A New Perspective on Constantine

(Worthy News) – Russian military personnel flying into Venezuela in recent weeks were likely sent to ensure the nation’s sophisticated S-300 surface-to-air missiles remain a credible deterrent to any U.S. military action against the government of socialist President Nicolas Maduro, according to defense analysts in Latin America, the U.S. and Russia.

Analysts say the Russian military contingent, which reportedly arrived in late March, included air defense specialists with the necessary skills to ensure the decade-old missiles can be kept operational in spite of Venezuela’s crumbling infrastructure and frequent power failures.

The Venezuelan government has displayed the S-300 missiles at military parades. U.S. Defense Department officials confirm their presence in the country, as do former Venezuelan military personnel. But few details have been revealed about their operational status or deployment. [ Source: VOA News (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan approved Monday to send an additional 320 military troops to the U.S.-Mexico border to provide humanitarian support, the Department of Defense said.

“DoD personnel will assist in driving high-capacity [Customs and Border Protection] vehicles to transport migrants; providing administrative support, including providing heating, meal distribution and monitoring the welfare of individuals in CBP custody and attorney support to [Immigration and Customs Enforcement],” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Jamie Davis said in a statement.

Davis said the deployment of roughly 320 personnel will last until Sept. 30 at an estimated cost of $7.4 million. [ Source: UPI (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – House Democrats moved Monday to block the Trump administration from cutting off family-planning grants for medical facilities such as Planned Parenthood that also provide and refer to abortions.

“It’s going to save lives, it’s going to keep the Trump administration from shutting the doors of Planned Parenthood, which they have been trying to do from day one,” Rep. Lois Frankel, D-Fla., said of the Democratic proposal in a call with Planned Parenthood Monday.

In the budget draft House Democrats released Monday, lawmakers stipulated that grants known as Title X could not be used to go toward paying for the Trump administration’s new restrictions, which had been set to go into effect Friday. The budget faces an uphill battle in the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans who support cutting off federal funding to Planned Parenthood. Even if it were to pass the Senate, it would be vetoed by President Trump. [ Source: Washington Examiner (Read More…) ]

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by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – A Michigan court recently overturned a 2015 law that allowed state-contracted Christian adoption agencies to decline placing children with same-sex adoptive parents.

The decision, the result of a settlement to a 2017 dispute involving two lesbian couples who claimed Bethany Christian Services and St. Vincent Catholic Charities had rejected them as adoptive parents, was helmed by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is herself a lesbian and played an instrumental role in overturning Michigan’s same-sex marriage ban in 2015.

Nessel celebrated “having more adoption agencies which don’t discriminate” in a tweet.

Chris Palusky, President and CEO of Bethany Christian services, judged the cost of not working with the government for the sake of principle to be too high, as the new decision requires all agencies, regardless of religious conviction, to be willing to place children with same-sex couples on pain of not receiving funding or contracts from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.

“The fact of the matter is that the government runs the foster care system. We cannot serve foster children without contracting with the state,” he said in a statement at Christianity Today. “So we faced a choice: Continue caring for hurting children in foster care or let our disappointment with government requirements supersede our compassion for kids who have suffered and need a loving family.”

While a 2015 Michigan state law passed by Governor Rick Snyder mandated that “a child-placing agency shall not be required to provide any services if those services conflict with, or provide any services under circumstances that conflict with, the child placing agency’s sincerely held religious beliefs,” the settlement to the lawsuit determined that federal non-discrimination requirements overruled it.

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(Worthy News) – The Palestinian Authority is facing imminent financial collapse over its refusal on principle to accept any tax revenues from Israel, and its dire call for help to the Arab world is mostly going unheeded.

If financial aid is not immediately forthcoming, the whole PA enterprise that has been in place since 1994 is likely to collapse.

The issue is the Israeli decision to withhold the sum of money that the PA gives monthly to terrorists in Israeli jails and their family members. [ Source: Jerusalem Post (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The new head of Iran’s hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps on Monday said the country wouldn’t negotiate with the United States while it maintains economic sanctions on his country.

“By putting economic pressure on Iran, America wants to force us to enter talks with this country … any negotiation under the circumstances is surrendering to America and it will never happen,” Brig. Gen. Hossein Salami said, according to Reuters.

Last week, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif warned the United States of “consequences” if it prevents Tehran from selling oil, after Washington ended sanction exemptions over the Islamic Republic’s energy exports. [ Source: Times of Israel (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The United Methodist Church’s top court has upheld much of the Traditional Plan approved earlier this year, continuing the global denomination’s ban on the ordination and marriage of its LGBTQ members.

Approved by delegates to a special session of the United Methodist Church’s General Conference in February, the Traditional Plan strengthens language in the denomination’s Book of Discipline that bars LGBTQ clergy and forbids same-sex marriage.

That rulebook currently states that “the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching” and that “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” cannot be ordained as ministers, appointed to serve or be married in the church. [ Source: Christian Headlines (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The Israeli ambassador to the United States linked The New York Times to the “Jew-hatred of growing parts of the intellectual class.”

Ron Dermer was speaking Monday in the U.S. Capitol at the annual Holocaust Days of Remembrance organized by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

It was an unusually political attack on a day and at an event organized by an institution that generally focuses on the historical meaning of the Holocaust. [ Source: Jerusalem Post (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The elusive chief of the Islamic State group Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi appeared for the first time in five years in a propaganda video released Monday by the jihadist organization.

The video released by Al-Furqan on Monday shows Baghdadi with a bushy grey and red beard, wearing a black robe with a beige vest and seated on the floor with what appears to be a machine gun propped up next to him. He is speaking with three men seated opposite him whose faces were covered and blotted out.

It is unclear when the footage was filmed, but Baghdadi referred in the past tense to the months-long fight for Baghouz, IS’s final bastion in eastern Syria, which ended last month. [ Source: Times of Israel (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – Iran said on Sunday it could quit a treaty against the spread of nuclear weapons after the United States tightens sanctions, while an Iranian general said the U.S. Navy was interacting as before with an elite military unit blacklisted by Washington.

Tensions between Tehran and Washington have risen since the Trump administration withdrew last year from a 2015 international nuclear deal with Iran and began ratcheting up sanctions.

Earlier this month, the United States blacklisted Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) and demanded buyers of Iranian oil stop purchases by May or face sanctions. [ Source: Reuters (Read More…) ]

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