A New Perspective on Constantine

(Worthy News) -Irma spun into a monster storm Tuesday morning with sustained winds topping 180 mph, becoming the strongest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded outside the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, National Hurricane Center forecasters said in their 11 a.m. advisory.

As the hurricane churns closer to the U.S. coast, its path becomes more certain, with South Florida, particularly the Keys, increasingly likely to take a hit. Tropical storm force winds could arrive as early as Friday. Gov. Rick Scott has declared a state of emergency for all 67 counties and has all 7,000 members of the state’s National Guard to report to duty on Friday.

Because Irma is so large, forecasters urged caution in paying too much attention to its exact track. The storm is continuing to roll west at 14 mph, with winds expected to begin battering the Leeward Islands today. A powerful high pressure ridge is steering the storm and will likely stay in place over the next few days, forecasters said. In five days, a trough moving across the U.S. should begin weakening the western edge of the ridge, allowing the storm to slide north. Where Irma makes the turn will determine impacts to Florida. [ Source (Read More…) ]

(Worthy News) – Russian media said Monday that Egypt has finalized a deal to build a nuclear power plant with funding from Moscow after nearly two years of negotiations.

The reports came after Egypt’s President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in China, where they were attending a summit.

The nuclear plant will be built in Dabaa, about 130 kilometers (80 miles) northwest of Cairo on the Mediterranean coast. [ Source (Read More…) ]

(Worthy News) – A group of evangelical leaders are pressuring President Donald Trump to continue protecting immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally when they were children, and are urging Congress to take permanent legislative action to ensure their long standing protection from deportation.

The Evangelical Immigration Table, a coalition of evangelical organizations and leaders who advocate for immigration reform that is “consistent with biblical values,” sent three letters on Wednesday to Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, R-Wis., calling for the protection of recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

The letters come while Trump is mulling what to do with the Obama-era DACA program as he continues to receive pressure from outside groups to halt the program, which critics say is unconstitutional because it was enacted executively, not legislatively. [ Source (Read More…) ]

(Worthy News) – Heads of churches in Jerusalem on Monday criticized what they see as a breach of the status quo in the capital, claiming there is a ‘systematic attempt to undermine the integrity of the Holy City of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and to weaken the Christian presence.’

In a joint statement the leaders said, “We now find ourselves united once again in condemning recent further encroachment on the status quo,” the churches said. “In such matters as this, the Heads of the Churches are resolute and united in our opposition to any action by any authority or group that undermines those laws, agreements, and regulations that have ordered our life for centuries.” [ Source (Read More…) ]

(Worthy News) – Andrew Brunson, the American pastor who has been imprisoned in Turkey for nearly a year on dubious terrorism charges, is now facing new charges: “gathering state secrets for espionage, attempting to overthrow the Turkish parliament and government, and to change the constitutional order.”

Brunson and his family had lived in the Turkish city of Izmir for 23 years, where he was the pastor of a small Presbyterian church. He was arrested, initially without charges, amid the crackdown on Turkey’s political opposition following last summer’s failed coup attempt. He was eventually charged with membership in what the Turkish government calls the Fethullahist Terror Organization—the followers of the exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government blames for the coup. (Gulen and his followers deny playing a role. The true story is uncertain and extremely complicated.) Brunson was also accused of giving a sermon to Kurds with “a special purpose” at his church, implying that he is a Kurdish nationalist sympathizer as well as a Gulenist. There’s not a lot of overlap between those groups, other than the fact that Erdogan’s government is hostile to both.

There’s little to no evidence that the Christian minister is a member of an Islamic social movement, much less proof that he plotted to overthrow the Turkish government. [ Source (Read More…) ]

(Worthy News) – Drug overdose deaths in the United States skyrocketed 21 percent in 2016 from the previous year, accounting for the deaths of approximately 64,000 people, according to numbers from the Centers for Disease Control.

Several states saw drug overdose death increases in the double digits, including Virginia (38 percent increase), Florida (55 percent), Maryland (67 percent) and Delaware (71 percent).

New York City also saw a rise of about 50 percent. [ Source (Read More…) ]

(Worthy News) – The progress congressional investigators have made this summer comes into sharp focus this week as House and Senate committees return to work to ratchet up the legal and political clash into the Trump campaign’s suspected collusion with the Kremlin in the November presidential election — and whether Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s allies tried to falsely fan the story.

During Congress’s summer recess, investigators have interviewed key government and Trump campaign figures, received thousands of pages of documents and traveled to London to track down the former British spy who prepared the salacious, unverified dossier on Donald Trump’s supposed activities in Russia.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence are all running probes parallel to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference and any coordination between members of the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. [ Source (Read More…) ]

(Worthy News) – Diaspora Affairs Minister Bennett has pledged $1 million in relief aid for the Jewish community of Houston, saying, “The Jewish state is measured by its response when our brothers around the world are in crisis.”

According to a statement released by the ministry, this aid will be transferred through the Israeli Consulate in Texas, and will be used to help repair and restore the communal infrastructure – schools, synagogues and JCC – which are not funded or supported by the state.

Noting the severity of the damages, and how flooded schools and synagogues can’t be used, Bennett said: “The city of Houston was hurt badly last week, and the Jewish community – 70% of which lived in the flooded neighborhoods – was hit hard. The old-age home and JCC were damaged, and hundreds of families will remain homeless. From talks we’ve had over the past week with the heads of the community and Israel’s Consul General, we learned the damage is vast, and the rehabilitation will take years. For years the Jewish communities stood by Israel when it needed their help; now it is our turn to stand by Houston’s Jewish community.” [ Source (Read More…) ]

(Worthy News) – Russia reportedly threatened to use its veto at the United Nations last week if the Lebanon-based terror organization Hezbollah, its ally in the Syrian civil war, was named in a Security Council resolution to renew the mandate of peacekeeping forces in southern Lebanon.

The US and Israel wanted the text of the resolution to state that the UN’s Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) would have a bigger presence south of the Litani River and would have full authority in its efforts to prevent violations of UN Resolution 1701, which brought the 34-day Second Lebanon War to an end in August 2006.

During last week’s talks on renewing UNIFIL’s mandate, Russia opposed the inclusion of any reference to Hezbollah as being behind illicit military activity in southern Lebanon that violated Resolution 1701, the Haaretz daily newspaper reported. [ Source (Read More…) ]

(Worthy News) – Russia reportedly threatened to use its veto at the United Nations last week if the Lebanon-based terror organization Hezbollah, its ally in the Syrian civil war, was named in a Security Council resolution to renew the mandate of peacekeeping forces in southern Lebanon.

The US and Israel wanted the text of the resolution to state that the UN’s Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) would have a bigger presence south of the Litani River and would have full authority in its efforts to prevent violations of UN Resolution 1701, which brought the 34-day Second Lebanon War to an end in August 2006.

During last week’s talks on renewing UNIFIL’s mandate, Russia opposed the inclusion of any reference to Hezbollah as being behind illicit military activity in southern Lebanon that violated Resolution 1701, the Haaretz daily newspaper reported. [ Source (Read More…) ]