A New Perspective on Constantine

(Worthy News) – A top U.S. military official has said that U.S. intelligence agencies believe Russia is likely conducting low-yield nuclear testing that may be violation of a major international treaty.

Lieutenant General Robert Ashley said in a speech on May 29 that Russia could be doing tests that go “beyond what is believed necessary, beyond zero yield.”

The problem, he said, was that Russia “has not been willing to affirm” they are adhering to the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. [ Source: Radio Free Europe (Read More…) ]

The post U.S.: Russia May Be Testing Low-Yield Nukes, In Violation Of Treaty appeared first on Worthy Christian News.

(Worthy News) – Special Counsel Robert Mueller announced Wednesday that he has concluded the Russia investigation. He is now closing the special counsel’s office and returning to private life.

Democrats in Congress have wanted to have Mueller testify about the report as they launch investigations against President Donald Trump.

But Mueller indicated there would be no point in him testifying before Congress about the investigation, saying the written report of the special counsel speaks for itself and that the words were carefully chosen. [ Source: CBN News (Read More…) ]

The post Case Closed: Special Counsel Mueller Says Russia Investigation Is Over, Nothing More to Say appeared first on Worthy Christian News.

(Worthy News) – Louisiana lawmakers on Wednesday passed a strict new abortion ban that would prohibit the procedure before some women even know they are pregnant, joining a half-dozen conservative states with similar measures.

In a 79-23 vote, the Louisiana House gave final passage to a bill barring abortion once there’s a detectable fetal heartbeat, as early as the sixth week of pregnancy. Gov. John Bel Edwards, the Deep South’s only Democratic governor, supports the ban and intends to sign it into law despite opposition from national party leaders who say such laws are attacks on women.

“I know there are many who feel just as strongly as I do on abortion and disagree with me – and I respect their opinions,” Edwards said in a statement after the ban’s passage. “As I prepare to sign this bill, I call on the overwhelming bipartisan majority of legislators who voted for it to join me in continuing to build a better Louisiana that cares for the least among us and provides more opportunity for everyone.” [ Source: CBN News (Read More…) ]

The post Louisiana Lawmakers Send New Abortion Ban to Governor's Desk appeared first on Worthy Christian News.

(Worthy News) – Thousands of Arkansas, Oklahoma and Louisiana residents braced for more flooding Wednesday, and some evacuated their homes, as forecasts of further rain drove fears that decades-old levees girding the Arkansas River may not hold.

More than a week of violent weather, including downpours and deadly tornadoes, has lashed the central United States, bringing record-breaking floods to parts of the states, turning highways into lakes and submerging all but the roofs of some homes.

“This is a flood of historic magnitude,” Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson told a news conference Wednesday, joined by state and federal emergency officials. He said of the Arkansas River: “It’s a beautiful sight until it comes to get you.” [ Source: VOA News (Read More…) ]

The post Three US States Face Flooding of ‘Historic Magnitude’ appeared first on Worthy Christian News.

(Worthy News) – Israel’s parliament on Wednesday voted to dissolve a mere month after it was sworn in, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to meet the midnight deadline to form a new government, triggering an unprecedented second national election this year.

After a raucous 12-hour debate, lawmakers voted 74 to 45 in favor of the Likud-drafted bill to dissolve the 21st Knesset and hold new elections on September 17.

But in a shocking turn of events for the longtime leader, Netanyahu failed to muster a majority coalition in the 120-seat Knesset by the Wednesday midnight deadline, due to an impasse between the secular and ultra-Orthodox members of his would-be coalition over a contentious draft law. [ Source: Times of Israel (Read More…) ]

The post Knesset votes for new elections on September 17 after Netanyahu fails to form coalition appeared first on Worthy Christian News.

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.

The post The Will of the People Leans Toward Secularism as Russian Government Seeks to Finance Renewal of Faith appeared first on Worthy Christian News.

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.

The post Indian Christians Say ‘God Works for the Good of Those Who Love Him’ As Modi Rides Anti-Christian Nationalist Wave to Second Term in Office appeared first on Worthy Christian News.

(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…) ]

The post U.S. says all North Korea's weapons of mass destruction violate U.N. resolutions appeared first on Worthy Christian News.

(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…) ]

The post EU tells Britain: There will be no renegotiation of Brexit deal appeared first on Worthy Christian News.

(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…) ]

The post China ready to hit back at U.S. with rare earths appeared first on Worthy Christian News.