Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D. – February 12, 2020

The Spanish parliament has approved a proposed law by the new Socialist-led government to legalize euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide.

On Tuesday, the controversial measure passed in parliament by 201 votes to 140, meaning the bill must now go to a parliamentary health committee for debate and then will head to the Senate before returning to the lower house for a final vote.

In Tuesday’s vote, parliament was predictably split, with generally leftist or libertarian parties such as PSOE, United We Can (UP), Citizens, ERC, JxCat, EH Bildu, New Canary Islands, Compromís and Más País all favoring the measure and the conservative PP, Vox and UPN opposing.

While there is no fixed calendar for this process, Health Minister Salvador Illa said he hoped to see the euthanasia law enacted by June.

The new bill, which has been hotly contested by the Catholic Church and other pro-life groups, requires the informed consent of the patient as well as the favorable judgment of two independent doctors and an evaluation commission.

According to the proposal, only those with a serious, chronic, and disabling illness or an incurable disease with a limited life expectancy can apply to be euthanized, whether in a hospital or at home.

Church leaders have denounced the “ideological and semantic euphemisms” behind the measure, while decrying the labeling of the bill’s opponents as “retrograde, intransigent, and contrary to individual freedom and progress.”

https://www.breitbart.com

Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D. – February 6, 2020

Tax cuts for the wealthy constitute a “structure of sin,” Pope Francis said Wednesday in a passionate address calling for international wealth redistribution.

“Every year hundreds of billions of dollars, which should be paid in taxes to fund health care and education, accumulate in tax haven accounts,” the pontiff told participants in a Vatican seminar, “thus impeding the possibility of the dignified and sustained development of all social agents.”

“Today’s structures of sin include repeated tax cuts for the richest people, often justified in the name of investment and development,” Francis told the meeting organized by the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences.

During his discourse, the pope repeated his conviction that poverty is on the rise worldwide and “the poor increase around us.”

With the passage of time and the advances of civilization the number of poor people increases rather than diminishing, Francis similarly asserted last June, and “the poor are always poorer, and today they are poorer than ever.”

As a Brookings Institution report noted in late 2018, however, the world is currently experiencing “the lowest prevalence of extreme poverty ever recorded in human history — less than 8 percent,” and that number falls with each passing year.

According to the widely used “international poverty line,” people are considered to be in “extreme poverty” if they live on less than $1.90 per day or its equivalent.

In the world today, less than 10 percent of the global population lives in extreme poverty, whereas just 30 years ago (1990), some 37 percent of the world lived in extreme poverty. Two centuries ago, nearly everyone in the world lived in extreme poverty.

https://www.breitbart.com

Madeline Farber – February 6, 2020

Two flights carrying American evacuees from Wuhan, China — the epicenter of the deadly coronavirus outbreak — that are slated to land sometime Friday in Texas and Nebraska, respectively, are likely to be the last State Department-chartered flights out of the city, an official told Fox News.

“At this time, we do not anticipate staging additional flights beyond those planned to depart February 6,” a State Department spokesperson told Fox News, adding any U.S. citizens still in China “should attempt to depart by commercial means.”

The two flights are scheduled to depart from Wuhan on Thursday and are expected to land at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio and Eppley Airfield in Omaha. Some 250 passengers are reportedly on the flight to Texas while an estimated 70 passengers are on the one to Nebraska.

The news comes after two planes chartered by the State Department arrived in the U.S. on Wednesday at Travis Air Force Base in Solano County, Calif., with one later traveling onto Miramar Marine Corps Air Station in San Diego. An estimated 350 Americans were on the two flights. All passengers are subject to a 14-day quarantine —  they remain in temporary housing units where they will be monitored by medical teams with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for possible symptoms of the coronavirus.

At least four evacuees — three adults and one child — who are being temporarily housed at Travis Air Force Base in San Diego were transported to area hospitals after showing signs of coronavirus, which have been reported to include fever, shortness of breath and a cough. In an update on Thursday, officials from U.C. San Diego Health and Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego said all four patients are stable, and that test results were expected as early as Saturday.

https://www.foxnews.com

Raven Clabough – January 30, 2020

Pro-life advocates are infuriated after Fox repeatedly ignored requests for ad space during the 2020 Super Bowl from pro-life group Faces of Choice after giving the group the “runaround,” while approving a commercial that will feature drag queens and LGBTQ activists. Fox is now claiming it is out of ad space, but Faces of Choice contends the network deliberately delayed approving its application for airtime so that they would run out of air space before having to issue a response to the request.

The commercial in question features more than a dozen abortion survivors in varying stages of their lives from all around the world, who ask, “Can you look me in the eye and say I should have been aborted?” The advertisement’s youngest abortion survivor is seven-year-old Zechariah Hagan, one of the first abortion pill reversal (APR, a treatment to reverse the effects of an initial dose of an abortion drug) success stories.

Life News reports Faces of Choice, which was incorporated in September, premiered its powerful new ad at the March for Life last week and had hoped to air a shortened version of the advertisement during this year’s Super Bowl.

Lyric Gillett, the 28-year-old founder of Faces of Choice and producer of the ad, said she wrote the script for her commercial three years ago, and had been raising money through sponsors to come up with the $5 million needed for a 30-second Super Bowl slot.

“Every great human rights movement in history has been anchored in the stories and the faces of its victims. That’s what we aim to do; we simply want to tell their forgotten stories and there’s no larger mega-phone than the Super Bowl,” she said.

Faces of Choice contends the advertisement shines light on the myth of “choice.”

“Abortion advocates need to look these survivors in the eye and come to terms with the fact that they are human, that their lives matter, and that choice is more than a word: it’s a person,” Gillett said.

https://www.thenewamerican.com

Deborah Bunting – January 8, 2020

This is so beyond Cinderella it’s not even funny. Disney has come up with a new cartoon about a teenager who, in their words, “finds herself stuck in the Demon Realm and battles the forces of evil alongside a rebellious witch and a pint-sized warrior.”

In this so-called fantasy world, the main character, Luz, “pursues her dream of becoming a witch by serving as Eda’s (the rebellious witch’s) apprentice.”

It’s called “The Owl House” and is set to premiere on January 10th on the Disney Channel. Here is the link to the show’s trailer if you’re inclined to watch it.

In another trailer, Luz declares, “I wanna stay and become a witch like you.” You can watch that trailer here.

The show tries to portray witchcraft as a positive tool to fight evil. That’s similar to what real-life witches have been promoting over the past few years as they’ve been putting hexes on President Trump and others in order to fight for their beliefs.

Folks, if you think this latest “Owl House” show is just “fantasy and fun,” think again. Over the years, Disney has gone farther and farther into the darkness of the spiritual world that opposes the living God, coming up with programming and characters that lead the vulnerable into that dark world of deception.

https://www1.cbn.com

Steven Ertelt, Micaiah Bilger – December 31, 2019

More human beings died in abortions than any other cause of death in 2019, a new report indicates.

A heartbreaking reminder about the prevalence of abortion, statistics compiled by Worldometers indicate that there were over 42.3 million abortions world-wide in 2019. The independent site collects data from governments and other reputable organizations and then reports the data, along with estimates and projections, based on those numbers.

When contrasting the abortion numbers to other causes of death, including cancer, HIV/AIDS, traffic accidents and suicide, abortions far outnumbered every other cause.

By contrast, 8.2 million people died from cancer in 2019, 5 million from smoking, 13 million from disease, and 1.7 million died of HIV/AIDS. Deaths by malaria and alcohol are also recorded.

Worldometers estimates about 58.6 million deaths world-wide in 2019, but that number does not include unborn babies’ abortion deaths. Unborn babies are not recognized as human beings even though biology indicates that they are unique, living human beings from the moment of conception and they die brutal, violent deaths in abortions.

The abortion number is incomprehensible, but each of those 42 million abortions represents a living human being whose life was violently destroyed in their mother’s womb. Each unborn baby already had their own unique DNA, making them distinct from their mother. That DNA indicated if the child was a boy or girl, their eye and hair color, their height, possible genetic disorders and other disabilities, and much more. In most cases, the unborn babies’ hearts are beating when they are aborted, too.

In America, just under 1 million babies are aborted every year. Though abortion rates have been dropping in the past decade, abortion remains the leading cause of death in the United States as well.

https://www.lifenews.com

Sean Walton – January 15, 2020

A bill has been proposed in the Vermont Legislature to decriminalize adult prostitution.

The legislation is co-sponsored by four female legislators. Rep. Selene Colburn, a Burlington progressive, said she thinks that decriminalizing sex work will improve safety and health of prostitutes.

“The underlying question is do we need to criminalize consensual sex between adults on any terms?,” she said. Sex trafficking, exploitation and solicitation of minors will remain a serious felony, she said.

The lawmakers say the World Health Organization agrees with them. Nevada is the only state that currently allows prostitution.

The bill is pending in Vermont’s House Judiciary Committee.

https://www.thedailysheeple.com

Eric Roston – November 5, 2019

Forty years ago, scientists from 50 nations converged on Geneva to discuss what was then called the “CO2-climate problem.” At the time, with reliance on fossil fuels having helped trigger the 1979 oil crisis, they predicted global warming would eventually become a major environmental challenge.

The scientists got to work, building a strategy on how to attack the problem and laying the groundwork for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s preeminent body of climate scientists. Their goal was to get ahead of the problem before it was too late. But after a fast start, the fossil fuel industry, politics and the prioritization of economic growth over planetary health slowed them down.

Now, four decades later, a larger group of scientists is sounding another, much more urgent alarm. More than 11,000 experts from around the world are calling for a critical addition to the main strategy of dumping fossil fuels for renewable energy: there needs to be far fewer humans on the planet.

“We declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency,” the scientists wrote in a stark warning published Tuesday in the journal BioScience.

https://www.bloomberg.com

Dr. Susan Berry – January 14, 2020

Lawmakers in California have killed a bill that would ban most surgeries on “intersex” infants and young children – those born with ambiguous sex characteristics.

The measure would have prohibited surgeries on children, aged six and under, born with sex characteristics that cannot easily be categorized as “male” or “female,” unless the Medical Board of California determined they were medically necessary.

A majority of state lawmakers – three Democrats and one Republican on the state Senate Business, Professions and Economic Development Committee, voted to reject the bill, proposed by Democrat State Sen. Scott Wiener, that would have banned most of the intersex procedures, reported the Associated Press (AP).

Wiener claimed the bill addresses a civil rights issue and seeks to “ensure that people who are born intersex are able to make their own choices about their health and their gender identity instead of having other people make those irreversible surgical choices for them.”

However, as AP reported, a majority of committee members considered the measure’s definition of “intersex” to be overly broad.

The committee heard the testimony of Dr. Hillary Copp, a pediatric urologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who said she opposed the bill because it would remove “all flexibility for trained medical professionals and their [sic] loved ones to do what is in the best interest of the patient.”

The committee voted to reject the legislation following a public hearing that featured testimony on both sides of the issue.

https://www.breitbart.com

Mac Slavo – January 9, 2020

The retail apocalypse was particularly bad in 2019, and only days into 2020, Macy’s has announced it’ll begin closing stores, following a trend in the industry.  Macy’s will close a minimum of 28 stores, and one Bloomingdale’s as problems in retail continue.

With consumer spending so high, it’s hard to imagine a reason for store closures.  “We regularly review our store portfolio and will provide an update at our Investor Day on February 5th,” the company said in a statement sent to USA TODAY.

Clearance sales will begin this month and run for eight to 12 weeks, Macy’s Media Relations Manager Julianne Bartosz said in an email to TCPalm.com, which is part of the USA TODAY Network, about the Macy’s in the Indian River Mall in Vero Beach, Florida.  Most other locations to be shuttered have not yet been disclosed.  Officials also steered clear of an exact number of closings, say there would be a “minimum of 28 stores” permanently closed.

Among the government and Federal Reserve’s insistence that consumers are spending money, Macy’s reported a drop in holiday sales. Macy’s November and December sales results Wednesday, which showed holiday sales did not meet the expectations. “Macy’s, Inc.’s performance during the holiday season reflected a strong trend improvement from the third quarter,” CEO Jeff Gennette said in a news release. “Additionally, customers responded to our gifting assortment and marketing strategy, particularly in the 10 days before Christmas.”

https://www.shtfplan.com