UK - Children as young as seven are using social media to share sexual messages, pictures or videos, research has found. More than half of teachers said they knew of pupils who had used social media for “sexting”, the poll by the NASUWT teachers’ union said. A quarter of the 1,300 teachers polled knew of pupils involved in sexting who were as young as 11, but the youngest child reported was just seven. The majority of the pupils involved were aged between 13 and 16. An NSPCC spokesman said: “Apart from exposing them to bullying when images are shared, it could make children targets for sex offenders in some cases.” The charity called for better sex and relationships education in schools.
BELGIUM - Belgian security services are fearful that ISIS operatives may have been looking to target a nuclear plant as it emerged two workers from a plant in Doel fled to Syria to join ISIS.
ISRAEL - An Irish schoolteacher who came to a Jerusalem hospital convinced she was about to give birth to the Baby Jesus when in fact she was not even pregnant. A Canadian tourist who believed he was the Biblical strongman Samson and tried to tear stone blocks out of the Wailing Wall. An Austrian man who flew into a rage in his hotel kitchen when staff refused to prepare the Last Supper for him.
USA - The American College of Pediatricians issued a sharply worded statement warning against any policies that condition children to accept transgenderism as normal. “Conditioning children into believing a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse,” the statement said.
USA - Michigan’s State Board of Education has drafted a guidance that would push the state’s schools to allow all students, regardless of parental or doctoral input, to choose their gender, name, pronouns, and bathrooms.
BELGIUM - The bombing attacks in Brussels on the morning of March 22 are somewhat different from the Paris horror just several months earlier. The blasts at the Brussels Zaventem airport and in the Maalbeek underground station, situated in the European district of Brussels, showed quite clearly that this is an attack against the European institutions, ergo the European Union as such.
USA - Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has been mocked by critics for shouting that China is "killing us" economically, but a new analysis of US-China trade shows that the trade gap isn't just at a historic high, but that the imbalance is the widest for any bilateral trade, ever. According to the website Howmuch.net, the US exported $116 billion to China in 2015, the same year China exported $481 billion to the United States, producing that $365 billion gap. And it found that the gap is growing so fast that it will "almost quintuple" over the next 15 years.
MIDDLE EAST - How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile. In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make “the world free from nuclear weapons”. People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
UKRAINE - Ukraine can deal with its plethora of problems if it follows the economic policies of Adolf Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt and obtains nuclear weapons, says the leader of the Radical Party, who is angling to be appointed the country’s prime minister.
MIDDLE EAST - Palestine is not the Muslims’ ‘primary cause,’ IS article argues; ending Saudi control of Mecca and Medina takes precedence. The Islamic State terror group published an article explaining why it does not attack the Jewish state, arguing that the Palestinian issue should not get preferential treatment.
MIDDLE EAST - The Islamic State has agents working in Western airports, metro stations and “very sensitive facilities in the world,” a leading Islamic State-allied militant claimed in an exclusive interview.
USA - For years, DNA and computer operating systems served as clichés for each other: DNA is the “operating software” of living cells in the same way that system software is the “DNA” of a computer. The problem with the comparison, as shown by research two decades in the making, is how much biologists still don't know about DNA, or genomes. That's an especially problematic development, given the industry sprouting up around genetic manipulation.
VATICAN - Catholics can no longer believe that all Muslims, Hindus, atheists and so on are going to hell. We have this on the authority of the former Pope Benedict XVI, who gave a long interview a couple of years ago that has only just surfaced in English. Benedict’s view must be definitive, not just because he was a pope, but because he was a notably conservative one.
AUSTRALIA - A new study has found that Merck & Co, the maker of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine Gardasil, neglected to examine the drug’s effect on the reproductive systems of women. As a result of that neglect, as well as the inherent dangers behind the vaccine, an Australian girl has suffered debilitating consequences, with her ovaries completely destroyed, the website Elite Insight reported.
USA - Easter is an annual celebration observed throughout the Christian world. However, there are absolutely no verses in the Bible that authorize or endorse the keeping of this tradition. Further – the Bible does not mention anything about Easter eggs, Easter baskets, Easter bunnies, or even Lent. The author includes convincing evidence to show that these very items were parts of the pagan rituals of the Mystery Religion of ancient Babylon.