A New Perspective on Constantine

(Worthy News) – A bipartisan bill that would cement the U.S. military aid to Israel into law has passed a major hurdle on Wednesday night.

The U.S. House of Representative approved the measure, known as the Ileana Ros-Lehtinen U.S.-Israel Security Assistance Authorization Act of 2018, several weeks after it passed the Senate. It will now head toward the president’s desk.

Under the proposed legislation, the $38 billion in military aid over 10 years spelled out under the 2016 Memorandum of Understanding, would be funded through a special mechanism that would be separate from the annual budget. [ Source: Israel Hayom (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – Palestinian factions and activists have called for the abrogation of the Olso Accords, and said that the agreements that were signed between the PLO and Israel 25 years ago have failed to fulfill Palestinian aspirations for statehood and independence.

Israel, they claimed, took advantage of the Oslo Accords to create irreversible facts on the ground, especially by increasing “settlement construction.”

In the Gaza Strip, Hamas and several extremist Palestinian factions issued separate statements on Thursday calling on the PA leadership to dump the “failed” and “disastrous” Oslo Accords. [ Source: Jerusalem Post (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The Trump administration is prepared for Israeli criticism of elements of its coming Middle East peace plan, the U.S. envoy to the region said, even as Washington faces growing Palestinian accusations that it will be heavily tilted in favor of Israel.

In an interview with Reuters, Jason Greenblatt, a chief architect of the long-awaited peace initiative, said U.S. negotiators had entered the “pre-launch phase” of the plan, despite a boycott by Palestinian leaders.

But he declined to specify a time frame, except to say it would not be announced at the U.N. General Assembly gathering in New York later this month, or offer any details of a proposal that has drawn deep skepticism even before its unveiling. [ Source: Reuters (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – Countries across south-east Asia are issuing emergency alerts and thousands are being evacuated as two typhoons barrel down on the region.

Around 12,000 people have been evacuated from low-lying parts of China’s Guangdong province and shipping halted ahead of the arrival of Typhoon Barijat Thursday.

But the real concern is Super Typhoon Mangkhut, which is still gathering strength as it nears the northern Philippines. [ Source: 9 Australia News (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – Weather experts have talked of rainfall predictions in terms of inches a lot this week with Hurricane Florence meandering toward the East Coast.

One meteorologist used a different unit of measurement Wednesday regarding the forecast that the National Weather Service says would be unprecedented if it becomes reality.

Weather.us meteorologist Ryan Maue crunched some numbers and tweeted that North Carolina’s 7-day rainfall forecast by the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center would be like getting “a total of over 10 trillion gallons” of rain from Florence. The math was based on the projected state average of 10.1 inches of rainfall for that time span. [ Source: News Observer (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – Hurricane Florence is spreading heavy rain and strong winds into the Carolinas, with landfall expected near the border between North Carolina and South Carolina on Friday, kicking off an agonizing crawl through the Southeast into early next week, producing catastrophic inland rainfall flooding, life-threatening storm surge and destructive winds.

As of 11 p.m. EDT, Florence’s eye was located about 50 miles south of Morehead City, North Carolina, or about 60 miles east-southeast of Wilmington, North Carolina, crawling northwestward at just 6 mph.

Wind gusts have reached as high as 106 mph at Cape Lookout, North Carolina, while a 105-mph gust was recently reported at Fort Macon, North Carolina. [ Source: Weather (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The World Health Organization’s cancer research arm estimated in a report released Wednesday that there will be about 18 million new cases of cancer globally this year and 9.6 million deaths.

The numbers published by the International Agency for Research on Cancer were slightly higher than those in the last world-wide update in 2012, when officials expected 14 million new cancer cases and 8 million deaths. Experts said the increase could be partly attributed to population growth and aging, but that individuals could do more to reduce their chance of getting sick.

“A lot of those (cancer cases) could be prevented, with key prevention efforts focusing on some of the main risk factors which we have heard about: tobacco consumption, alcohol consumption, lack of physical activity and improper diet,” said Dr. Etienne Krug, director of WHO’s department of non-communicable diseases. [ Source: CBS News (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The European Union must flex its muscles as a world power, EU chief executive Jean-Claude Juncker said on Wednesday, as he spoke critically of U.S. President Donald Trump’s retreat from international engagement.

In his annual State of the Union address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Juncker, who is entering his final year as president of the European Commission, urged EU states to bridge angry divisions over budgets, immigration and other issues in order to capitalize on a chance to shape the world.

“Whenever Europe speaks as one, we can impose our position on others,” Juncker said, arguing that a deal he struck in July with Trump to stall a transatlantic tariff war and which won plaudits for the Commission should have come as no surprise. [ Source: Reuters (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – A Republican-led panel in the U.S. House of Representatives voted on Thursday to make permanent individual tax cuts from President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax overhaul, a move widely seen as a partisan ploy to help Republican candidates in the Nov. 6 congressional elections.

Members of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee voted 21-15 along party lines to send the measure to the House floor for a full chamber vote expected by Oct 1. But the tax cuts are likely to be dead on arrival in the Senate, where they would need Democratic support to pass.

The tax overhaul that Trump signed into law last December, known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, gave permanent tax relief to corporations but set individual cuts that will expire after 2025. [ Source (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The federal government collected a record $1,521,589,000,000 in individual income taxes through the first eleven months of fiscal 2018 (October 2017 through August 2018), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today.

However, the federal government also ran a deficit of $898,112,000,000 for those eleven months, according to the statement.

Prior to this year, the record federal individual income tax collections for the first eleven months of the fiscal year occurred last year, when the Treasury collected $1,460,379,260,000 in individual income taxes in constant August 2018 dollars (adjusted using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator). [ Source: CNS News (Read More…) ]

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