A Nebraska elementary school reprinted its newest yearbook before it was distributed to students because the cover included a cross.

The fifth graders at Manchester Elementary School in Elkhorn, Neb., voted for the 2018-19 yearbook’s original cover art – a white calligram of a cross comprised of 15 different words such as “love,” “learn,” “dream” and “faith,” the Omaha World Herald reported.

But the principal and the Parent Teacher Organization (PTO), which raises funds for the publication, did not approve it before it was printed.

PTO President Andrea Abrahamson said board members “voted unanimously to reprint the cover as it was not sensitive to our all-student agenda.”

“The yearbook cover in question was not distributed to students,” Abrahamson told the newspaper.

The reprinted yearbook cover includes a scene with clouds.

It is the second time in less than a year the school has received national attention. Last winter, then-principal Jennifer Sinclair issued a directive banning Christmas music, Christmas carols, Christmas trees, candy canes, Santa and the colors red and green, as Christian Headlines reported. 

Sinclair eventually stepped down, even though Liberty Counsel – the legal group that wanted the policy overturned – had said it wasn’t wanting her dismissed.  

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Illinois’ abortion bill passed the state’s Senate on Friday with a vote of 34-20.

The bill, which many are calling more extreme than the pro-abortion law passed in New York earlier this year, will now head to the Democrat Governor J.B. Pritzker’s desk where he is expected to sign it. 

As Christian Headlines previously reported, Illinois’ “Reproductive Health Act,” in essence, strips all rights from the unborn. The bill proclaims, “A fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus does not have independent rights under the laws of this State.”

The bill also adds that abortion is a person’s “fundamental right” and can be conducted at any point during a pregnancy, including up to the moment of birth if the mothers “life or well-being” is at risk.

The bill states: “Every individual who becomes pregnant has a fundamental right to continue the pregnancy and give birth or to have an abortion.”

The bill will also require parents to pay for their minor child’s abortion even if the child has the procedure without the parent’s consent.

According to CBN News, Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver called the lawmakers decision to pass the bill a “crime against humanity.”

Staver wrote in a press release, “These are horrific days when Illinois lawmakers celebrate eliminating all protections for unborn children, allowing infanticide, removing…

JUBA, South Sudan, June 4, 2019 (Morning Star News) – Days after Muslim leaders in Egypt came to his apartment to warn him to return to Islam, a Sudanese Christian in Cairo received a death threat by phone last week, he said.

Having fled Sudan after authorities tortured and threatened to kill him if he refused to return to Islam, Al Hadi Izzalden Shareef Osman said he has had to change apartments once again in the face of fresh threats.

On May 27 he received a phone call from someone speaking in Sudanese Arabic threatening to kill him, he said.

“You are infidel and fuel for hell,” the called told him, according to Osman.

It was one of several threats he received in the past month. He recognized the voice as one of the Muslim clerics, both Sudanese and Egyptian, who knocked on his apartment door the previous week, Osman said.

Living in hiding after death threats began last year by radical Muslims monitoring his movements in Egypt, Osman said he was terrified when he opened the door to find the five Muslim clerics ordering him to renounce Christ and return to Islam or face consequences.

“They kept telling me to go mosque, but I refused,” Osman told Morning Star News. “I was afraid and had to relocate from the apartment to another location.”

In a country where at least 2 million Sudanese migrants, including thousands of refugees, already face racial discrimination…

A number of Christian refugees have been denied asylum in Sweden after failing a difficult theology-based quiz which is administered by immigration authorities in order to determine the authenticity of their faith.

Tragically, without asylum into the western nation, the refugees will be left at grave risk of persecution upon returning to their home countries.

A damning new report from a Swedish Christian evangelical organization discovered that out of some 619 asylum cases involving Christian converts from Afghanistan, an astonishing 70 percent were rejected because the authorities deemed their declaration of faith to be phony.

Unbelievably, the only reason these desperate individuals are being rejected is because they failed an unnecessarily difficult theological test.

“A theology student may have to take another test if he or she fails,” Jacob Rudenstrand, deputy general secretary of the Swedish Evangelical Alliance, wrote at the Stream. “But if the asylum seeker fails the test, he or she will be deported to a country where he or she may be killed.”

Rudenstrand noted that the test contained questions which “not even experienced pastors have been able to answer.” Questions that regularly pop up in the test include: “Do you know what the Trinity is?” “What sacraments exist in Christianity?” “What other traditions apart from…

The percentage of Americans who believe abortion is “morally wrong” is the highest it’s been in seven years, according to Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs survey.

A full 50 percent of adults say abortion is morally wrong while 42 percent say it’s morally acceptable, according to the poll of 1,009 adults conducted May 1-12.

It’s the highest percentage of Americans to have considered abortion wrong since 2012 when 51 percent thought so. The percentage of adults who say it’s acceptable is the lowest since 2014 when it also was 42 percent.

Not surprisingly, there is an ideological divide. Twenty-three percent of conservatives but 73 percent of liberals believe abortion is morally acceptable.

“A strong ideological split remains across many of the issues, but none is as divisive as abortion,” Gallup’s Megan Brenan wrote.

It is but the latest poll reflecting a strong pro-life sentiment among Americans. 

The Harvard Caps/Harris Poll showed that 70 percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal only in the case of rape or incest (41 percent) or only in the first trimester (29 percent). Six percent favored legal abortion “up until the birth of the child.”   

The Harvard/Harris survey included interviews with 1,295 registered voters May 29-30. 

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