A New Perspective on Constantine

(Worthy News) – Turkey’s main opposition claimed a decisive victory on Sunday in Istanbul’s re-run election, dealing one of the biggest blows to President Tayyip Erdogan during his 16 years in power and promising a new beginning in the country’s largest city.

Ekrem Imamoglu, mayoral candidate of the secularist Republican People’s Party, was leading with 54 percent of votes against 45 percent for Erdogan’s AK Party candidate, with more than 99% of ballots opened, Turkish broadcasters said.

The election was Istanbul’s second in three months after results of an initial March vote were scrapped, setting up the do-over as a test of Turks’ ability to check what many saw as their president’s increasingly authoritarian power. [ Source: NBC News (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – An Alabama megachurch is slated to have its own police force by the fall after Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signed a bill into a law that allows it to do just that.

The law permits Briarwood Presbyterian Church to “appoint and employ one or more suitable persons to act as police officers to protect the property of the school or academy.”

Officials in Briarwood Presbetyrian church say the law is crucial to protect its 4,100 members, including 2,000 students and faculty on its two campuses, according to CNN. [ Source: Washington Examiner (Read More…) ]

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by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – A Russian scientist will move ahead with gene editing babies, following in the footsteps of a Chinese scientist who attracted widespread condemnation in the scientific community for doing so in November 2018.

Dennis Rebrikov plans to disable the proteins in a CCR5 gene using the “CRISPR” method of gene editing, a ploy he hopes will prevent the contraction of HIV in embryos artificially implanted in the wombs of HIV-positive mothers.

“The data I have seen say it’s not that easy to control the way the DNA repair works,” said Jennifer Doudna, a molecular biologist at UC Berkley who pioneered CRISPR, suggesting the risk of unintended gene mutilations in the edited embryos–such as those leading to shortened life span and susceptibility to influenza–was high.

He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who claimed to have successfully edited the genes of two baby girls in November of last year, was panned when he announced his experiment to the world by scientific authorities such as Francis Collins, a Christian who helmed the mapping of the human genome.

“The need for development of binding international consensus on setting limits for this kind of research, now being debated in Hong Kong, has never been more apparent,” wrote Collins in his capacity of director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) shortly after He’s announcement, calling the experiment an “epic scientific misadventure.”

“CRISPR,” short for “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Palindromic Repeats,” refers to naturally repeating sequences of DNA used by bacteria to cut off strands of DNA replicated by viruses, which scientists noticed had some utility for scrubbing genes of undesirable traits like proneness to certain diseases.

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by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – A Wisconsin school board member is under fire from the Madison-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, which has filed a complaint for his mention of Jesus at Appleton North High School’s graduation ceremony on June 6th.

Alvin Dupree, who is also a Pastor, served in the marines, in part, he said, to preserve the constitutional right to freedom of religion he feels is under attack in the controversy, the FFRF having sent a letter to the school board on June 13th requesting he be disallowed from speaking at any further school functions.

“To try to say that we can’t do what people have laid down their life [for], and what this Constitution and this country has been established on, that’s offensive,” Dupree, who was the first African-American elected to the school board in 2017, told Madison365.com.

The letter, penned by staff attorney Ryan D. Jane on behalf of the FFRF, accused Dupree of “using a government position to promote his personal religion” for honoring Jesus Christ as his source of strength in the graduation speech.

Stretching the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” to include all mentions of faith in the public sphere is an oft-employed tactic of atheist groups against vocal Christians.

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by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – Representatives for major American Bible publishers met with the U.S. International Trade Commission on Tuesday and Wednesday, hoping to apprise the Trump administration of potential effects on Bible manufacture in the US-China trade war.

Mark Schoenwald, President of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Evangelical Christian Publishers Association CEO Stan Jantz, and Paul Hendrickson, general manager of Hendrickson Publishers testified in Washington before a panel of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), presenting evidence that Trump’s 25% tax on $300 billion worth of goods imported from China would affect Bible sales especially.

“There will be significant damage to Bible accessibility if Bibles and books are not excluded from the tariffs. Some believe such a tariff would place a practical limitation on religious freedom,” Jantz’s statement read, highlighting the lack of infrastructure outside of China for printing the uniquely thin paper materials required for constructing a Bible.

As of the beginning of June, the US has penalized $250 billion of Chinese goods, with plans to place tariffs on $325 billion more if China does not begin to comply with the strictures of the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement it entered into in 2001.

According to Jantz, 50% of Bibles printed by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA) are printed in China.

The post Trump May Have Accidentally Imposed 'Bible Tax' Through Sanctions On China, Say Christian Publishers appeared first on Worthy Christian News.

(Worthy News) – The U.S. launched a sweeping cyberattack against the Iranian military last week in direct response to Iran’s downing of an American surveillance drone, U.S. officials told the Associated Press over the weekend, confirming that President Trump personally approved the retaliatory measures.

The response was aimed at Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a branch of the nation’s military that the White House officially labeled a terrorist organization earlier this year. The cyberattack targeted computer systems that control the Corps’ rocket and missile launchers, administration officials said.

The cyberattack was presented to the president as one of several options following last week’s incident in which Iran shot down a U.S. drone over the Strait of Hormuz. While no Americans were abroad the aircraft, the shoot-down still added more fuel to growing military tensions between the two sides and brought Mr. Trump to the brink of ordering airstrikes against Iranian targets. [ Source: Washington Times (Read More…) ]

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