DENMARK - A Danish teenager who said she was sexually assaulted now faces a fine for using pepper spray against her attacker. The man who pulled her to the ground and tried to undress her fled the scene without any charges.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO (DRC) - A new report by Amnesty International has accused Apple and Microsoft of using batteries made with cobalt mined by underage children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
GERMANY - The incident occurred on Monday during Merkel’s address to the Fraunhofer Institute for Microsystems. “I’m scared about the future of my children. My children are 2, 4 and 9 years old,” said the professor, adding, “You are making an experiment and you don’t know the outcome.”
USA - A couple who hosts occasional wedding ceremonies on their New York farm have lost an appeal to overturn the $13,000 in fines levied against them by the state’s human rights agency, which ruled that their refusal to host a wedding for two women was discriminatory.
VATICAN - Pope Francis met with the Iranian president Tuesday, joining in a cordial discussion which touched on the recent nuclear accord and Iran's role in the region. President Hassan Rouhani met first with Francis, privately for 40 minutes, and later with other officials.
ITALY - Italy wants a different European Union, one with more growth and more rights, Premier Matteo Renzi wrote on his website Monday. Italy wants "a more socially oriented Europe, more growth, more rights - a Europe capable of being more daring and of working better than it does today," the premier wrote.
UK - The FTSE 100 dropped by almost 1.5 per cent shortly after opening to sit below 5,800 and undoing most of the gains seen at the end of last week, as fears gripped global markets again.
USA - A grand jury convened to investigate whether a Houston Planned Parenthood clinic had sold the organs of aborted fetuses on Monday cleared the clinic and instead indicted the undercover videographers behind the allegations, surprising the officials who called for the probe and delighting supporters of the women's health organization. The Harris County grand jury indicted David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, both of California, on charges of tampering with a governmental record, a second-degree felony with a possible sentence of up to 20 years in prison. It also charged Daleiden, the leader of the videographers, with the same misdemeanor he had alleged – the purchase or sale of human organs, presumably because he had offered to buy in an attempt to provoke Planned Parenthood employees into saying they would sell.
USA - In the Land of the Free, one-quarter of the entire planet’s prison population, some 2.2 million people, currently languish behind bars; yet, an astonishing number of them — around 2 million — have never been to trial.
ECUADOR - Ecuador is planning to auction off three million of the country’s 8.1 million hectares of pristine Amazonian rainforest to Chinese oil companies, Jonathan Kaiman of The Guardian reports. The report comes as oil pollution forced neighbouring Peru to declare an environmental state of emergency in its northern Amazon rainforest. Ecuador owed China more than $7 billion — more than a tenth of its GDP — as of last summer. In 2009 China began loaning Ecuador billions of dollars in exchange for oil shipments. It also helped fund two of the country’s biggest hydroelectric infrastructure projects, and China National Petroleum Corp may soon have a 30 per cent stake in a $10 billion oil refinery in Ecuador.
GERMANY - A member of Alternative for Germany (AfD), an anti-immigration party, has suggested that German Chancellor Angela Merkel should go into exile in South America to escape retribution for allowing over a million immigrants to enter Germany. Speaking to political talk show host Anne Will on Sunday, Beatrix von Storch, an MEP from the Alternative for Germany party, said that Merkel “should go into exile to Chile or South America” after her term in office – an apparent reference to the many Nazi war criminals who fled to South America following Germany’s defeat in WWII. Von Storch had earlier blasted Chancellor Merkel on Facebook for “ruining our country like no one since 1945.”
UK - Some 5 billion tons of plastic waste are littering our planet and the total amount is enough to wrap the Earth in clingfilm, a new international study has found. Scientists compare the grave pollution levels to a start of a new geological epoch. Since the end of World War II, mankind has produced about 5 billion tons of plastic and now the remains of water containers, supermarket bags, polystyrene lumps, compact discs, cigarette filter tips, nylons and other plastics can be found everywhere, a team of scientists led by Professor Jan Zalasiewicz from Leicester University has found in a study. Humankind produces about 300 million tons of plastic annually, and the manufacturing figures continue to grow, the paper says. Plastic degrades very slowly, so it takes plastic bags and bottles about 200 years to degrade.
ISRAEL - Israel’s Electricity Authority managed to thwart a “severe cyber attack” on its operations this week, National Infrastructure, Energy and Water Resources Minister Yuval Steinitz revealed Tuesday.
USA - In a very interesting piece on the news website Mondoweiss, Philip Weiss has speculated that the day is coming when American Jews will divorce Israel.
UK - Doomsday Clock scientists reveal how many minutes we are to midnight, representing the “end of humanity”. The Doomsday Clock, which represents how close we are to humanity's destruction, has remained at three minutes, scientists have announced. Experts with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said the threat level to the end of the world remains the same as in 2015. Climate change, nuclear weapons and new technologies are among some of the factors considered by the scientists. They said that while the Iran nuclear agreement and the Paris climate accord were positives, tensions have risen between some nations. “In short, the major challenges the Bulletin laid out for governments a year ago have not been addressed, even as, over all, the global threats we face have become more urgent.”
“Just what is an APOSTLE?”
Today we find the Church of God in a “wilderness of religious confusion!”
The confusion is not merely around the Church – within the religions of the world outside – but WITHIN the very heart of The True Church itself!
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