A New Perspective on Constantine

(Worthy News) – U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Tuesday during a visit to Afghanistan that the Trump administration is aiming for a peace deal in the war-ravaged country by September.

His visit came as American and Taliban negotiators are scheduled to meet in Qatar later this week (June 29) for the next round of talks in their months-long dialogue aimed at finding a political settlement to the Afghan war.

“I hope we have a peace deal before September 1st. That’s certainly our mission set,” Pompeo told reporters at the U.S. embassy in Kabul after his meetings with Afghan leaders. The country is due to hold presidential elections on September 28. [ Source: VOA News (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – North Korean and U.S. officials are holding “behind-the-scenes talks” to arrange a third summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on the fate of the North’s expanding nuclear arsenal, South Korea’s president said, four months after a second meeting between the leaders in Hanoi collapsed without any agreement.

There have been no public meetings between Washington and Pyongyang since the breakdown of the Hanoi summit. But the prospects for a resumption of U.S.-North Korea diplomacy have brightened since Trump and Kim recently exchanged personal letters. Trump called Kim’s letter “beautiful” while Kim described Trump’s as “excellent,” though the contents of their letters have not been disclosed. [ Source: Fox News (Read More…) ]

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by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – Three East London churches were attacked last week, in a string of arsons that left pentagrams, “666” symbols, and the word “hell” scrawled in the doors.

St. John’s in Stratford, Cann Hall Road Baptist Church in Leystone, and St. Matthew’s in West Ham, one of which had a children’s class going on at the time of the attacks, had doors partially or totally destroyed in what investigators now suspect was the work of a single arsonist.

‘[The fire] was bad enough but also our minister was working in the building and a childminding group was using the hall which the door enters into,” the daughter of the church secretary at Cann Hall Road Baptist church told parishioners, according to the Daily Mail.

The United Kingdom saw another slew of church attacks in March and October of last year, where, in one case, a sacred picture at the altar of a Catholic church in Great Yarmouth was replaced with a picture of the devil.

The Vienna-based Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe documented over 500 anti-Christian acts in Europe between 2016 and 2017, with France alone experiencing as many as 2,000 between 2017 and 2018, according to the French Ministry of the Interior.

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by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – Vermont will enact new rules in its health insurance marketplace that allow minors covered by Medicaid to receive free gender reassignment surgeries with fewer restrictions.

According to the Burlington Free Press, the new proposal put forth by Vermont health insurance regulators allows for 16 kinds of gender modification within a taxpayer-funded system that has, until now, banned the procedures for anyone under the age of 21.

“When a kid gets to the point where they say ‘I really, really need this to be comfortable in my body’… why would we get in the way of that?” said Dana Kaplan, executive director of LGBT organization Outright Vermont, who claimed a high suicide rate among transgender teens was the result of gender dysphoria—a disjunction between physical sex and gender identity that Kaplan alleged can only be rectified through gender reassignment.

The Burlington Free Press reported that 50% of children in Vermont receive health coverage under Medicaid, all of whom, under the new law, would potentially have access to surgeries like mastectomy and breast augmentation without the letters from two psychiatrists formerly needed under the old rules.

Until July 17th the Medicaid Policy Unit will be accepting public comment on the new proposal at AHS.MedicaidPolicy@Vermont.gov.

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by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – Iran is planning on further scaling back its commitment to the 2015 nuclear accord July 7th, citing the failure of European signatories to find a way around Trump’s crippling sanctions.

Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Shamkhani, who announced the changes to the Fars news agency on Tuesday, said the “political insolence” of European actors in expecting Iran to comply with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) despite the US’s withdrawal last year had led to its failure.

“Countries who interpreted Iran’s ‘patience’ with weakness and inaction” will be proved wrong by its forthcoming turnaround on its nuclear commitments, Shamkhani suggested.

On Monday, President Trump announced further sanctions specifically targeting Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s use of American financial assets and institutions, with sanctions on Iranian foreign minister Mohmmad Javad Zarif to follow later this week.

Iran notified the world recently that, to begin its abrogation of the deal, it will exceed the 661-pound uranium limit of the JCPOA on June 27th, a threat it bolstered with claims it had quadrupled its enrichment capacity since Trump began his “maximum pressure” campaign.

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by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – NATO will announce new measures against Russia’s violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty Wednesday, barring Russian compliance with longstanding U.S. demands for it to destroy a nuclear-capable missile system it says violates the treaty.

Hammered out by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, the INF disallowed the US and Russia from possessing land-based, medium-ranged missiles with a range of 300 to 3,400 miles, which are said to make a short-notice nuclear strike possible, and of which the Russian 9M729 missile system is one kind, according to assessments by the US and the 29 NATO allies.

“We call on Russia to take the responsible path, but we have seen no indication that Russia intends to do so. We will need to respond,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Tuesday, telling reporters that NATO measures against Russia would be rolled out Wednesday.

Russia, for its part, held military exercises Monday in response, it said, to rising tensions between the U.S. and Iran in the Middle East, even pinning recent anti-Russia democratic unrest in Georgia on U.S. interference, with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu telling the TASS news agency that virtually the whole Russian military had been “placed on alert.”

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov echoed his sentiment on the same day, warning of an impasse comparable to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis should the U.S. decide to deploy nuclear-capable weaponry in Eastern Europe following the collapse of the INF on August 2nd.

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(Worthy News) – Russia’s top national security adviser spoke out on behalf of Iran during trilateral meetings with his Israeli and American counterparts in Jerusalem on Tuesday, backing Tehran’s claims against the United States and supporting its ongoing military presence in Syria, which Israel sees as a threat to its security.

The trilateral conference of Israeli, Russian, and US national security advisers is the first event of its kind to be held in Jerusalem and, according to Israel, is aimed specifically at countering Iran, including both its nuclear aspirations and its influence throughout the Middle East.

The meeting comes amid escalating tensions between Washington and Tehran, following US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal last year and put in place a series of crushing economic sanctions. The Islamic Republic has retaliated by stepping up its uranium enrichment to levels beyond those permitted under the 2015 accord, allegedly carrying out a number of attacks on petroleum facilities around the Middle East, and shooting down a sophisticated US drone last week. [ Source: Times of Israel (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – The Mexican government has dispatched approximately 15,000 troops and National Guard officers to the U.S. border in a bid to check the flow of migration from Central America, the country’s defense chief told reporters Monday.

Mexico promised earlier this month to send 6,500 National Guard agents to its southern border, but Monday’s announcement was the first public acknowledgment of deployments to the U.S. border.

At a news conference in the Caribbean city of Cancun, Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval said Mexican forces were detaining migrants to prevent them from crossing the U.S. border. Mexican security forces previously have detained migrants traveling within Mexico but had not stopped them from crossing into the United States. [ Source: Fox News (Read More…) ]

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(Worthy News) – U.S. President Donald Trump targeted Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top Iranian officials with sanctions on Monday, taking a dramatic, unprecedented step to increase pressure on Iran after Tehran’s downing of an unmanned American drone.

With tensions running high between the two countries, Trump signed an executive order imposing the sanctions, which U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said would lock billions of dollars more in Iranian assets.

Trump told reporters the sanctions were in part a response to last week’s downing of a U.S. drone by Iran, but would have happened anyway. He said Khamenei was ultimately responsible for what Trump called “the hostile conduct of the regime” in the Middle East. [ Source: Reuters (Read More…) ]

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by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – The government of Georgia has finally conceded to a few demands of protesters as crowds gathered in the Eastern European country’s capital of Tbilisi for a fourth consecutive night.

Head of the Georgian Dream party currently in power, Bidzina Ivanishvili, announced on June 24 that the country would transition from a mixed to a proportional electoral system, after a Russian diplomat’s decision to sit in the Georgian parliamentary speaker’s seat during an address to the Interparliamentary Assembly on Orthodoxy (IAO) was seized upon as proof by opposition parties that Russia controls politics in Georgia.

“You have an opposition which is still associated with former President [Mikheil] Saakashvili, which is very keen…to play the Russia card and accuse Georgian Dream of being soft on Russia, and it’s also keen to portray the government as out of step with society,” analyst for Carnegie Europe Thomas de Waal told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

The protests, which began on June 20, were met with a severe police response in which 240 people were hospitalized by rubber bullets and other crowd suppression methods, and included demands for the resignations of officials viewed as Russia-sympathetic, such as parliament speaker Irakli Kobakhidze and the Georgian interior minister, as well as early parliamentary elections aimed at rectifying the presence of a Russian “fifth column.”

Russia is viewed as an occupier by nationalistic elements in Georgia, having crossed into the Orthodox country in 2008 in an attempt to maintain the disputed territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, in which thousands of Russian troops are still stationed.

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