Spearheaded by board president John C Austin and signed by state superintendent Brian Whiston, the guidance informs Michigan public schools that only the students themselves – ie not their parents or doctors – can determine what their individual gender identities are. “The responsibility for determining a student’s gender identity rests with the student. Outside confirmation from medical or mental health professionals, or documentation of legal changes, is not needed,” the guidance states.

Gender identity is defined in the guidance as “a person’s deeply held internal sense or psychological knowledge of their own gender, regardless of the biological sex they were assigned at birth.” Notably, the guidance makes no mention of a student’s age affecting whether or not they can pick a gender without their parent or doctor. In fact, the guidance seems to intentionally cut parents out of the process.

In other words, a boy named “Jake” could become a girl named “Jane” at school, seemingly without his parents ever knowing.

The first reactions were of compassion for the country of Belgium, to Belgian citizens. The fact that this is a hit against the EU was first hinted by European Council President Donald Tusk (Poland, EPP). In a special statement, he initially said that the attack was against “our open democratic society”, but later added: “Our common European institutions are hosted in Brussels, thanks to the generosity of the government of Belgium and the Belgian people”.

In his statement, on the subject of the attacks, Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov was completely straight-forward: “Brussels is not just the Belgian capital. It is the capital of united Europe”, he said. A number of European leaders, politicians, and diplomats came out with similar statements later. The reason is obvious. Zaventem airport is the most used one by European politicians and officials. There are several flights per day to the Belgian capital from the member states.

The first ones are early in the morning, so that travelling officials can arrive on time for sessions and meetings. The Maalbeek underground station is positioned on one of the busiest streets in the European district of Brussels. It is just several hundred meters away from the buildings of the European Parliament, the Council, and the Commission.

The terrorist attacks will probably tempt some more authoritarian governments to continue building illiberal societies. In other words, the answer to the question “Will the Brussels attacks succeed in uniting us?” is “Hardly”, because, although everyone states that these bombings are direct attacks on European values, the concept of those values sometimes differs to a degree that makes joint effort impossible. Ideological views are also one of the obstacles in front of building trust among member states, which is what Commissioner Avramopoulos keeps advocating.

The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories. Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American president. The cost over thirty years is more than $1 trillion.

A mini nuclear bomb is planned. It is known as the B61 Model 12. There has never been anything like it. General James Cartwright, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, “Going smaller [makes using this nuclear] weapon more thinkable.”

In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two — led by the United States — is taking place along Russia’s western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia. Ukraine – once part of the Soviet Union – has become a CIA theme park.

Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of the Russian speaking minority.

This is seldom news in the West, or it is inverted to suppress the truth.

The unexpected comparison between the leaders of Nazi Germany and the leader of one of the major nations that defeated him comes from Oleg Lyashko, who heads the ultranationalist Radical Party. “No business can survive by export contracts only. We need large-scale construction of roads, houses, infrastructure,” he told the newspaper Segodnya. “We shouldn’t reinvent the bicycle. That was how Hitler and Roosevelt acted.”

He added to the surprised correspondent that he “wasn’t talking about Hitler in a positive way.” “But Germany’s economy was growing because of military contracts,” he added.

Lyashko is among the more controversial Ukrainian MPs. His party saw a surge of popularity amid the political crisis of 2013-14. It had a single MP – Lyashko himself – in the previous parliament elected in 2012, but now has 21, and its leader claims it would double its strength, if a snap election were called now.

On March 15, the Islamic State weekly newspaper al-Naba ran a story entitled, “Beit Al-Maqdis [Jerusalem]… First and Foremost an Issue of Shari’a Law,” in which the terror group justified its lack of attacks on Israel to the wider Muslim community.

The Islamic State has not carried out an orchestrated attack on Israel, though independent cells inspired by the terror group’s ideology have been arrested by Israeli security forces, several dozen Israeli Arabs are said to have been recruited by IS, and terrorists including Nashat Milhem — who murdered three Israelis in Tel Aviv on January 1 — have identified with IS. Israeli officials have warned that IS will turn its attention to Israel at some stage.

There is a place, however, where jihad does take precedence, according to the article: in the Arab states that are governed by “tyrants.” First and foremost among these is the Saudi kingdom, where the two holy Islamic cities of Mecca and Medina must be rescued from the Saudi royal family. “The apostate [tyrants] who rule the lands of Islam are graver infidels than [the Jews], and war against them takes precedence over war against the original infidels,” the article said.

Abu al-Ayna al-Ansari, a Salafist movement senior official in the Gaza Strip, made the claim in a pre-recorded, hour-long interview to air in full on Sunday on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” the popular weekend talk radio program broadcast on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and NewsTalk 990 AM in Philadelphia. Klein doubles as Breitbart’s senior investigative reporter and Jerusalem bureau chief.

Ansari is a well-known Gazan Salafist jihadist allied with Islamic State ideology. During the interview with Klein, Ansari seemed to be speaking as an actual IS member, repeatedly using the pronoun “we” when referring to IS and even seemingly making declarations on behalf of IS.

IS has been reluctant to officially declare its presence in Gaza for fear of a Hamas clampdown, but the group is known to be active in the coastal enclave and Ansari is a suspected IS leader. IS-aligned militants have taken responsibility for recent rocket fire from Gaza aimed at Israel.

Genomics pioneer Craig Venter and more than 20 colleagues engineered a living microbe with a genome simpler than any seen in nature. In other words, they created a life form whose relative simplicity and modular design make it a platform that one day may be as easily manipulated as, say, software.

The most surprising result of their work — and perhaps the most sobering one for the rest of the field: The team still doesn’t understand what 31 percent of the essential genes do in even the simplest organism, to say nothing of a human genome. It's a development Venter called “very humbling.”

Scientists have long theorized how many genes might be required for a simple, viable organism that could be used as a universal template. Many studies have tried to estimate the rock-bottom number by knocking out individual genes; they have settled on 250 to 300 or so. The original bacteria species that the Venter group worked on is already pretty tiny: M. mycoides is found in cow stomachs and has about 985 genes. The human genome has more than 20,000 genes. Golden Delicious apples have more than 57,000 genes. The new organism, nicknamed Syn3.0 by researchers? It has 473.

“We are probably at the 1 percent level in understanding the human genome,” said Clyde Hutchison III, a distinguished professor at the Venter Institute.

Remove the threat of hell for people who are honestly mistaken, and you have a problem: if you don’t have to be a Christian to be saved, what is the point? This is a question that really troubles Benedict. It has led, he says, to a “deep double crisis” in the church. First, it takes away the inspiration for the heroic missionary efforts of the past, and indeed takes away the point of being a missionary in the future. Worse than that, though, it raises the question of why anyone already a Christian should bother to keep it up when they are going to heaven anyway.

The pope emeritus is not the first person to raise this question. It is a commonplace of the sociology of religion that hardline sects, which really do believe that everyone outside them is damned, can demand much greater commitment than those that simply think it would be nice if everyone were right. One reason that the world is full of intolerant fanaticism is that it works. Believing wicked things gives you the energy to propagate them too.

But the old pope can’t go back. He can’t believe that untold millions are being tormented forever by a loving God just because the same loving and omnipotent God arranged for them to be born in countries that are not Christian. So what can he believe?

The British Medical Journal, which publicized the case of the 16-year-old girl, said the damage occurred three years after she was vaccinated. “Parents should be warned by this example not to allow use of Garadsil in the case of their daughters,” Elite Insight reported. The recent study pointed out that the vaccine has the ability to severely damage the function of ovaries; in the case of the Australian 16-year-old, her destroyed ovaries led to very premature menopause.

As reported by Life Site News, Dr Deirdre Little, the Australian physician who treated the girl and co-authored the BMJ report, provided researchers with solid evidence that Gardasil caused the destruction of the girl’s fertility.

In addition, she pointed out that Merck has no supporting information regarding the effects of the vaccine on ovaries, which of course suggests that Merck either did no safety testing regarding the vaccine’s effects on the female reproductive system, or has hidden the data. What’s more, the drug maker was able to get Gardasil approved via the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) despite incomplete fertility testing.

Our traditional Good Friday to Sunday celebration however only accounts for Jesus’ being in the heart of the earth for two nights and one day. Were the facts of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection purposely distorted? There are absolutely no verses anywhere in the Bible that authorize or endorse the keeping of an Easter celebration.

Further, the Bible says nothing about the practice of observing Lent, dyeing Easter eggs, having Easter egg hunts, baskets of candy, bonnets – and so on. Easter has long been known to be a pagan festival. America’s founders knew this.

In the children’s book Easter Parade: Welcome Sweet Spring Time (pp 4-5) Steve Englehaty states:

“When the Puritans came to North America, they regarded the celebration of Easter – and the celebration of Christmas with suspicion. They knew that pagans had celebrated the return of spring long before Christians celebrated Easter. …For the first 200 years of European life in North America, only a few states – mostly in the South – paid much attention to Easter.

“Not until after the Civil War did Americans begin celebrating this holiday… Easter first became an American tradition in the 1870’s… The original 13 colonies of America began as a Christian nation, with the cry of ‘No king but King Jesus’. The nation did not observe Easter within an entire century of its founding.”

Most people accept traditions as fact because they have been part of our culture for so long. Unfortunately, most of these traditions are dark and gory Satanic rituals.

There is also evidence of fake vodka containing toxic levels of methanol and the selling of harmful weight loss pills, such as DNP, which have been linked to the deaths of several young women. The unit says there are more than 20 organised crime groups involved in some aspect of food and drink fraud in Britain.

And a 20 per cent rise in sheep and other farm rustling over the last five years has seen animals slaughtered in unlicensed premises – creating health risks. Part of the Food Standards Agency, the unit was set up in 2013 following the horsemeat scandal.

Yesterday it published the Food Crime Annual Strategic Assessment which sets out the seriousness of the problem and the threats involved. According to the report, British food is generally safe and properly labelled but it warns that fraud represents a “serious criminal threat to the safety and authenticity of UK food and drink”.

France said much the same after suffering its own attacks in Paris last November, which had been linked to plotters based in Belgium, and others around the world have joined the chorus since the bombs went off in Zaventem and Maelbeek.

Security services should be held accountable in these situations, of course, yet there is plenty of blame to go around considering the wider pattern of Islamic terrorism facing Europe, America, and, most importantly, the Middle East, the ultimate source of funding and inspiration for these attacks. Many other countries besides Belgium have suffered such intelligence "failures", while suspects on watch lists have slipped easily through border controls in the US, the UK, France, Belgium, and other countries.

So what is to be done? The blame game has morphed quickly into a search for "solutions", and again the European chorus is singing a familiar, but always dissonant, tune. Those who believe the EU is the root of all evil believe that national solutions, such as strict border controls and limits on migrants/refugees, must prevail. Those in favour of greater European integration stress a need for joint intelligence services, greater cooperation regarding border and refugee/migration policies, and even a common European army.

Yet the EU has had elements of these solutions in place for years, if not decades. Debates over a common defence date back to the 1950s, and over counter-terrorism back to the 1980s, and over migration/refugee policy back to the 1990s. So these are not new problems or solutions. In each case, the EU lacked the consensus to delegate more authority over these policy domains to common institutions and procedures in Brussels. Instead, "intergovernmental" solutions were favoured, which required consensual decision-making by all EU member states.

The inevitable result of this confusion of naming and shaming, wishful thinking, and piecemeal intergovernmental cooperation is the Europe we have today, where all the major recent crises - the eurozone, refugees, and now terrorism - stem from the same problem: profound disagreement among EU member states, particularly the "big three," about the future of Europe and the institutional structures required to maintain its security and prosperity.

Mike Hookem, its defence spokesman and an MEP, said: “I’m once again calling for an immediate suspension of the Schengen [free travel] agreement, the re-establishment of border controls and an end to the EU’s open door migration policies.”

Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, was widely criticised for posting messages on Twitter that seemed to be referencing the Brexit debate. “I'm very upset by events in Brussels today and even more depressed for the future,” he said while the attacks were still going on.

He later retweeted a post by Allison Pearson, a columnist for British daily The Telegraph, who described Brussels as “the jihadist capital of Europe,” adding “and the Remainers dare to say we're safer in the EU!" Geert Wilders, a popular Dutch anti-immigrant politician, said the attacks meant “we must close our national borders and detain all the jihadists whom we have foolishly allowed to return from Syria”. “We need to de-Islamise the West,” he told Breitbart, a US news agency.

Speaking from Canada, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French far-right party, the National Front (FN), said: “I don't get the sense that Islamic fundamentalism is being treated like the threat it really is … whoever condemns Islamic fundamentalism is accused of Islamophobia.”