptick in dead animals turning up, just in our ability to hear about them via blogs and Twitter.
But of course science would say this. Science has a very clear pro-world bias. It has every motivation to back unfounded ideas that the world isn't about to blink out in a blaze of fire and ice, because it works for the very universities controlled by world-loving academics and funded by worldist politicians.
Send an email to Adrian Chen, the author of this post, at adrian@gawker.com.
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Train Carrying 20,000 Gallons of Hydrochloric Acid Derails, Leaks
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Dozens of residents of Vernon Township, Mich. have been evacuated after a train carrying 20,000 gallons of hydrochloric acid derailed and began to leak. No injuries have been reported, but still! Hydrochloric acid! Yikes!
Send an email to Max Read, the author of this post, at max@gawker.com.
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The Zen master’s snafu: Trained as a Jesuit Jerry Brown takes charge again
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Jerry Brown takes charge again
ON JANUARY 3rd a new governor was sworn in as the leader of a state, California, which in recent years has been described as everything from dysfunctional to ungovernable. He seemed to trip over his oath: “without…any…mental…reservation.” There was laughter in the hall. Keeping his hand on his wife’s Bible, and smirking, he turned to the audience: “Really, no mental reservation.” It brought the house down.
It was vintage Jerry Brown. At the age of 72 he was following, as he did not need to remind anybody, in the footsteps not only of his father (Pat Brown, first sworn in 52 years ago) but also of himself, 36 years ago. In place of the famous shock of jet-black hair there are now tufts of silver. But Mr Brown is still known for the two strands in his intellectual persona.
He trained as a Jesuit, and retains cerebral proclivities. He also studied Zen Buddhism, and has never lost his penchant for the spontaneous and offbeat “accident” that makes his desired point all the more effectively. Hence the humorous kernel inside that little irregularity during the oath. California is in awful economic straits. One might well wonder why anybody would want the job.
Mr Brown obliquely answered that in Jesuitical style. He expounded on the “philosophy of loyalty” by a 19th-century thinker, Josiah Royce. And he read from the diary of his own German great-grandfather, who came to California by wagon trek across the desert in 1852, as a way of putting the current challenges facing Californians into perspective.
But Mr Brown was most eloquent whenever he allowed his inner Zen to emerge On the matter of his age, for instance: he is too old for “delay or denial” in dealing with daunting problems, he said. But the young guns hankering after his job shouldn’t get any ideas. “Aunt Connie, would you stand up?”, he asked, to renewed laughter. Aunt Connie is turning 99 and in fighting form. “It may be a while, so relax,” Mr Brown said. “God willing, the genes are good.”
His predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, typically retired after such occasions to a purpose-built tent in the courtyard of the state capitol to smoke cigars. Mr Brown instead joined the crowds outside for a hot dog. Then he departed to prepare a budget, to be delivered on January 10th. By all indications, it will cause shock and awe.
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Who were the Jews of Kaifeng?
Amplify’d from www.thejewishchronicle.net
Lee Chottiner, Compiler
At its height, the Kaifeng Jewish community consisted of 5,000 to 6,000 Jews (the number varies by reference source), many of whom were involved in commerce.
According to Ynet, all of Kaifeng’s Jewish descendants belonged to one of seven clans, each identifiable by its surname and family trees that stretch back for centuries. One legend has it that the emperor of China assigned the names.
These seven names — Zhao, Li, Ai, Zhang, Gao, Jin and Shi — were used by Kaifeng’s Jews throughout the centuries. It is believed that the Li family’s original Hebrew name was Levi, and the Gao family was Cohen.
The community was largely unknown until the 1600s when a Jesuit priest visited the city and verified the Jews’ existence there.
The community’s last rabbi died in the 19th century without leaving an heir and the synagogue of Kaifeng was destroyed in floods in 1854. It was never rebuilt.
After that, many Kaifeng Jews began assimilating.
There are approximately 1,000 descendants of the Jewish community living in Kaifeng today, of whom about half are connected to their identity. Other Kaifeng Jews have made aliya in recent years.
— Compiled by Lee Chottiner
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Catholic stores withdraw ‘dangerous’ books
More suppressed Books!!!
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Catholic stores withdraw ‘dangerous’ books
Catholic books displayed at the Bookstore of Our Lady of Peace
A Catholic bookstore in Ho Chi Minh City has withdrawn from sale a series of books by a Scottish Protestant theologian on the advice of Vietnamese bishops’ doctrinal commission.
The set of commentaries on the New Testament by William Barclay, a Church of Scotland minister and professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism at the University of Glasgow, had been on sale at a Redemptorist bookshop, ucanews.com reports.
However, Bishop Paul Bui Van Doc of My Tho, head of the Episcopal Commission for the Doctrine of the Vietnam Bishops’ Conference, warned that the books were “a danger to the faith of local Catholics,” said Redemptorist Provincial Superior Father Vincent Pham Trung Thanh.
“I have ordered bookstore workers to withdraw those copies from sale and return them to suppliers,” Father Thanh said in a Dec. 31 letter to his confreres.
Father Thanh criticized Father Jean Baptiste Huynh Cong Minh, vicar general of Ho Chi Minh City archdiocese, and local Oeuvre de Saint Paul nuns, who run the Catholic Bookstore of Our Lady of Peace, for publishing and supplying the books.
Father Thanh said he had also received a copy of an anonymous letter dated Sept. 29 that was sent to Cardinal Ivan Dias, head of the Vatican-based Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.
The author of the letter complained to Cardinal Dias that the book contradicted the Catholic faith on several points.
The letter said that 1,500 Vietnamese language copies of the Gospels of Matthew, John and Mark were printed in July 2008. Another 1,000 Vietnamese copies of Acts, Romans, Corinthians, Jude and revelation were printed in September that year.
Father Thanh noted that the books were translated by a priest who teaches at a local major seminary.
In his letter, Father Thanh added that he was compelled to explain the truth of the events following recent rumors among Church leaders that “local Redemptorists were reprimanded by the Vatican or sued for their work.”
The Redemptorist-run bookstore is one of the two biggest Catholic bookstores in the city.
SOURCE
Catholic stores withdraw ‘dangerous’ books (ucanews.com)
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The Pope Is Furious: Radical Islam is provoking the most terrifying institution in the world
Amplify’d from www.thetrumpet.com
If Asia Bibi, a hard-working mother of five living in northern Pakistan, could have known what would happen at work on June 14, 2009, she never would have gotten out of bed.
On June 18, four days after the incident, a mob of villagers snatched Bibi from her home, stripped and beat her in the street, and then marched her to the local police station. Fearing the angry hordes (which included Muslim clerics), and without any investigation into the veracity of the claims against her, village officials arrested and locked Bibi away. On Nov. 8, 2010—after being held in isolation in prison for more than a year—a local court sentenced Bibi to death.
What heinous crime did Asia Bibi commit?
“She was picking berries with other women,” her husband explained, “when she was sent to get water. One of the women [a Muslim] refused to drink the water after my wife dipped her cup in the bucket. This woman said it was contaminated because it was touched by a Christian.” Before long a group of Muslim women had descended on Bibi, insulting her mother, children and religion. Asia tried to defend herself, her husband says, and simply responded by “repeat[ing] the same insults back to them.” Four days later, Bibi was ripped from her home and family, viciously beaten, unfairly arrested and thrown in jail on the trumped-up charge that she blasphemed the prophet Mohammad.
Long story short, radical Muslims sentenced Asia Bibi to death for being a Christian.
Bibi’s tale of religious intolerance, injustice and outright persecution and violence is not an anomaly. As Muhammad Salim, one of the Muslim clerics responsible for having Bibi locked away, stated: “Any Muslim, if given the chance, would kill such a person” as Bibi. To the outside observer, the hatred among many Pakistanis for Bibi is astonishing. Across Pakistan, hard-line clerics have promised riots and protests if the president releases Bibi. One cleric in nearby Peshawar has offered 500,000 rupees, about $6,000, to the person who kills Bibi, should she be released from jail by the federal government.
Why such vicious hatred for a 45-year-old mother of five, whose only crime was defending herself from a gang of Muslim women who became furious after she drank water from the same bucket?
Asia Bibi is a victim of radical Islam’s ever growing hatred for Catholicism!
Persecution of Christians is now so pervasive and violent, wrote Jeffery Kuhner in the Washington Times recently, that “Christianity is on the verge of extinction in the ancient lands of its birth.” Across the Middle East, Kuhner lamented, “a creeping religious genocide is taking place” (emphasis mine throughout). Truth is, there are hundreds, even thousands, of Bibis, in a host of countries around this world.
On New Year’s Eve in Alexandria, Egypt, 21 Coptic Christians were killed and 79 were wounded when a bomb left outside the door of the Two Saints Coptic church exploded. Despite some ridiculous claims that the attack was conducted by the Mossad, Egyptian authorities and various intelligence agencies agree that the attack, the worst terrorist attack in Egypt since 2006, was carried out by Iraq-based Islamic terrorists.
The same day, a cluster of 10 bombs were placed near the homes of 14 Catholic families in Baghdad, Iraq. Four of the bombs were defused; the others exploded, killing two and wounding 20. The victims were all Catholic. In Russia the next day, radical Islamists set fire to a church using a grenade in the Muslim-rich North Caucus region. A week earlier in the Philippines, six people were wounded on the island of Jolo after a bomb planted by Islamic terrorists exploded inside a church during Christmas Day mass.
In Nigeria, at least 80 Christians were killed in a wave of attacks on Christmas Eve. In one instance, dozens of armed men attacked a church in Maiduguri, dragging the pastor from his home and executing him in the street. In another, more than 32 people were killed and 50 wounded in the central Nigerian city of Jos after a series of roadside bombs placed by radical Islamists exploded. In Nigeria alone, the number of Christians killed by Muslim terrorists numbered in the hundreds.
In Iran, a Christian pastor is slated to be executed for converting to Christianity. In Pakistan last February, 150 armed Muslims invaded Pahar Ganj, a Christian neighborhood north of Karachi, and ransacked two churches, beat Christians, and torched shops and vehicles—all because a Christian lad touched a piece of fruit on a Muslim vendor’s cart. In Somalia, the Islamic terrorist group Al Shabaab, which controls much of central Somalia, routinely persecutes, even kills, Christians, and is seeking to eradicate Christianity. Similar atrocities against Christians are becoming increasingly common in the Ivory Coast, Sudan, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Lebanon—and the list goes on.
Then there’s Iraq, which in 2010 experienced the worst attack on Iraqi Christians on record. On October 31, as 140 parishioners prepared to take mass in Baghdad’s Our Lady of Salvation Catholic church, the church was invaded by gunmen from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq terrorist group. When the church was later stormed by Iraq’s counterterrorism unit, the militants detonated suicide bomb vests, killing 58 men, women and children, including two priests, and wounding 80 more people. Over the past decade, Christian Iraqis have fled the country at a shocking pace: Before 2003, Iraq’s Christian population was about 1.5 million; today, barely 400,000 Christians remain!
The exodus of Christians from the Middle East, lamented Robert Fisk last fall, has reached “almost biblical proportions.”
Although times are tough for many professing Christians, and growing numbers are being tormented and tortured by radical Islam, both Bible prophecy and history tell us that the persecution will soon end. As Christians flee Iraq, as church members wipe the blood of their brethren from the walls of the Coptic church in Alexandria, as Asia Bibi sits in jail awaiting the noose, the plight of these individuals, and the larger Catholic community, is not going unnoticed.
The deep-seated hatred for Christianity that wells inside radical Islam, and the global campaign of violence and cruelty that it has engendered, is serving to infuriate the most dangerous and terrifying institution on Earth—the Roman Catholic Church!
The day after Islamic terrorists attacked Catholics in Alexandria, Pope Benedict xvi said it was a “vile gesture of death” and that it “offends God and all of humanity.” In his speech, he appealed to Christians: “In the face of the threatening tensions of the moment, especially in the face of discrimination, of abuse of power and religious intolerance that today particularly strikes Christians, I again direct a pressing invitation not to yield to discouragement and resignation.” That’s a polite way of saying, “Let’s not capitulate to the demands of radical Islam.”
Radical Islam is not a compromising religion. Buoyed by its apparent success, radical Islam will undoubtedly remain unrelenting in its attacks on Christians in 2011. The story this year will be how the Vatican responds. Fifteen hundred years of European history—including the Crusades, when tens of thousands of Catholic Europeans responded to Pope Urban’s war cry and descended on the Middle East—tell us that the Catholic Church will respond mightily, with terrific force and vigor!
In practical terms, two developments are likely. First, the ongoing persecution of various Christian churches and Catholic sects will drive these groups into the protective arms of the mother church, the Catholic Church. The more its daughter churches run to it for protection, the stronger the Vatican will become in defending its spiritual family. The further radical Islam encroaches, the more intense and popular Benedict’s campaign to re-evangelize the Catholic community, especially in Europe, will grow.
Second, expect the Vatican to increasingly employ its tried and tested strategy of forging a powerful axis with the most dominant European power, and then exploiting that powerful entity as the instrument through which it can confront its enemy, in this case radical Islam. For the Vatican, the rise of militant Islam is an ideal talking point with Europeans, millions of whom are alarmed by the encroachment of Islam on the Continent. With a little prodding here and there, and a few phone calls to European governments, the Vatican could begin to make life much tougher for Muslims in Europe!
Point is, radical Islam is a mutual threat to both the Catholic Church and Europe, making it an issue on which the Catholic Church’s relations with the German-led European Union could reach new levels.
While we don’t claim to know the thoughts and designs of Pope Benedict and other Catholic leaders, we do know what Bible prophecy and history say. And we can say with absolute certainty that Pope Benedict xvi is looking at Asia Bibi, and the Catholic victims of the bombing in Alexandria, and the mass exodus of Catholics from Iraq, and is becoming enraged. Even now, he is more than likely hatching a strategy to confront this enemy.
That strategy, Bible prophecy says, will soon thrust the entire world into a time of unprecedented upheaval and violence! •
Brad Macdonald’s column appears every Thursday.
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Priests accused of sex abuse claim unfair treatment
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Priests accused of sex abuse claim unfair treatment
Valletta (Malta), Jan 6 (DPA) Four priests accused of sexually abusing youths in Malta filed a constitutional case in court Thursday claiming they were being unfairly tried by the media.
Fr. Joseph Bonett, Fr. Godwin Scerri, Fr. Charles Pulis and Fr. Conrad Sciberras - have been charged in a criminal court with sexually abusing boys, aged 13 to 16, at an orphanage in the 1980s.
In a surprise move Thursday, their lawyer claimed a breach of their right to a fair hearing due to the massive media spotlight on their case.
Though the four priests were arraigned in 2003, the case is still pending before the courts and the constitutional case is expected to delay the case further.
The Catholic Church in Malta said last October there was enough evidence to back allegations by eight men that they were sexually abused as minors to have the case sent to the Vatican.
Last April, Pope Benedict XVI agreed to meet the alleged victims during a visit to Malta in an event which received worldwide media coverage.
The spokesman for the alleged victims, Lawrence Grech, said the priests' decision to open a constitutional case was a delaying tactic to further postpone justice.
'We are going to persist with this case, come what may. We had no choice but to resort to the media and tell the story of our suffering because we were ignored for far too long,' Grech, 39, told DPA.
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5200 Pentagon Employees PURCHASED Child Pornography! (Why Is This Not A Bigger Story?)
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5200 Pentagon Employees PURCHASED Child Pornography! (Why Is This Not A Bigger Story?)
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