JAPAN - When the lights change at the Shibuya crossing in Japan's capital, one of the world's busiest pedestrian thoroughfares, hundreds of people with their eyes glued to smartphones pick their way over the road.
Despite being engrossed in the latest instalment of Candy Crush or busy chatting with their friends on messaging app Line, most manage to weave around cyclists, skateboarders and fellow Tokyoites.
UK - Schemes to tackle climate change could prove disastrous for billions of people, but might be required for the good of the planet, scientists say. That is the conclusion of a new set of studies into what's become known as geo-engineering. This is the so far unproven science of intervening in the climate to bring down temperatures.
USA - More than 11,000 oil wells have been drilled in North Dakota since 2006, covering the state’s agricultural landscape. In all, almost 40,000 miles of well bores have been drilled underground to connect the fracking operations to surface wells. Laid end to end, they would circle the Earth about one and a half times.
TEMPLE MOUNT, ISRAEL - 'Mourabitoun' consists of dozens of men and women, and is funded by Gulf states and Islamic organizations. Israel's Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch, backed by the Israel Police and internal security agency Shin Bet, is drafting a bill to outlaw the civilian Palestinian guard stationed on the Temple Mount, a site holy to both Muslims and Jews.
UK - The family of Lee Rigby today accused Facebook of failing to help stop his killers as it emerged the social network has still not handed over data from five accounts opened by one of his extremist murderers. His sister Sara said the internet giant had ‘blood on its hands’ because it had hosted exchanges between one of the soldier’s murderers and an Al Qaeda extremist, in which the former said: ‘Let’s kill a soldier.’
EUROPE - Auditors have identified a black hole in European Union budgets that could lead to extra demands for cash from the British taxpayer of up to £34 billion over the next six years. David Cameron will be legally obliged to make up a share of a shortfall of £259 billion by 2020 with liabilities for the Treasury estimated at £33.7 billion, calculated at the usual rate of Britain’s EU contributions. The hole in EU spending has been identified by the European Court of Auditors and represents a political disaster for the Prime Minister who has made repeated pledges to bring down the amount Britain pays into Brussels budgets.
USA - Four major global firms are to appear in a New York court accused of manipulating platinum and palladium prices for eight years. The law suit is the first of its kind in US history. Those accused include units of Goldman Sachs Group, the world’s biggest global investment bank, HSBC Holdings, Europe's largest bank by market value, the metals unit of BASF SE (BAS), the world’s largest chemical company, and Standard Bank Group from South Africa, the world’s largest producer of platinum and second largest producer of palladium after Russia. The plaintiffs claim the manipulations of precious metals prices, which is believed to have started in 2007, have cost purchasers millions of dollars, Reuters reports.
USA - The looting in Ferguson, Missouri is bad. The looters are giving the peaceful protesters against the shooting of Michael Brown a bad name, and provoking an armed (and over-militarized) response by the police. But let’s put things in perspective …Wall Street’s crimes and fraud have cost the economy tens of trillions of dollars. The big banks are still engaged in mind-blowing levels of manipulation and crime. Nobel prize winning economist Joe Stiglitz and well-known economist Nouriel Roubini say that we’ve got to jail – or perhaps even hang – some bankers before they’ll stop looting the economy. Nobel prize winning economist George Akerlof has demonstrated that failure to punish white collar criminals – and instead bailing them out - creates incentives for more economic crimes and further destruction of the economy in the future.
UK - Despite several clouds over the UK economy, the Bank of England’s team of interest rate setters is determined to deliver an interest rate hike as their next change in policy. Speaking in front of MPs on Tuesday, Mark Carney, the BoE’s Governor, said the central bank’s “next move in policy is going to be an increase” to Bank Rate. There were no formal discussions of additional easing in the minutes of the MPC’s last meeting, despite a deterioration in “the global economics conditions … in two of the major economies, Europe and Japan”. The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), the body of nine members that votes on Bank policy, have elected to disregard a worsening situation in the global economy.
USA - Cold temperatures have socked much of the country early, bringing freezing temperatures and mounds of snow in some of the earliest winter weather in decades. Winter has debuted early in the USA. So early, in fact, that river ice has already ended the shipping season on the upper Mississippi river. The shipping season was ended early on November 20, the earliest shut down since records were first started in 1969. This month areas of Michigan and Western New York were slammed with snow up to six feet in depth in some places snarling traffic and causing roofs of buildings to collapse under the strain. But the early snowfall didn't wait until November to hit the nation. As early as the day after Labor Day Barrow, Alaska found one of its earliest significant snowfalls in recent memory. There was even snow in Chicago on Halloween Day, the first appreciable snow fall on that scary night since 1993.
MADAGASCAR - Madagascar said Monday it was trying to contain an outbreak of plague - similar to the Black Death that swept medieval Europe - that has killed 47 people and is spreading to the capital Antananarivo. "The plague" has been taking lives in the most gruesome of ways for thousands of years. And guess what: It's still here. The health ministry said there had been 138 suspected cases since the beginning of the year and warned that the death toll was likely to rise in coming months. Two people have been infected in Antananarivo, one of them dying, and health workers have mounted a pest control campaign through slum areas around the city, the World Health Organization (WHO) said. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the country has recorded on average 500 cases of plague every year since 2009. The Black Death, otherwise known as the bubonic plague, is estimated to have killed some 25 million people across Europe in the Middle Ages.
USA - Michael Brown's father was the only person not wearing a suit. While the lawyers and civil rights leaders addressed the cameras in sharply-tailored outfits, Michael Brown Senior stood silently in a white T-shirt with a four-word message: "No justice, no peace."
USA - Chaos has engulfed Ferguson, Missouri as the mainstream media is directing national attention to divisive racial issues at a time of rising tyranny in America. Sensational revelations about government corruption are becoming a regular occurrence under the Obama administration. Ordinary Americans are being targeted while known terrorists are escorted through security.
USA - The United States prison system, not only a machine for mass incarceration, but a machine for modernized slave labor. The United States has 5% of the world’s population, yet we have 25% of the world's prison population. Land of the free, right? It would seem the statistics say otherwise, since the official drug war president Nixon announced in the 70's, our prison population has grown over 700%!
ISRAEL - In Jewish tradition, the Temple Mount, Har Habayit, is uniquely holy, special and significant. Not only the site of the First and Second Temples, the Mount, Mount Moriah, is considered to be the site where Abraham sacrificed Isaac, Jacob dreamed of the ladder ascending to heaven, and in some interpretations, the site of Gan Eden itself. And while our political leaders are eager to mute its significance, our adversaries have correctly perceived its importance.
“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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