According to the Daily Caller, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed SB179, known as the Gender Recognition Act, on Sunday, allowing individuals to identify as non-binary on driver’s licenses, birth certificates, and other legal documents.
FoxNews.com reports that the bill will also make it easier for individuals to change their gender on official documents.
This bill was sponsored by the same senator, Scott Wiener, who introduced a recent bill to give jail time to Californians who refuse to use an individual’s desired gender pronoun. That bill will go into effect in January.
Individuals in the transgender community have championed SB179, noting that it will make it easier for them to travel because the gender on their identification will be more consistent with their appearance.
In defending his pro-LGBT bills, Wiener stated, “Everyone is entitled to their religious view. But when you enter the public space, when you are running an institution, you are in a workplace, you are in a civil setting, and you have to follow the law.”
Rachel Newham, Founding director of Think Twice told Premier that while she isn’t surprised by the spike in numbers, hearing about children as young as 10 thinking about taking their own life is “always shocking”.
The NSPCC’s phone service revealed in 2016/17, a total of 22,456 sessions were given to children in the UK who were suicidal – up from 19,481 the year before.
Newham told Premier that parents have a part to play in supporting young people struggling to cope.
Speaking during News Hour she said: “Really listen to what your child is saying, whether they’re talking about the reason they feel so down and it might be hard to listen to but I think it’s really important that we keep listening to our young people.
“For parents, discovering that your child is thinking of suicide can be hellish. So finding someone that you can talk to and get your feelings out is really important.”
The figure was released ahead of the publication of the NSPCC’s annual review of Childline.
Volunteers held 2,061 counselling sessions – a 9 per cent increase – with actively suicidal young people from across the UK, who had taken initial steps to take their own lives, such as writing a note, giving away meaningful items or planning their death.
The review found that suicide is the third most common reason for girls to contact Childline and the fifth most common for boys.
Childline has reported that it only has the resources to assist three out of every four young people who ask for help and has called for more volunteers to come forward.
Newham said that churches should also be amongst those trying help children contemplating suicide.
She explained: “Part of it actually is just being more open about mental health in our churches.
“Whether it be talking about the feelings someone is experiencing in a biblical passage or just praying about mental health conditions in our intercessory prayers so that it’s generally more open.”
Childline founder and president Esther Rantzen has called for more volunteers.
She said: “I would urge members of the public to consider becoming a Childline volunteer.
“Anyone who can lend a few hours to this vital service could end up saving a child’s life.”
Listen to Rachel Newham speaking with Premier’s Eno Adeogun:
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REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/FilesA sign advertises Wi-Fi service in the Times Square Subway station in New York, April 25, 2013.
A new widespread vulnerability affecting Android and Linux-based devices have been discovered by researchers. The new exploit can allow attackers to read Wi-Fi traffic between devices and wireless access points and potentially look at everything people are doing online.
Mathy Vanhoef, a researcher at Belgium’s university KU Leuven, released information about the vulnerability. Dubbing it KRACK, for Key Reinstallation Attack, Vanhoef’s description of the hack was shocking, to say the least.
“This can be abused to steal sensitive information such as credit card numbers, passwords, chat messages, emails, photos, and so on,” he said. “The attack works against all modern protected Wi-Fi networks.”
Vanhoef added that depending on the network configuration, it is also possible to inject and manipulate data. One such way attackers can utilize this is to inject ransomware or other malware into websites.
The vulnerability appears to be in the Wi-Fi standard itself affecting a core encryption protocol, Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2), which most Wi-Fi users rely on to keep their web use hidden and secret from others. Using KRACK, a hacker to trick a victim into reinstalling an already-in-use key rendering the encryption useless and allows messages to be silently intercepted.
The researchers found that the attack was particularly severe for Android and Linux users. This is mainly due to the operating system using what’s known as an “all-zero encryption key” which makes it easier for an attacker to intercept by just by forcing a reinstallation.
For now, the only thing users can do is to be wary of using Wi-Fi particularly public ones. This is until patches can be rolled out remedying this particular vulnerability.
There might also be some actions to fix the weakness in the WPA2 encryption protocol which is currently the universal standard. Vanhoef suggests getting devices patched as soon as updates are available which shouldn’t take long as manufacturers have already taken notice.
Many Christians have been eagerly awaiting the opening of the Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C. next month, but have the museum-creators forgotten what the Bible is really all about?
Writing for The Washington Post, Michelle Boorstein, Julie Zauzmer, and Sarah Pulliam Bailey note, “Jesus is also curiously not central to the museum’s presentation of the biblical story. Visitors walk through a multi-room saga of the Old Testament, and they can visit a re-creation of a 1st-century village in Galilee where actors will tell them what the villagers think of this controversial preacher Jesus. They can watch a movie about John the Baptist. But the story of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection is almost absent.”
Those involved in the Museum of the Bible project, however, say they are expecting criticism from both conservatives and liberals.
“The fact that it is as broad and ecumenical and nonsectarian as it is, I think there will be criticism from the religious left and the religious right — which would mean to me that we probably got it just about right,” said board member Mark DeMoss.
Steve Green, CEO of Hobby Lobby and chair of the museum project, added, “The museum has fence posts — limits. It doesn’t overtly say the Bible is good — that the Bible is true. That’s not its role. Its role is to present facts and let people make their own decisions.”
According to a senior commander for a US-backed force, clearing operations were under way to remove land mines left behind and search for the extremist group’s sleeper cells.
Brigadier General Talal Sillo said there are no longer clashes in the city, which had served as the extremist group’s headquarters and self-proclaimed capital of their so-called “caliphate” for more than three years.
However, Al-Hadaf, which is a charity that works with Iraqi refugees in Jordan, said IS survivors still need a lot of therapy and prayer.
Maran Maayah AbuJaber is the founder and CEO of the charity, which began when IS invaded Iraq in 2014.
She said three years on, children are still traumatised.
She told Premier: “The pain is still there, the loss is still there, and many families are still waiting for a second home.
“In Jordan they cannot work because they are asylum seekers. They are waiting to be relocated.”
The Al-Hadaf uses art therapy to help traumatised refugees begin to heal from their experiences.
The charity said when they first began working with some of the traumatised children, they would be given crayons and colours and they would only draw darkness with black and brown.
AbuJaber added: “I thought, ‘This is not like my kids – they love green and blue. There’s something wrong here.'”
On top of providing therapy and medical care, the charity is the first organisation in Jordan to begin registering Iraqi refugee children in schools. It also teaches English to Iraqi asylum seekers.
AbuJaber asked for continued prayers for those who wish to get back to how life was before the IS invasion.
She told Premier: “Pray that the peace of God that’s surpasses all understanding can cover the hearts of these families.
“That mum who’s taking care of the kid, who’s in a new country that has to smile all the time, that she will have the patience to wait for the new home she’s waiting for.
“Pray that the leaders will have wise decisions, and to think of the families who lost so much.
Listen to Maran Maayah AbuJaber speaking with Premier’s Tola Mbakwe here:
Throughout human history, those in the ruling class have found various ways to force those under them to work for their economic benefit. But in our day and age, we are willingly enslaving ourselves. The borrower is the servant of the lender, and there has never been more debt in our world than there is right now. According to the Institute of International Finance, global debt has hit the $217-trillion mark, although other estimates would put this number far higher. Of course everyone knows that our planet is drowning in debt, but most people never stop to consider who owns all of this debt. This unprecedented debt bubble represents that greatest transfer of wealth in human history, and those that are being enriched are the extremely wealthy elitists at the very, very top of the food chain.
Did you know that eight men now have as much wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion people living on the planet combined?
Every year, the gap between the planet’s ultra-wealthy and the poor just becomes greater and greater. This is something that I have written about frequently, and the “financialization” of the global economy is playing a major role in this trend.
The entire global financial system is based on debt, and this debt-based system endlessly funnels the wealth of the world to the very, very top of the pyramid.
It has been said that Albert Einstein once made the following statement:
“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn’t … pays it.”
Whether he actually made that statement or not, the reality of the matter is that it is quite true. By getting all of the rest of us deep into debt, the elite can just sit back and slowly but surely become even wealthier over time. Meanwhile, as the rest of us work endless hours to “pay our bills”, the truth is that we are spending our best years working to enrich someone else.
Much has been written about the men and women that control the world. Whether you wish to call them “the elite”, “the establishment” or “the globalists”, the truth is that most of us understand who they are. And how they control all of us is not some sort of giant conspiracy. Ultimately, it is actually very simple. Money is a form of social control, and by getting the rest of us into as much debt as possible they are able to get all of us to work for their economic benefit.
It starts at a very early age. We greatly encourage our young people to go to college, and we tell them to not even worry about what it will cost. We assure them that there will be great jobs available for them once they finish school and that they will have no problem paying off the student loans that they will accumulate.
Well, over the past 10 years, student loan debt in the United States “has grown 250 percent” and is now sitting at an absolutely staggering grand total of $1.4 trillion. Millions of our young people are already entering the “real world” financially crippled, and many of them will literally spend decades paying off those debts.
But that is just the beginning.
In order to get around in our society, virtually all of us need at least one vehicle, and auto loans are very easy to get these days. I remember when auto loans were only made for four or five years at the most, but in 2017 it is quite common to find loans on new vehicles that stretch out for six or seven years.
The total amount of auto loan debt in the United States has now surpassed $1 trillion, and this very dangerous bubble just continues to grow.
If you want to own a home, that is going to mean even more debt. In the old days, mortgages were commonly 10 years in length, but now 30 years is the standard.
By the way, do you know where the term “mortgage” originally comes from?
If you go all the way back to the Latin, it actually means “death pledge.”
And now that most mortgages are for 30 years, many will continue making payments until they literally drop dead.
Sadly, most Americans don’t even realize how much they are enriching those that are holding their mortgages. For example, if you have a 30-year mortgage on a $300,000 home at 3.92 percent, you will end up making total payments of $510,640.
Credit card debt is even more insidious. Interest rates on credit card debt are often in the high double digits, and some consumers actually end up paying back several times as much as they originally borrowed.
According to the Federal Reserve, total credit card debt in the United States has also now surpassed the trillion-dollar mark, and we are about to enter the time of year when Americans use their credit cards the most frequently.
Overall, U.S. consumers are now nearly $13 trillion in debt.
As borrowers, we are servants of the lenders, and most of us don’t even consciously understand what has been done to us.
In Part I, I have focused on individual debt obligations, but tomorrow in Part II I am going to talk about how the elite use government debt to corporately enslave us. All over the planet, national governments are drowning in debt, and this didn’t happen by accident. The elite love to get governments into debt because it is a way to systematically transfer tremendous amounts of wealth from our pockets to their pockets. This year alone, the U.S. government will pay somewhere around a half-trillion dollars just in interest on the national debt. That represents a whole lot of tax dollars that we aren’t getting any benefit from, and those on the receiving end are just becoming wealthier and wealthier.
In Part II we will also talk about how our debt-based system is literally designed to create a government debt spiral. Once you understand this, the way that you view potential solutions completely changes. If we ever want to get government debt “under control,” we have got to do away with this current system that was intended to enslave us by those that created it.
We spend so much time on the symptoms, but if we ever want permanent solutions, we need to start addressing the root causes of our problems. Debt is a tool of enslavement, and the fact that humanity is now more than $200 trillion in debt should deeply alarm all of us.
Michael Snyderis a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.
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The terrorists drove into the city centre of el-Arish in the morning and split into two groups, throwing grenades and exchanging gunfire with guards at an unused Coptic church, to distract officials from their fellow members robbing a bank across the street.
Officials have reported that about $1 million was stolen.
The assault follows a wave of attacks in recent months on Egypt’s Christian minority – which account for ten per cent of the country’s population.
The Islamic State group attacked military checkpoints in a nearby town, killing nine soldiers on Sunday and Fr Samaan Shehata died in hospital on Friday after being attacked with a cleaver in a poor district of Cairo.
Speaking at the time, General Bishop of the Coptic Orthodox Church in the UK Bishop Angaelos, told Premier that life has become so dangerous for priests in the country that some have told their family not to walk with them as they don’t want them to become targets as well.
He also expressed concern about how the attacks on Christians are being treated by officials and said: “As we’ve seen in Europe and around the world, there are initial attacks and then there are lots of copy-cats. When crimes go unchallenged, unprosecuted, people feel they can replicate them.
“My concern is that if this isn’t taken seriously- and the track-record regrettably is not very good of taking these attacks seriously in terms of investigations, prosecutions and convictions. If it’s not taken seriously, I’m concerned it will almost be a greenlight and a template to be now followed.
“We have thousands of priests in Egypt and they go about their business, they walk about in the street, they’re very imbedded in the community. They are very visible and this just means they are infinitely more vulnerable and easily targeted.”
He had been collecting humanitarian aid for his parish in Beni Suef on 12th October when a man started chasing him with a large knife.
His attacker, who fled the scene before being arrested later, was known to police as an “extremist” with a previous criminal record, according to the International Business Times.
The latest church attack left three civilians, three guards and one soldier dead and wounded another 15 people, including women and children, officials have said.
The two groups of attackers were caught on camera fleeing the site of the clashes in a stolen pickup and three motorcycles, AP reports.
A spate of suicide bombings claimed by the extremist Islamic State group has killed more than 100 people since December last year.
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence is joined by his wife, Karen. (REUTERS/Las Vegas Sun/Steve Marcus)
In light of the flood of allegations against Harvey Weinstein, the left’s extreme reaction to Vice President Pence’s personal morality guidelines now seems even more absurd. Mothers and fathers of America, who would you rather have your daughters work for: Weinstein or Pence? Young ladies of America, for whom would you rather work and with whom would you feel safer, Weinstein or Pence?
According to a Washington Postarticle, “In 2002, Mike Pence told the Hill that he never eats alone with a woman other than his wife and that he won’t attend events featuring alcohol without her by his side, either.”
Sounds reasonable and wise to me. Nothing extreme or unusual from my point of view or in the circles in which I travel, especially if you are a powerful leader or a person of influence.
But that’s not how many on the left saw it. As I noted in April, “The left’s bizarre and almost hysterical reaction to Vice President Pence’s personal marital guidelines is not only totally off point. It actually misses the most essential point of all, namely, that it is Pence’s high esteem for women—specifically, the most important woman in his life, his own wife—that fuels his moral choices. At the same time, the leftist response reveals a glaring blind spot when it comes to self-awareness.”
Yes, the response from the left was an outright denial of human nature. The fact is that we humans can do all kinds of creepy, ugly things, things that are despicable and shameful. It’s embarrassing, but it’s true.
Vice President Pence, being aware of his humanity, knows all too well how easy it is to fall. That’s why he made it his habit to take certain precautions—in the best interests of his marriage, his own life, and the women he worked with. Again, it makes perfect sense to me.
Now, with more and more women saying, “Me too! I’ve been sexually abused,” we realize just how epidemic this problem is in our culture. In other words, it’s not just the Harvey Weinsteins who are allegedly guilty. There are many other abusers out there, from rapists who prey on strangers to adults who abuse children to bosses who abuse their employees.
And this is nothing new. It’s as old as the human race, which is why the Bible addresses sexual sin from Genesis to Revelation, exposing even some of Israel’s most famous leaders (including Samson and David and Solomon).
That’s why Paul also puts sexual sin at the top of his lists of sins of the flesh (see, for example, 1 Cor. 6:9-10), and that’s why the book of Proverbs (the book of wisdom par excellence) contains so many lengthy warnings about the dangers of sexual sin (see especially Prov. 5 and 7). That’s also why Jesus warned against it so strongly (see Matt. 5:27-30).
As Paul so wisely wrote, “Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed, lest he fall” (1 Cor. 10:12).
When our daughters were growing up, I would explain to them how teenaged boys would try to check them out and how lust-filled they could be. Our girls first reacted with shock and protest, thinking this was gross and impossible. “No way, Dad!” But it wasn’t long before they realized I was telling them the truth. Boys will be boys! (And all too often, in the bad sense of the word, men will be men—including dirty old men.)
It’s true that most men are not sexual predators. But I’m pretty sure that if the secret thoughts of most men could be revealed, they wouldn’t be all that wholesome. And in a sexually charged culture like ours today, where women are expected to wear suggestive and skimpy attire (and some love to do so), where seductive images greet you on countless websites, where your junk folder is filled with invitations to chat rooms, where prostitution and stripping are glorified, where 8-year-olds access porn on their cell phones, we need to be all the more vigilant.
Let us, then, encourage sexual purity and marital fidelity. And rather than mock the Mike Pences of this world, we should commend them.
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St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Official WebsiteSt. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
Young patients who were being treated for acute leukemia at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital were vaccinated against the influenza virus but failed to respond to treatment. The hospital released the results of the study earlier this week through the Journal of Pediatrics, confirming that patients who received flu shots and those who did not have almost identical rates of developing flu.
“This is preliminary data. The annual flu shot, whose side effects are generally mild and short-lived, is still recommended for patients with acute leukemia who are being treated for their disease,” said lead author Dr. Elisabeth Adderson of the St. Jude Department of Infectious Diseases. She said, however, that the results of the recent study highlight the need for more research in the area.
The researchers particularly examined the medical records of acute leukemia patients of St. Jude Hospital during the 2011-2012, 2012-2013, and 2013-2014 flu seasons. After a thorough review of their cases, it was found that there was actually no significant difference in the rates of confirmed flu illnesses among patients who were vaccinated and those who were not. In short, the booster vaccine dose received by the patients did not have any direct relationship with the reduction of flu, neither did it delay the onset of the illness.
The findings reinforce how important hand washing is in protecting vulnerable patients from influenza infections. The study also recommended that at-risk patients like cancer patients avoid crowds during the flu season. It also recommended the process of “cocooning,” where family members and health care providers who regularly come in close contact with cancer patients get vaccinated against the influenza virus.
In other cancer news, the annual “Race for the Cure” against breast cancer was held in Little Rock, Arkansas over the weekend, drawing around 15,000 people. On its first year, the annual fund-raising event was able to raise more than half a million dollars with 4,000 participants.
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