1. Where is the United States in
Prophecy?
Americans name Bible as their favorite book of all time, but less than half still read it
Regardless of which demographic group they belong to – male-female, Republican-Democrat or old-young – Americans named the Bible as their favorite book of all time, according to a recent nationwide poll. In addition to being the number one book overall, the Holy Book also came in first across the board when comparing different demographic groups – gender, race/ethnicity, generation, political party, region, education – according to the Harris Poll released on Monday. The results may come as no surprise considering statistics that reflect how plentiful Bibles are in the nation. An estimated 92 percent of Americans own a Bible and the average household owns three, a 1993 Barna Research study found. More recent research puts Bible ownership at an average of four per household, which suggest that Bible publishers sell twenty-five million copies a year, according to The New Yorker. But the revered book, a testament to God's enduring love toward mankind, is read by just 45 percent of Americans in a typical week..
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Name the Western U.S. city most vulnerable to a terrorist attack - you might be surprised
Quick: Name the Western U.S. city most vulnerable to a terrorist attack. Is it Los Angeles, with its crowded roads that make quick escape impossible? San Francisco and its iconic bridge? Or Seattle with its Space Needle and busy port? Try Boise, Idaho, with its, um, potatoes. A new study funded largely by the Department of Homeland Security ranked 132 American cities according to vulnerability to terrorist attacks. Boise was the only city in the western half of the country to make the top 10. "To be honest, we're a little bit surprised," said Adam Park, a spokesman for Boise, a landlocked city of 200,000 where the big event this weekend is a Professional Bull Riders invitational. The rest of the top 10 -- led by New Orleans and including New York and Washington, D.C. -- were largely East Coast cities. Los Angeles was No. 41, followed by San Francisco at 66 and Seattle at 87. "Is this a typo or what?" asked Bobbie Patterson, executive director of the Boise Convention and Visitors Bureau. "Where in the world did this information come from?".
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Study: National media more liberal, secular than ever
A recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center found that 32 percent of national reporters acknowledge being politically liberal -- compared to only 19 percent of the general public. Kristen Fyfe of the Media Research Center's Culture and Media Institute (CMI) says the numbers are not surprising. She contends that all one has to do is pay attention to the headlines in the media and, as she puts it, "you get a dose of, basically, liberal propaganda, most of the time." The Pew survey also found that 68 percent of national reporters and news executives never or almost never attend worship services. Fyfe, who recently produced a CMI Special Report entitled "Apostles of Atheism," says that "91 percent of the journalists say that you don't have to believe in God to be a moral person." Kristen FyfeAccording to Fyfe, "we found in our coverage of last years' news programs that atheists pretty much get a free pass when it comes to reporting on their belief systems." Fyfe says new media, such as the Internet and blogs, do give conservatives and Christians alternative sources of
information.
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Minerals: Crumbling Bedrock of U.S. Security
During the War of Independence, America learned the painful lesson of reliance on foreign nations. The newborn United States had to rely on France and the Netherlands to supply everything from iron and gunpowder to blankets and clothing, and Britain routinely cut America’s supply lines. Seeing this weakness, America’s founders implemented a national strategy promoting industrial and military self-sufficiency in order to establish the nation’s security. It seems America has forgotten that lesson. One specific example is in mineral production. America’s leaders have allowed the nation’s once formidable mining industry to erode. Many minerals—including some that are strategically important for the military—are no longer produced in the United States at all. Due to lack of investment, radical environmental activism, and low-cost foreign competition, many of America’s former mining giants have turned off the drills, closed the refineries and sent the workers home, or have chosen to develop new production outside the U.S. It’s not that America wasn’t warned. Back in 1985, the secretary of the United States Army testified before Congress that America was more than 50 percent dependent on foreign sources for 23 of 40 critical materials essential to U.S. national security. Without just a few critical minerals, such as cobalt, manganese, chromium and platinum, it would be virtually impossible to produce many defense products such as jet engines, missile components, electronic components, iron, steel, etc. “This places the U.S. in a vulnerable position with a direct threat to our defense production capability if the supply of strategic minerals is disrupted by foreign powers".....
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The Blackmail Effect - Al-Qaida nuclear attack in planning stages?
In his testimony Dr. Matthew Bunn, a senior research associate for the Project on Managing the Atom at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's School of Government said there is greater chance than ever that the Al-Qaida would get the material and manage to make it into a bomb. ''I think then the next question is if they got the material, and they managed to make it into a bomb, could they somehow deliver it to Washington, or New York, or another major city somewhere around the world. I think, in my view, the answer is yes,'' he said. Bunn said in case a bomb goes off there would be blackmailing tactics from these terrorists' organizations. ''One has to recall that the moment after a nuclear bomb goes off, someone -- either the perpetrator or another terrorist group -- is going to call up and say, ''I've got five more, and they're already hidden in U.S. cities, and I'm going to start setting them off unless you do X, Y and Z.'' And one bomb having just gone off, they will have substantial credibility,'' he argued. ''The prospect for panic, uncontrolled mass evacuation of our cities, economic chaos and disruption is, I think, very great Deposing before the Congressional committee, Gary Ackerman, research director for the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland said at present the efforts of non-state actors seeking to acquire and use nuclear weapons are growing in size and scope. ''Jihadists have, since the mid 1990s, made at least 10 statements advocating the possession or use of nuclear weapons, and there have been at least a dozen reports of jihadists' attempts to acquire nuclear weapons, fissile material or technical knowledge,'' he said. ''As an initial indicator of this trend, a recent analysis of online jihadist documents that deal explicitly with nuclear weapons has revealed that while their knowledge is still below par, there have been significant advances in the understanding of nuclear issues within the general jihadi community in only a few short years,'' Ackerman said..
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2. Israel - God's Timepiece
A Mystery in the Middle East
The Arab-Israeli region of the Middle East is filled with rumors of war. That is about as unusual as the rising of the sun, so normally it would not be worth mentioning. But like the proverbial broken clock that is right twice a day, such rumors occasionally will be true. In this case, we don’t know that they are true, and certainly it’s not the rumors that are driving us. But other things — minor and readily explicable individually — have drawn our attention to the possibility that something is happening. The first thing that drew our attention was a minor, routine matter. Back in February, the United States started purchasing oil for its Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). The SPR is a reserve of crude oil stored in underground salt domes. Back in February, it stood at 96.2 percent of capacity, which is pretty full as far as we are concerned. But the U.S. Department of Energy decided to increase its capacity. This move came in spite of record-high oil prices and the fact that the purchase would not help matters. It also came despite potential political fallout, since during times like these there is generally pressure to release reserves. Part of the step could have been the bureaucracy cranking away, and part of it could have been the feeling that the step didn’t make much difference. But part of it could have been based on real fears of a disruption in oil supplies. By itself, the move meant nothing. But it did cause us to become thoughtful when combined with other events.........
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Insider leaks plans for Palestinian state
U.S.-backed negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians are expected to generate an agreement by the end of the year that would set up a Palestinian state in the West Bank and eastern sections of Jerusalem, according to a source who has participated in the talks. In one of the first media glimpses into the current negotiations, a source who takes part in the regular meetings outlined for WND the main objectives of the secretive negotiations. Since last November's Israeli-Palestinian Annapolis summit, which set as a goal the creation of a Palestinian state before 2009, negotiating teams including Israeli Foreign Minister Tzippy Livni and chief Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Qureia have been meeting weekly while Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas have been meeting biweekly. Unlike previous Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in which both sides attended with about a dozen advisers each, the teams working with Livni and Qureia are small, usually consisting at most of five people each. Also unlike previous talks, in which the contents of many meetings were leaked quickly to the media, the current negotiations have resulted in few press leaks. According to the source who has been playing a role in the meetings, the two sides are drafting an agreement, to be signed by the end of the year, requiring Israel to evacuate most of the West Bank and certain eastern sections of Jerusalem..........
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Syria on Alert 'Because Hizbullah Revenge Attack is Near'
Syria has raised the state of alert of its armed forces because it knows Hizbullah's revenge attack against Israel for the killing of Imad Mughniyeh is near, according to Israel's Channel 2 TV. Soon after Mughniyeh's death, Israel warned Syria that it would hold it responsible for any revenge attack launched by Hizbullah for the killing of Mughniyeh, its operations officer. Syria is due to release its official findings in the probe into Mughniyeh's death. He was killed in an explosion in Damascus in February. The paper Al-Quds Al-Arabi, which is published in London, reported that since Mughniyeh's death, Syria has arrested dozens of suspects, including "Palestinians and senior Syrian army officers." Sources in Damascus told the paper that the investigation established that foreigners were behind the murder of Mughniyeh. Syria has accused Israel of being behind the assassination.............read
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Hamas undertaking a broad military buildup, Israeli study finds
An Israeli study says that Hamas, the militant group that now controls Gaza, is engaged in the broadest and most significant military buildup in its history with help from Syria and Iran, restructuring itself more hierarchically and using more and more powerful weapons, especially longer-range rockets against Israel's southern communities. The study, by an independent research group with close ties to the Israeli military establishment, says that while the buildup will take some years to complete, it is in an intensive phase that has already led to better infiltration into Israel and a rise in the breadth and precision of rocket fire. "This is the first comprehensive analysis of the Hamas buildup," said Reuven Erlich, a retired Israeli colonel in military intelligence who heads The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, the institute that produced the study. "It is based on a wide range of sources. And what is very clear is that Hamas, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, is aiming to use rocket fire to draw the Israeli military in."............read
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Israeli intel projects a one-month war with Syria
Israel's intelligence community has concluded that the next war would involve missiles and Hizbullah, last at least a month and include Syria. The intelligence community has drafted a series of scenarios for Israel's emergency services to prepare for future war. The scenarios envisioned the next war as including massive missile and rocket salvos, some of them containing chemical weapons, on Israeli cities. "The scenarios are based on Arab military capability rather than intentions," an Israeli government source said. "The war in Lebanon was also seen as a taste of what a full-scale war would bring." Officials said Israel's military, police and emergency services have been on high alert for an attack by Hizbullah, Syria or Iran, Middle East Newsline reported. They said the current alert would last throughout April and did not rule out a continuation of high combat-readiness for the rest of 2008. Under the scenarios, hundreds of Israelis would be killed and thousands injured in missile strikes on Tel Aviv. The enemy missiles would target strategic facilities, including Israel's Ben-Gurion International Airport.............read
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Netanyahu: "Zionist Christians Our Best Friends"
Israel has no better friends in the world than Christian Zionists, Likud opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu said on Sunday. "This is a friendship of the heart, a friendship of common roots, and a friendship of common civilization," Netanyahu told a conference of American Evangelicals in Jerusalem. The event, which was organized by the San Antonio, Texas-based Christians United for Israel, drew 1,000 Israel supporters led by the conservative evangelical Pastor John Hagee, who has been a stalwart supporter of Israel for the past three decades. Hagee on Sunday announced donations of $6 million to a number of Israeli causes and declared that Israel must remain in control of all of Jerusalem. "Turning part or all of Jerusalem over to the Palestinians would be tantamount to turning it over to the Taliban," Hagee said.
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4.
Gog/Magog War
Israel warns: We'll 'destroy" Iran as region under general war alert
Israel will "destroy" Iran if Tehran decided to launch a war against the Jewish state, Israeli Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer said today. The unusually harsh warning from Ben-Eliezer, a former defense minister, was delivered as the official visited his ministry's war room, which took part today in a massive, nationwide, weeklong drill that is set to include simulated chemical missile attacks on central Israel. "The Iranians won't rush to attack Israel, because they understand the significance such action would have and are well aware of our strength," Ben-Eliezer told reporters. "However, Iran continues to aggravate the situation by supplying arms to Syria and Hezbollah, and we must deal with this." The minister said this week's war drill "is not a meaningless spectacle or a fictional scenario. The future reality is likely to be a number of times harsher than that which we recognize now. We are confronted with a situation where the home front becomes the front line." "In a future war, it will be much safer to live in the northern towns of Nahariya and Shlomi instead of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, since I expect that in the opening attack hundreds of missiles will strike Israel," Eliezer said. "There will be no place in the country which is not within range of Syria and Hezbollah's rockets."
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Russia mulls stronger strategic deterrent
The Kremlin has pledged to boost its strategic capabilities. Russia will continue to develop its nuclear deterrent, including naval, air and land-based components, Putin announced on 4 April. Inevitably, Putin's statements were echoed by the country's top military officials. Russia plans to create five-six naval aircraft carrier groups, Russian Naval Commander Admiral Vladimir Vysotsky said on 4 April. He also pledged to start operations on a new strategic nuclear submarine Yuri Dolgoruki and test the new naval missile complex Bulava by the end of 2008. Russia would raise the number of strategic patrol flights over the world's oceans up to 20-30 per month, Russian Air Force Commander, General Alexander Zelin said on 4 April. He said the Air Force had recorded 40 strategic bomber flights since the beginning of this year. Russia resumed strategic bomber patrol flights over international waters in August 2007. The move has been widely perceived in the West as a sign of Russia's increasingly assertive military stance, while Moscow described the long-range flights as legitimate security measures. Furthermore, Russia's military experts appear to favor a doctrine of preemptive strikes. In March, General Leonid Ivashov, head of the Moscow-based Geopolicy Academy, suggested that Russia should be prepared to use nuclear weapons to protect its allies. He also warned that Russia may face effectively loosing its nuclear deterrent because of the growing capabilities of the US missile
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6.
The Rise of Islam
World’s most populous Muslim country shuts down 100 churches in 3 years
Islam has overtaken Roman Catholicism as the biggest single religious denomination in the world, the Vatican said on Sunday. Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, who compiled the Vatican's newly-released 2008 yearbook of statistics, said Muslims made up 19.2 percent of the world's population and Catholics 17.4 percent. "For the first time in history we are no longer at the top: the Muslims have overtaken us," Formenti told Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano in an interview, saying the data referred to 2006. He said that if all Christian groups were considered, including Orthodox churches, Anglicans and Protestants, then Christians made up 33 percent of the world's population -- or about 2 billion people. The Vatican recently put the number of Catholics in the world at 1.13 billion people. It did not provide a figure for Muslims, generally estimated at around 1.3 billion. Formenti said that while the number of Catholics as a proportion of the world's population was fairly stable, the percentage of Muslims was growing because of higher birth rates........
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7. Increase in Knowledge/New Technologies
Physicist: Secrets of Universe Soon to Be Unlocked
The "father" of an elusive subatomic particle said Monday he is almost sure it will be discovered in the next year in a race between powerful research equipment in the United States and Europe. British physicist Peter Higgs, who more than 40 years ago postulated the existence of the particle in the makeup of the atom, said his visit to a new accelerator in Geneva over the weekend encouraged him that the so-called Higgs boson will soon be seen. The $2 billion Large Hadron Collider, under construction since 2003, is expected to start operating by June at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, which is known as CERN. It likely will take several months before the hundreds of scientists from all over the world at the laboratory are ready to start smashing together protons to study their
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'The Grid' 10,000 Times Faster Than Broadband Could Soon Make the Internet Obsolete
The Internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds. At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds. The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call. David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said. The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates......
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Robots seen doing work of 3.5 million in Japan
Robots could fill the jobs of 3.5 million people in graying Japan by 2025, a thinktank says, helping to avert worker shortages as the country's population shrinks. Japan faces a 16 percent slide in the size of its workforce by 2030 while the number of elderly will mushroom, the government estimates, raising worries about who will do the work in a country unused to, and unwilling to contemplate, large-scale immigration. The thinktank, the Machine Industry Memorial Foundation, says robots could help fill the gaps, ranging from microsized capsules that detect lesions to high-tech vacuum cleaners. Rather than each robot replacing one person, the foundation said in a report that robots could make time for people to focus on more important things. Japan could save 2.1 trillion yen ($21 billion) of elderly insurance payments in 2025 by using robots that monitor the health of older people, so they don't have to rely on human nursing care, the foundation said in its
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D.C. police set to monitor 5,000 cameras
D.C. officials are giving police access to more than 5,000 closed-circuit TV cameras citywide that monitor traffic, schools and public housing — a move that will give the District one of the largest surveillance networks in the country. "The primary benefit of what we're doing is for public health and safety," said Darrell Darnell, director of the city's Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency, who announced the initiative along with Mayor Adrian M. Fenty yesterday. But the announcement left some civil liberties advocates and a key D.C. Council member concerned. "We've been sort of sounding the alarm on this stuff for a long time, saying these little pieces — they grow," said Art Spitzer, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of the National Capital Area. "You put a camera here, it's not so bad, you put a camera there, it's not so bad. But then it turns out all the sudden, we find out there are 5,200 cameras. That's a big number."......
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8. Christian Worldview/Issues
Christian group sues Google after search engine refuses abortion adverts
A Christian group is suing internet giant Google after it refused to take adverts on abortion and religion. The Christian Institute, a Church of England campaign group, wanted to place an "AdWords" advertisement. This meant that whenever an internet user typed the word abortion into the search engine a link would appear on the right hand side of the page saying: "UK abortion law: news and views on abortion from the Christian Institute. www.christian.org.uk." But Google refused the advert because it said it had a policy of declining sites which mixed abortion with religion. "At this time, Google policy does not permit the advertisement of websites that contain 'abortion and religion-related content'," said the Dublin-based Google Adwords Team in its reply. Google does, however, accept adverts for abortion clinics and secular pro-abortion sites..........
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Religious teaching straight to your iPod
The Rev. Bruce Walker preaches to a congregation of fewer than 100 people in Greenville, S.C., but people all over the world listen to his sermons via podcast. Evangelists have long used the airwaves to get their messages out to a mass audience. But now, podcast technology is opening the doors to a wider variety of religious teaching than ever before, available on demand and delivered automatically to the computers of a growing number of Americans hungry for spirituality. A survey last year by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more people used the Internet to look for religious and spiritual information than to download music, participate in online auctions or visit adult websites. And a list updated recently by the podcast directory Podcast Alley shows 2,462 podcasts in the religion and spirituality category, the fourth highest among 21 categories, and more than in sports, news and
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9. Other Events
To Watch
Behold the False Prophet? Blair to devote rest of his life to religion and interfaith dialogue, creation of global faith foundation
Former British prime minister Tony Blair says the promotion of interfaith dialogue is "the rest of my life's work". Speaking to The Times, Mr Blair said he had focused his efforts on religion because, along with his own personal interest in the subject, combating climate change and eradicating poverty - both also interests of his - were "well-trodden ground". Mr Blair, who converted to Catholicism in December, was Britain's premier from 1997 to last June, and has since become a Middle East peace envoy, is heading a team of experts charged with securing a deal to combat climate change, and is hoping to turn his Tony Blair Faith Foundation into a "global foundation". "People will think this is a piece of spin but, I've always been as interested in religion as politics," Mr Blair told the British daily. "I see this over time as the rest of my life's work." Of his foundation, Mr Blair said the aim was not to throw "all the faiths in a doctrinal melting pot and coming out with the world religion as it were, that's not what it's about". "At the moment, you've still got really quite profound struggle going on about whether religion is going to be taken over by those who do not regard even the thought of an encounter with those of another faith as a good thing. On the contrary, they regard it as a betrayal of their faith."....
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Regional Nuclear War Would Affect Entire Globe
From India to Africa to North Korea to Pakistan and even in New York City, higher grain prices, fertilizer shortages and rising energy costs are combining to spell hunger for millions in what is being characterized as a global "silent famine." Global food prices, based on United Nations records, rose 35 percent in the last year, escalating a trend that began in 2002. Since then, prices have risen 65 percent. Last year, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's world food index, dairy prices rose nearly 80 percent and grain 42 percent. "This is the new face of hunger," said Josetta Sheeran, director of the World Food Program, launching an appeal for an extra $500 million so it could continue supplying food aid to 73 million hungry people this year. "People are simply being priced out of food markets. ... We have never before had a situation where aggressive rises in food prices keep pricing our operations out of our reach." The WFP launched a public appeal weeks ago because the price of the food it buys to feed some of the world's poorest people had risen by 55 percent since last June. By the time the appeal began last week, prices had risen a further 20 percent. That means WFP needs $700 million to bridge the gap between last year's budget and this year's prices. The numbers are expected to continue to rise. The crisis is widespread and the result of numerous causes – a kind of "perfect storm" leading to panic in many places:.........
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