You can spend $50,000 dollars in Texas and get your pet cloned. I heard that on the radio the other day. One lady had her chihuahua cloned, into several cloned pets, all the same genetically.
You're absolutely right with this Carol. I think the Turkish state had some sort of internal-mini-war-uprising and Erdogan and his cronies won out. They are unpredictable at best. They shot down a russian fighter jet, recently. How stupid is that?! Im not defending anything, or anyone's position with the following. But have a scan at it anyways, I feel something - some entity, is whipping up discord, hatred and war everywhere. When will the West take a stand on the persecution of Muslims? It’s not only Christians who are suffering from the rise of religious conflict Dan Hitchens A Rohingya refugee girl (image: Getty) 31 March 201Anti-Christian persecution, for so long a great untold story, has started to gain the world’s attention. But the suffering of Christian communities, from Syria to Nigeria to China, is part of an even broader phenomenon. Religious conflict is on the rise across the globe, with ancient tensions being raised by new political methods. And in many countries — Sri Lanka, India, the Central African Republic and elsewhere — it’s Muslims who have the most reason to fear violence. In Burma, they may even have been victims of genocide. That, at any rate, is what UN officials are trying to investigate after a wave of brutality which has forced 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee the coastal region of Rakhine State since last August. Burmese soldiers, police and armed civilians carried out a campaign of diabolical violence, in which hundreds of villages were burned to the ground and helpless civilians were machine-gunned and dumped in mass graves. There were warning signs — in 2012, 200 Rohingyas were killed and more than 100,000 displaced — but Western observers missed them. Sanctions were lifted, foreign investment surged, Aung San Suu Kyi was hailed as her country’s saviour. As the human rights campaigner Benedict Rogers observes, the international community was ‘too quick to embrace positive signs. It was almost inconvenient to be confronted with what was happening to the Rohingyas and others’. Religion is not the only factor: hostility to the Rohingyas draws on the dubious historical claim that they are recent immigrants who should return to Bangladesh. But it also relies on a deep-rooted and specifically Buddhist idea of the state, which sees the health of the nation and the strength of the religion as interdependent. That idea has been spread since the 1980s by influential movements led by Buddhist monks, many of them given to incendiary language about the Muslim enemy. Sri Lanka has its own Buddhist troublemakers. One Buddhist group, the BBS, leads inflammatory campaigns, including one boycotting Muslim businesses. Such hostility sometimes boils over: earlier this month, the Sri Lankan government declared a national state of emergency after co-ordinated anti-Muslim riots broke out in the central city of Kandy. Sri Lanka’s troubles should not be exaggerated. It does not, for instance, compare to Thailand, where Malay Muslim separatists clash with security forces in an armed conflict which has cost 7,000 lives in the past 15 years. But there is the same dynamic: a Buddhist nationalist idea of the state from which Muslims are easily excluded. The persecution of Muslims, though not as globally widespread as that of Christians, extends well beyond South Asia. In China’s Xinjiang province, the Uighur population is subject to official harassment, arbitrary detention and draconian laws on religious dress. In the Central African Republic, rebel militias are carrying out a horrifying war of revenge which has targeted Muslim communities. India’s 170 million Muslims, meanwhile, live against a constant background of local violence, not exactly encouraged by the authorities, but not much discouraged either. From 2011 to 2016, official figures record more than 4,000 incidents of ‘communal violence’ — mostly Hindu on Muslim — leading to nearly 600 deaths. And of course, a lot of violence against Muslims is by other Muslims. The Shia-Sunni divide has become perhaps the key one in the Middle East — the catalyst for conflict in Syria, insurgency in Bahrain and the region-defining rivalry of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Why is anti-Muslim violence on the rise? It is a combination of some very old theories about religion and the state, and some very new political techniques. In Burma, for instance, there has always been a strain of thought that Buddhism and Burma rise and fall together. But democracy has enabled radical monks, preaching the most aggressive version of that belief, to gain a political foothold. One group, Ma Ba Tha, has offices in 250 of the country’s 330 townships. The internet has helped such organisations. In 2015 Buddhist nationalists began to warn that Aung San Suu Kyi would betray the country’s identity. They spread images of her on social media wearing a hijab. Soon afterwards Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, conceded ground, refusing to run any Muslim candidates in the national elections. There is a similar combination of forces at work in Sri Lanka. Again, Buddhist thinkers have long defined national identity in religious terms and against Muslims. Anagarika Dharmapala, the 20th-century pioneer of Buddhist nationalism, believed that Sri Lanka had been ‘a paradise’ when the ‘Aryan Sinhalese’ (Buddhists) had dominated it. Other religions were a threat. The violent possibilities in this tradition have been brought out by Sri Lanka’s present-day extremists. It is easy to explain away all religious conflict as being really about wealth inequality, or race, or politics. But in Sri Lanka, as elsewhere, disputes over the sacred bring out the most uncontrollable passions. Anti-Muslim riots have been sparked by a rumoured attack on a monk, a public debate about the regulation of halal meat and a dispute over whether a mosque is built on ‘stolen’ land. In India, too, ancient tensions have been emphasised by new movements, in this case Hindu ones. The RSS, a volunteer network of millions, sees India as a ‘Hindu nation’ and runs programmes to convert Christians and Muslims. This tradition has its extremists — some of whom are close to power. Officials from the ruling BJP party, an offshoot of the RSS, have rewritten school textbooks to bring them closer to the nationalist story. (For example, the fact that Gandhi’s killer was a Hindu fanatic goes unmentioned in some classrooms.) One of the party’s star campaigners is the firebrand Hindu priest Yogi Adityanath, who once told an audience: ‘If they kill one Hindu man, then we will kill 100 Muslim men.’ Every few months someone is killed by a lynch mob on suspicion of possessing beef. Hindi has recently gained a new word, gautankwad, which literally translates as ‘cow terrorism’. A spokesman for Minority Rights Group International tells me that there are ‘degrees of state complicity’ in these incidents. And when the authorities tighten legislation against cow slaughter and on ‘forced conversions’, it can ‘provide a cloak of legitimacy to anti-minority violence and discrimination’. Yet, the plight of India’s Muslims — four million of them in the province of Kashmir, where the Indian army stands accused of countless human rights abuses — goes un-remarked by western leaders uncomfortably aware of India’s economic clout. In every country, social media makes propaganda significantly easier. After the Kandy riots, the Sri Lankan government blocked Facebook and other networks; in Burma, UN officials have blamed Facebook for the speed with which violently anti–Muslim sentiment had spread. This is helped by state control of the media: Burmese public opinion holds that the Muslims are lying and the gullible international media has been taken in. ‘You hear that all the time there,’ says an academic specialist on the region, who recently visited the country and who asked not to be named. ‘The sheer propaganda through television and the very limited print media has even very well-intentioned people willing to say, “Well, we really don’t know what’s going on out there, there’s two sides to the story.” I find myself saying under my breath, “Tell me what the other side of the story is to rape and murder as a methodology.”’ In many countries, religious identity politics has replaced older forms of political allegiance. In the Middle East, nationalism has fallen away and the Sunni-Shia conflict has become the decisive one. Burma’s sectarian tensions increased in the 1980s after the ‘Burmese Road to Socialism’, launched in 1962, turned out to have led nowhere. And the idea that everyone is headed towards secular liberal democracy looks more and more like a fantasy. The 21st century is going to be dominated by arguments between believers — not least because the number of Muslims is likely to approach three billion by 2060, and may even overtake the number of Christians. The West still needs to wake up to the extent of religious persecution around the world. If pity for excluded minorities isn’t enough of a motive, then sheer pragmatism should be. Isis social media accounts use photographs of the suffering Rohingyas to drum up support, and Islamist groups see a recruitment opportunity in the persecuted Muslims of India and South Asia. The world’s conscience should be pricked by one constant theme of the jihadists’ propaganda. It runs, roughly: Join us — everyone else has abandoned you. Spectator.co.uk/podcast
If that's not playing God, then I don't know what is... If (when!) He loses his patience, We're in fer a rough ride! Buckle up folks....
jack, I read that the Russian jet that went down yesterday was probably due to a bird strike, 2 pilots died - may they RIP. I believe that in 2015 Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet and you are correct there was a large uprising in Turkey a little over a year ago but there has been unrest there for a few years now. They're part of NATO but also "allied" with countries not in NATO, as you have stated,"They are unpredictable at best". It is all very sad and I think that you might be correct that, "some entity, is whipping up discord, hatred and war everywhere." I think that this article is pretty good because it brings attention to the problems around the world in relation to religious persecution but it does not offer a solution, as Catholics we know what the solution is - Jesus Christ and his teachings. Everyday we have the opportunity to be examples to those who do not believe in Our Lord and to those who do not follow his teachings. Peace begins with each one of us, we can be an example of peace everyday. Today's Gospel reminds us to "love one another", Gospel Jn 15:12-17 Jesus said to his disciples: "This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father. It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you. This I command you: love one another." I should add that I think that President Trump is making some good progress. He met with the President of Nigeria this week and they talked a little bit about the terrorism problems there but it appears that the whole world will be well armed before we get close to peace and Jesus Christ is really the answer not nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, missiles, armed aircraft, battleships, anti-aircraft systems, etc. ***** President Buhari Goes to the White House to Meet President Trump By ADC Editor April 30, 2018 https://www.africa.com/president-buhari-goes-to-the-white-house-to-meet-president-trump/ Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has become the first leader from sub-Saharan Africa to be received by US President Donald Trump in talks at the White House. President Buhari and President Trump discussed shared economic and security interests. The two presidents will discuss terrorism, trade, and anti-Christian sentiment in Nigeria. President Donald Trump said the extremist group Boko Haram has been a “terrible problem” for Nigeria. Boko Haram launched a violent insurgency in the Nigerian northeast nine years ago with the aim of creating an Islamic state. Thousands of people have been killed. Mass abductions of schoolgirls brought Boko Haram international notoriety and one faction has declared allegiance to the Islamic State group. Buhari thanked the U.S. for its commitment to fighting terrorism and says U.S. action has helped his country a lot. During the meeting, Mr Trump commented on their “great relationship” and planned talks about trade and security. What’s the agenda for Trump-Buhari talks? The two leaders may be keen to put the scandal behind them to focus on more pressing issues, writes the BBC’s Nigeria correspondent Mayeni Jones. At home, President Buhari faces multiple security challenges, including the nine-year-old insurgency by Boko Haram jihadists in the north-east, and mounting insecurity in the centre of the country. So fighting terrorism is a priority for both administrations, our correspondent adds. The White House recently sold 12 counter insurgency aircraft worth $496m (£360m) to Nigeria to help in its fight against Boko Haram. The US previously refused to sell military aircraft to Nigeria, citing human rights concerns. In Washington, Mr Trump and Mr Buhari were expected to discuss ways to deepen economic co-operation between both their countries. Mr Buhari, who is seeking re-election in 2019, has also been expected to stress that he is committed to democracy despite rampant corruption and poor governance in the West African country. In 2015, he became the first opposition leader to be elected president in Nigeria. After the talks, the Nigeria leader is due to meet businesses specialising in agriculture. Senior Nigerian government officials will also discuss a number of projects with executives from major US transport companies.
Hey Jack, When Your Ol' Buddy/Ol' Pal, Richard 67 provides the CREDIBLE EVIDENCE of his OUTRAGEOUS & PHONY CLAIMS, that I have requested on numerous occasions, concerning the aforementioned Posts. I will consider rescinding my BS label. Oh ... I did catch your snide attempt to label me as a Black Racist ... I'm not, though along with the inbred Antisemitism I was raised with, I got over it. ... Have YOU!?? GOD SAVE ALL HERE!!
Major quake hits Hawaii, prompts further volcano eruptions Los Angeles (AFP) - A magnitude 6.9 earthquake shook Hawaii's Big Island on Friday, prompting fresh eruptions of a volcano that has been spewing lava near residential areas, forcing hundreds of people to flee. The US Geological Survey said the quake struck at 12:32 pm (2232 GMT) and was centered on the south flank of the Kilauea volcano, which first erupted on Thursday after a series of tremors on the island. "This is in almost exactly the same location as the deadly 1975 M 7.1 quake," USGC said in a tweet. That quake killed two people and injured 28. Another 5.7-magnitude tremor hit the island earlier on Friday and authorities said they expect more seismic activity. https://www.yahoo.com/news/homes-damaged-residents-flee-hawaii-volcano-eruption-205738388.html
Enough!!! Knock it off, both of you. This is your last warning. Next time you’ll get a nice vacation for a spell from MOG.
This is the first I have seen of it Carol, thank you for posting it. I can not say that I am surprised by this in the least.
With the greatest respect Brian, could you point out where I have offended or insulted anyone, or insulted any group of people... I merely pointed out the lack of respect shown by one member toward another, which should in fact be your role as moderator. You don't have to boot me. I leave of my own free will.
WOW! This is quite a video....all that "sulphur" being spewed forth....signs indeed: https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2018/05/04/hawaii-volcano-elam-dnt-tsr.cnn
Hi Jack, My apologies, I was simply responding to several complaints about the direction and tenor of this debate, and I had already requested these lines of discussions and accusations cease. I didn’t read the entire thread, nor the specific references in each of your posts. I just ask everyone to cease these juvenile accusations, as well as the use of inflammatory appellations which is causing such recriminations to continue! Thanks.
https://www.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/...leet-155635347.html?__twitter_impression=true Washington (AFP) - A top US navy admiral announces the re-establishment of the US 2nd Fleet -- a Cold War command disbanded in 2011 -- to patrol the North Atlantic and face a resurgent threat from Russia. The chief of US Naval Operations, Admiral John Richardson, made the announcement during a change of command ceremony Friday in the Atlantic naval port of Norfolk, Virginia. "Our National Defense Strategy makes clear that we're back in an era of great power competition as the security environment continues to grow more challenging and complex," said Richardson, according to a navy statement. "That's why today, we're standing up Second Fleet to address these changes, particularly in the north Atlantic." The 2nd Fleet command was disbanded as a cost-savings measure in 2011, and its assets and personnel dispersed within the navy. The new command will be responsible for US naval forces along the US east coast as well as the north Atlantic region, a navy statement said. Before it was disbanded the 2nd Fleet played a key role during the Cold War years, with operations in the North Atlantic and supporting US naval forces in the Mediterranean. Russian planes and ships have in recent months made multiple incursions in the north Atlantic close to the airspace and territorial waters of US NATO allies, including Britain. NATO naval officials in late 2017 also reported Russian submarines probing underseas data cables in the north Atlantic. - Russian 'threat' - The 2nd Fleet command currently exists only on paper, but according to USNI News, a publication of the US Naval Institute, the command will open for business on July 1 with 11 officers and four enlisted personnel. The command will eventually grow to 256 personnel -- 85 officers, 164 enlisted and seven civilians -- USNI reported, citing a memo signed earlier in the week by Navy Secretary Richard Spencer. The decision to reactivate the 2nd Fleet followed increasing threats in the Atlantic from Russia, officials familiar with the decision told USNI News. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said in January the United States is facing "growing threats" from China and Russia, and warned that the US military's advantages have eroded in recent years. "We face growing threats from revisionist powers as different as China and Russia, nations that seek to create a world consistent with their authoritarian models," Mattis said as he unveiled the Pentagon's national defense strategy. "Our military is still strong, yet our competitive edge has eroded in every domain of warfare," he added. 263 Reactions
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018...an-build-churches-report-180504190452065.html Saudis sign deal with Vatican to build churches: report Egyptian media say the kingdom has signed an agreement with the Vatican to construct churches for Christian citizens. Saudi Arabia has signed an agreement with the Vatican to build churches for Christian citizens, according to Egyptian news media reports. Online newspaper Egypt Independent on Wednesday said the agreement was signed during a visit by Jean-Louis Tauran, the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue at the Vatican, during his visit to the kingdom in April. Al Jazeera could not independently verify the contents of the purported agreement. In an interview with Vatican News, Tauran confirmed a declaration had been signed which paved the way for further dialogue, but did not mention building future churches in Saudi Arabia. Tauran met high-level officials including King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud on his visit. "During my meetings, I insisted very much on this point, that Christians and non-Muslims are spoken of well in schools and that they are never considered second-class citizens," Tauran told Vatican Radio after his return. Saudi Arabia currently bans the practice of faiths other than Islam.
More on the developing cloning: (the article is from The Daily Star but I didn't include the link since the rest of the page is pretty gross) Fears raised over HUMAN cloning: Lab in controversial embryo experiments FEARS have been raised a laboratory could clone humans after its controversial experiments were revealed. The research institute combined two types of stem cells to create a viable embryo, which could then be replicated multiple times. Amazingly, it means the researchers didn’t use either an egg or sperm to create the very beginning of human life. The embryos the lab has made will be used for medical testing, specifically to figure out why embryos fail to implant in women’s wombs. The experiment was carried out by scientists from the MERLN Institute at Maastricht Univeristy and the Hubrecht Institute (KNAW) in the Netherlands. Lead researcher, Professor Nicolas Rivron of Maastricht University, said: “As you know, embryos are very precious, and it is impossible to use to test drugs on them as you don’t have the numbers. “With blastocysts you can open up the numbers. This will allow screening medicines in the future. “I do not believe in using blastocysts for human reproduction. This is ethically very questionable, this would be clones of somebody who is already alive. Human cloning is totally forbidden.” Professor Clemens van Blitterswijk, department chair at the MERLN Institute of Maastricht University, added: “This research opens the path to a new biomedical discipline. "We can create large numbers of model embryos and build up new knowledge by systematically testing new medical techniques and potential medicines. It also dramatically reduces the need for animal experimentation." But fears have been raised the research is paving the way for human cloning. Professor Robin Lovell-Badge, of the Francis Crick Institute, called it a “relief” the team is not yet at the human cloning stage. He said: “It may come as a relief to others that such a method of producing many genetically identical human embryo-like structures that might be capable of implantation is not feasible – even if it would be illegal to implant them into women, as is clearly the situation in the UK.”
The following videos are very scary imo, I'm praying for those effected by this. And the following recently occurred in New Zealand,
Fortunately this area of Hawaii is very sparsely populated. Think of how densely/highly populated the area around Mount Vesuvius has become. Frightening that mankind has settled literally on active volcanoes.
You know, if that guy had just paid attention to the odd-even parking laws, I'll bet he'd still have his car.
Quakes Now In Canary Islands MORE than 270 earthquakes have been recorded in just ten days near Spain’s Canary Islands raising fears of a volcanic eruption. The quakes have struck near Tenerife and Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands where there is a huge submarine fault between the two islands. A report said the fault line has not been active in recent times, but it added, “What if it started spewing magma again? And what if it was reactivating the Teide volcano? That would be cataclysmic.” Volcano eruption fears as almost 300 earthquakes rock Spanish holiday hotspot https://www.euroweeklynews.com/news...-300-earthquakes-rock-spanish-holiday-hotspot
Magnitude-4.5 earthquake rattles L.A. area An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 4.5 shook a large portion of Southern California early Tuesday morning, authorities said. http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-earthquake-20180508-story.html
