A New Perspective on Constantine

by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – On May 13th protestors, among them MMA fighters from the Russian Copper Company martial arts academy, tore down the fence that had marked off the proposed construction site of the new St. Catherine Cathedral in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

Almost 100 protestors, 21 of whom were charged with hooliganism, were detained for stoking “religious conflict,” according to authorities, as the Russian government and Russian Orthodox church seek to repopulate the country with churches in an attempt to hearken back to a pre-Soviet Russia grounded in God and family.

“We have learned a great lesson as a people,” Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, said recently during the consecration of another new church in Strasbourg.

“The churches are not built because no one knows where to throw their money, but so that the people understand that without God nothing is obtained,” a truth he said was obscured by a Soviet-era that sought to scrub the country of everything God-related.

A local poll found that 52 percent of Yekaterinburg residents opposed the Cathedral’s construction, while 28 supported it, with the proposed building seen by some as a flashpoint for Russian church excess.

Igor Altushkin, for example, one of the Russian billionaires financing the project, was reported to have paid $25 million for a private jet flight escorting Patriarch Kirill from Moscow to Yekaterinburg in 2018, an expenditure which critics saw as unnecessarily lavish and typical of the Orthodox church.

Altushkin’s Russian Copper Company Charity Foundation lists “strengthening traditional family values and the role of the family in society” as one of its primary objectives.

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by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – Christians in India are bracing themselves for more of the same after Prime Minister Narendra Modi was elected to another five-year term last Thursday, having garnered a 303-seat parliamentary majority—a 31-seat gain from his initial election in 2014.

Since Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) first came to power five years ago, Christians in India increasingly have become the object of a nationalistic hatred tinted with religious fervor under the auspices of “Hindutva” ideology, which envisions a homogenous and strictly Hindu India and seems to be sweeping the nation concomitant to Modi’s rise to power.

David Curry, whose organization Open Doors USA ranked India in the top ten of its World Watch List for global Christian persecution for the first time in 2019 after the world’s largest democracy jumped 18 places during the first 5 years of Modi’s tenure as head of state, called the democratic ratification of Modi’s broad-based agenda an “absolute tragedy” for Indian Christians.

“Since 2014, Hindu extremists have actively promoted hate toward its Christian and Muslim minorities which has led to a tragic escalation of violence,” he wrote on Open Doors’ website in the days following the wrap-up to Indian elections.

Besides a significant spike in religious violence reported by International Christian Concern between Modi’s first and second terms, with 325 instances of violence against Christians in 2018 compared with only 147 in 2014, a December 31st report on Indian religious persecution by the British All-Party Parliamentary Group for International Freedom of Religion or Belief found that the Narendra Modi government had “remained largely inactive in proactively tackling spiraling religiously motivated violence.”

Christian rights organization ADF India bolstered this conclusion with its discovery that between January and October of last year, 219 instances of religiously motivated violence against Christians had been reported, but only 12 registered as a crime by local authorities.

More worrying still, however, were the deep ties the British parliament report unearthed between the publicly legitimate Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an extremist militant Hindu organization that draws on legends of a gilded age of Hindu Supremacy–much like the Thul Society in Hitler’s Germany–that had been the main agent behind the demolition of a historic Mosque in 1992 claimed to be the ancient site of the Hindu god Ram’s temple.

“The leaders of nationalist groups have openly asked Hindus to produce more children and train them in weaponry to fight Muslims. This poison is spreading across the country and is leaving minorities in dire straits,” Adil Hussain, a human rights activist based in New Dehli, told UCA News in the lead-up to Indian elections.

Several anonymous Indian church leaders, interviewed by Open Doors USA in the wake of Modi’s victory, expressed optimism when asked how the church in India is girding itself to meet what will likely be an even larger tidal wave of religious violence following Modi’s consolidation of power.

“Most mature Christians are talking about God’s will,” one unnamed leader said, quoting Proverbs 16:33 and 21:1, and elaborating that Indian Christians “are not happy or sad” about the election results, but “instead prepare ourselves to face what God has prepared for us.”

“I don’t support any party and have peace believing Romans 8:28, which says ‘In all things God works for the good of those who love Him,’” another Indian believer told Open Doors.

All this despite speculations by some of the believers interviewed that the Modi government may alter laws and even amend the Indian constitution—long couched in an ideal of religious toleration—during his second tenure to allow for greater persecution of religious minorities.

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(Worthy News) – North Korea’s entire weapons of mass destruction program violates U.N. Security Council resolutions, the U.S. State Department spokeswoman said on Tuesday, when asked about recent missile launches by Pyongyang.

“I think the entire North Korean WMD program, it’s in conflict with the U.N. Security Council resolutions. But what the U.S. is focused on here … is in trying to negotiate a peaceful end to the North Korean WMD program,” State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus told reporters.

Ortagus had been asked to make clear the State Department’s position after President Donald Trump appeared to contradict his national security adviser, John Bolton, over whether North Korean launches this month had violated U.N. resolutions. [ Source: Reuters (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The European Union will not renegotiate the Brexit deal that Prime Minister Theresa May agreed, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said on Tuesday, as concerns grew that a successor to May could trigger a confrontation with the bloc.

Brexit is up in the air after May announced plans to step down, triggering a leadership contest in the ruling Conservative Party that could bring a new prime minister to power who wants a much more decisive break with the EU.

One of the candidates, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, said it would be “political suicide” to pursue a no-deal Brexit, a reprimand to frontrunner Boris Johnson who said last week that Britain should leave with or without a deal by the end of October. [ Source: Reuters (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – China is ready to use rare earths to strike back in a trade war with the United States, Chinese newspapers warned on Wednesday in strongly worded commentaries on a move that would escalate tensions between the world’s two largest economies.

President Xi Jinping’s visit to a rare earths plant last week had sparked speculation that China would use its dominant position as an exporter of rare earths to the United States as leverage in the trade war.

Rare earths are a group of 17 chemical elements used in everything from high-tech consumer electronics to military equipment. The prospect that their value could soar as a result of the trade war caused sharp increases in the share prices of producers, including the company visited by Xi. [ Source: Reuters (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a legal challenge to a Pennsylvania school district’s policy that allows transgender students to use whichever restroom they identify with.

The conservative Alliance Defending Freedom group has argued the Boyertown District’s policy violates student privacy. The high court, however, said it wouldn’t take up the case, meaning the decision last year in the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals will stand. The appellate court ruled in favor of restroom freedom.

The American Civil Liberties Union represented student Aidan DeStefano in the case. [ Source: UPI (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The United States continues to be alarmed by Syrian government and Russian airstrikes in northwest Syria and believes they are a “reckless escalation” of violence, the State Department said on Tuesday.

Government air strikes, backed by Russia, have focused on the south of Idlib province and nearby parts of Hama, uprooting nearly 250,000 people. The bombing has killed 229 civilians and injured 727 others, according to the UOSSM medical charity.

Hundreds of members of the U.S. Congress signed a letter to President Donald Trump last week arguing that the United States should remain engaged with the conflict in Syria, saying they were “deeply concerned” about extremist groups in the country. [ Source (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The National Weather Service (NWS) said as many as 55 tornadoes may have touched down overnight across eight states stretching eastward from Idaho and Colorado. Storm reports posted online by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Prediction Center said 14 suspected tornadoes touched down in Indiana, 12 in Colorado and nine in Ohio. Seven were reported in Iowa, five in Nebraska, four in Illinois, three in Minnesota, and one in Idaho.

Residents of the Midwestern U.S. states of Ohio and Indiana were sifting through the ravages of a series of powerful tornadoes that killed at least one person, injured more than 130 others, and destroyed homes, schools and businesses.

According to NWS, Tuesday was the 12th consecutive day where multiple tornadoes were reported in the United States. While the high number of twisters is not unusual, but they are typically not as widespread. [ Source: VOA News (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – With only 24 hours to go before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces a legal deadline to form a coalition, Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Lieberman once again shot down a compromise aimed at securing Netanyahu a fifth term.

Coalition talks broke down between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Lieberman earlier in the week.

Lieberman says that he would not accept anything short of the full passage of a controversial bill that would set mandatory quotas, but the haredi coalition partners have refused to accept that, leading to a clash that put Netanyahu’s premiership at stake. [ Source: Israel Hayom (Read More…) ]

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