A New Perspective on Constantine

(Worthy News) – The strongest earthquake to hit the region in years as well as 77 smaller quakes occurred Saturday night to Monday afternoon in Southeast Idaho, startling tens of thousands of residents.

The quakes have been felt in Caribou County, where all 78 occurred, as well as in cities in northern Utah and throughout Southeast Idaho. It’s unknown when the earthquake swarm will end. Earthquake swarms have been known to continue for weeks or even months.

Bannock County Sheriff Lorin Nielsen said he’s been a law enforcement officer in Southeast Idaho for over 40 years and during that time there’s never previously been so many earthquakes occurring in such a short time frame. He said at the most there have been up to three earthquakes that have occurred in short succession along the East Idaho-Western Wyoming border. The dozens of earthquakes that have occurred since Saturday night in Southeast Idaho are unprecedented, the sheriff said. [ Source (Read More…) ]

(Worthy News) – Kenyans reacted with celebration, frustration and shock Friday after the Supreme Court, in a 4 to 2 decision, ordered a do-over of last month’s presidential election.

The court ruled that the Independent Election and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) was responsible for “irregularities and illegalities” in the transmission of election results.

“A declaration is hereby issued that the presidential election on the 8thAugust 2017 was not conducted in accordance with the constitution, and the applicable law, rendering the declared results invalid, null, and void,” said Chief Justice David Maraga. [ Source (Read More…) ]

(Worthy News) – Gunmen killed two police officers guarding a church on Kenya’s southern coast on Sunday in an attack that police said bore the hallmarks of Somalia’s Islamist militant group al Shabaab.

Four gunmen confronted the police stationed at the entrance of an Anglican church in the town of Ukunda, south of Mombasa, regional police chief Larry Kiyeng said. They sprayed the officers with bullets before escaping by motorbike, taking two AK-47 police rifles, he said.

“One officer was shot in the head and died on the spot while the other … died in hospital,” Kiyeng told Reuters. [ Source (Read More…) ]

(Worthy News) – Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov went on a PR offensive this week to counter Israeli warnings that a ceasefire imposed by Moscow in Syria is enabling Iran and its terror proxy, Hezbollah, to amass fighters and weapons near the Jewish state’s northern border in preparation for a future war.

Lavrov — a storied diplomat who began his career in the Soviet Foreign Ministry during the Cold War — told a news conference in the Qatari capital Doha on Wednesday, “We do not have any information that someone is preparing an attack on Israel.” He also defended Iran’s role in Syria in supporting, alongside Russia, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. “Whatever area of cooperation between Iran and Syria, my position is that if their cooperation in whichever field does not violate the basic provisions of international law, it should not be cause for question,” Lavrov said.

On Friday, Lavrov parried Israel’s displeasure with the terms of the ceasefire by implying that Israel had been kept fully abreast of developments in the negotiations to create so-called “de-escalation zones” in Syria — areas that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others fear will now become ripe targets for Iran. [ Source (Read More…) ]

(Worthy News) – Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Friday blamed former President Barack Obama and the Congress — but not President Trump — for the downward spiral in U.S.-Russia relations.

“We understand that there are forces that simply want to undermine the administration,” Lavrov said, according to Russia’s state-owned news agency Tass. “This is our standpoint on the sanctions that Congress has been forcing on Donald Trump.”

Lavrov also pointed a finger at Obama, and said it was he who started the diplomatic battle by sanctioning Moscow.

“I would like to point out it was not us who initiated this exchange of sanctions, but the Obama administration,” Lavrov said. “They sought to rupture Russian-U.S. relations and prevent U.S. President Donald Trump from putting forward any constructive proposals.” [ Source (Read More…) ]

(Worthy News) – A flurry of religious liberty challenges headed toward the Supreme Court in its upcoming term could leave a lasting mark on American law for years to come.

The Supreme Court’s decision to grant a high-profile case involving a Colorado baker’s refusal to design and make a cake celebrating a same-sex marriage figures to be a blockbuster. The court has not yet scheduled oral arguments for Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which makes it increasingly likely that the case could be heard in December.

Meanwhile, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty has asked the court to hear that case ‘in tandem’ with a similar dispute arriving from Washington state.

Eric C. Rassbach, a Becket Fund attorney, filed a petition urging the Supreme Court to hear the cake-baker case back-to-back with Arlene’s Flowers v. State of Washington given the “wave of religious vendor litigation around the country.” The Arlene’s Flowers case involves Barronelle Stutzman’s refusal to design floral arrangements for a same-sex ceremony of a longtime customer of her flower shop. [ Source (Read More…) ]

(Worthy News) – The United States, Britain, France, Japan and South Korea requested the urgent meeting, to be held at 10 a.m., the US mission said in a statement.

North Korea on Sunday detonated what it described as a hydrogen bomb designed for a long-range missile, calling the test “a perfect success.”

The underground blast was North Korea’s sixth nuclear test, in defiance of UN resolutions that prohibit Pyongyang from pursuing nuclear and missile programs.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres earlier condemned the nuclear test as “profoundly destabilizing” for regional security and again urged Pyongyang to halt such acts.

U.S. warns of ‘massive military response,’ halt in Chinese trade after N. Korea nuke test

The president met with his national security team on the expanding crisis. Afterward, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis warned that any threat to the U.S. or its allies would be met with a “massive military response.”

“We have many military options, and the president wanted to be briefed on each one of them,” Mattis said outside the White House. “We are not looking to the total annihilation” of North Korea.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told Fox News Sunday he was working on a new sanctions package. [ Source (Read More…) ]

(Worthy News) – An ongoing earthquake swarm at Yellowstone volcano is now one of the biggest ever recorded, with over 2,300 tremors since it began in June.

As of August 30, 2,357 earthquakes had been recorded. The most powerful in recent weeks was magnitude 3.3; it took place on August 21.

The most powerful in the current swarm was a magnitude 4.4, which was recorded on June 15. Most of the earthquakes were in the magnitude 0 or 1 range, with a further 181 recorded at magnitude 2 and 11 at magnitude 3. Another 53 were less than 0, meaning they were very small events that could be detected only with sensitive earthquake-monitoring instruments. [ Source (Read More…) ]

(Worthy News) – Seventy percent of Russian-language tweets targeting NATO military activities in Eastern Europe are generated by automated Russian trolls, according to a survey done by the military alliance.

“Two in three Twitter users who write in Russian about the NATO presence in Eastern Europe are robotic or ‘bot’ accounts,” the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence stated in a report made public this week.

The Russian bots sent 84 percent of all Russian language messages. English language tweets against the alliance also were found to be automated, with some 46 percent generated by automated Twitter accounts. [ Source (Read More…) ]

(Worthy News) – California’s Rocklin Academy has a long waiting list for admissions, but that isn’t stopping some parents from pulling their children out of the prestigious charter school after a kindergarten class was exposed to transgender “indoctrination” without parental notification.

Several families have pulled their children out of the Sacramento-area school since the end of the last academic year, when a male kindergartener was reintroduced to his class as a girl and two children’s books espousing transgender ideology were read to the class.

Karen England, executive director of the pro-family Capitol Resource Institute, has been working with Rocklin families to enact a policy that would require the school to notify parents before controversial matters are discussed in the classroom, but the school has resisted. [ Source (Read More…) ]