“They also took all the pails, scrapers, snuffers, ladles, and all the other bronze vessels used in the service. KINGS 25:14 (THE ISRAEL BIBLE)

A recent initiative may be bringing Rome and Jerusalem closer together as the Vatican has expressed interest to advance a project releasing artifacts from their archives and allowing them to be placed in a museum.

Investigative archaeologist Rabbi Harry Moskoff has been searching for the Ark of the Covenant for decades and though he has yet to discover the holiest Temple artifact, he was recently contacted by the Vatican. In a stunning example of religious largesse, Vatican officials have expressed a willingness to reveal artifacts from the Holy Land that have been in their possession for hundreds of years. To facilitate this, Moskoff established the Vatican Museum Exchange Program.

The remarkable story began almost two years ago when a lawyer representing the Israeli government contacted Moskoff.

“A high profile lawyer, who happened to be religious, was researching a case at the National Library of France,” Moskoff related. “He came across a document recording gifts that were given to Pope Innocent III by Baldwin I, the Emperor of the Latin Empire of Constantinople in the year 1204.”

The document listed the gifts which were, in fact, artifacts taken from the Holy Land.

“The lawyer contacted me on behalf of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs because he knew that I am an investigative archaeologist,” Moskoff told Israel365 News. “He told me that the Vatican may be interested in sharing with the public Byzantine era artifacts from Israel from the 11th, 12th, and even 13th centuries. This includes ancient makhta (incense shovels) and khatzotzroth (silver trumpets), as well as other smaller Jewish cultic items that were used for sacrificial rites.”

Read more at: www.israel365news.com

A powerful California teachers’ union was part of a successful pressure campaign to get the Los Angeles Dodgers to re-invite a group of drag queen nuns to the team’s annual Pride Night. The union suggested that LGBT students’ lives were at stake.

“At a time when LGBTQ+ rights are under attack across the country with more than 400 pieces of legislation filed in states, at a time when 45 percent of LGBTQ+ youth report seriously considering committing suicide each year, we should be leading with love and inclusion in California rather than sowing division,” the California Teachers Association president said in a statement on Monday, referring to a spate of “red state” legislation restricting sex-change treatment for minors and a 2022 Trevor Project survey. “Our students are watching what happens on and off the field.”

The union had resolved to speak out after the Dodgers rescinded an offer to honor the drag group, known as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, for its advocacy before a June 16 home game against the San Francisco Giants. The resolution, which was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, went even further than the union’s public statement, likening the controversy over the baseball game ceremony to the AIDS epidemic.

“SILENCE = DEATH has long been a refrain of the LGBTQIA+ community, and though it refers to refusal to acknowledge the AIDS crisis, silence in the face of the national assault upon these marginalized youths will lead to more deaths,” the resolution read.

Between 1981 and 1990, more than 100,000 people died of AIDS in the United States, the overwhelming majority of whom were gay men. There is no evidence that the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence or sex-changes treatments for minors save lives.

The California Teachers Association’s over-the-top advocacy for the Sisters highlighted the union’s powerful role in California’s progressive politics. It has consistently ranked among the biggest-spending lobbyists in the state legislature and has supported California’s growing embrace of transgenderism in schools.

Hours after the union weighed in, joining LA Pride and others, the Dodgers caved and agreed to recognize the Sisters as originally planned. The team on Monday offered its “sincerest apologies” to the drag group and its allies and pledged to “continue to work with our LGBTQ+ partners to better educate ourselves.” The Sisters confirmed it had accepted the Dodgers’ renewed invitation.

Read more at: freebeacon.com

Bud Light and its parent company Anheuser-Busch are sponsoring at least three different upcoming Pride events despite backlash over the partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, a social media influencer who identifies as transgender.

Bud Light is listed as a sponsor on the Cincinnati Pride Parade website. Planned Parenthood and the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, which medically transitions minors, are both also listed.

Meanwhile, in St. Louis, Missouri, where Anheuser-Busch is headquartered, the company is listed as the presenting sponsor of the St. Louis Pride Parade. A sponsorship packet explains that there are only four “presenting sponsor” slots available. The “Rainbow” sponsorship tier, located below the “presenting sponsor” tier, requires entities to pay $25,000.

Bud Light is also listed as a “Diamond Sponsor” of Stonewall Columbus, which organizes and hosts the annual Columbus, Ohio, Pride Parade. The “diamond” sponsorship tier requires companies to donate $20,000, a document from the organization specifies. The document also adds, “All Stonewall Columbus sponsors must affirm Stonewall’s diversity, equity, and inclusion policies AND agree to donate no less than 8 hours of volunteer time during a calendar year.”

Anheuser-Busch was also listed as a premier sponsor for the San Francisco Pride Parade in 2022. The 2023 sponsors of the San Francisco Pride Parade have not yet been released.

Read more at: www.dailywire.com

Growing human babies from scratch in a lab could be possible in just five years thanks to a new breakthrough.

Researchers in Japan are on the cusp of being able to create human eggs and sperm in the lab from scratch, which would then develop in an artificial womb.

Professor Katsuhiko Hayashi, a Japanese scientist at Kyushu University who has already figured out the process in mice, believes he is just five years away from replicating the results in humans.

But there are ethical concerns, as it means women of any age could have babies. Parents may also want to design their offspring to have certain traits using gene editing tools, giving way to the notion of an assumed perfect child.

Dr Hayashi and his team recently created seven mice with two male biological parents, using skin cells from a male mouse to form a viable egg and then fertilize it.

The ability to produce custom-made human sperm and eggs in the lab is called in vitro gametogenesis (IVG).

It works by taking cells from a person’s blood or skin and reprogramming them to become induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells).

In theory, these cells can become any cell in the body, including egg and sperm cells.

They could then be used to make embryos and implanted into women’s wombs.

Scientists have been able to make very basic human eggs and sperm this way, but have not yet been able to make embryos.

Read more at: www.dailymail.co.uk

An early Hebrew inscription from Mount Ebal near Nablus that was found on a folded lead tablet during an excavation in the 1980s recently underwent x-ray tomographic measurements to reveal hidden text.

Epigraphic analysis of the data revealed a formulaic curse written in a proto-alphabetic script likely dating to Late Bronze Age that predates any previously known Hebrew inscription in Israel by at least 200 years.

The finding has just been published in the journal Heritage Science by Prof. Gershon Galil, a researcher at in Jewish history and biblical studies at the University of Haifa; Scott Stripling of the Archaeological Studies Institute in Katy, Texas; Ivana Kumpova, Daniel Vavrik and Jaroslav Valach of the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics the Czech Academy of Sciences; and Pieter Gert van der Veen at the Department of Old Testament and Biblical Archaeology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany.

The inscription was: “You are cursed by the God YHW.”

In December 2019, an expedition on Mount Ebal to wet sift the discarded material from excavations led by Adam Zertal – a prominent but controversial University of Haifa archaeologist who died at the age of 79 in 2015 – from decades earlier, yielded a small, folded lead tablet.

The east dump pile from which the object emerged contained the discarded matrix from two structures that he interpreted as altars dated to the Late Bronze Age II and Iron Age I. The earlier and smaller round altar lay underneath the geometric center of the later and larger rectangular altar.

Read more at: m.jpost.com

• An ancient stone, housed in Scotland and dubbed the “Stone of Destiny,” has been used in the coronation of kings since around 840 AD.
• The origins of the stone’s prominence remain unknown.
• New research has revealed never-before-seen markings on the stone, which will be used during King Charles III’s coronation in May.

There’s a special stone used in the coronation ceremonies of monarchs in the United Kingdom. It’s been this way since around 840 AD. And now we have found, for the first time, hidden markings on the red sandstone slab that will be a part of King Charles III’s May coronation.

An oblong block 25 inches long, 15 inches wide, and about 10 inches thick, the stone’s earliest origins are a mystery. But it has long held a special place in the royal history of the United Kingdom, and is considered by many to be a sacred object.

Believed to have been moved to Scone about 840 AD by Kenneth I from western Scotland, this block—also called the Stone of Scone—became part of the coronation tradition for Scottish rulers. It didn’t remain in Scotland forever, though, as King Edward I of England pillaged it in 1296 and moved it to Westminster. It was officially returned to Scotland in 1996—with some theft now a part of it’s history—and is currently housed in Edinburgh Castle. It remains part of the United Kingdom’s coronation tradition, however, and Scotland has agreed to allow it to be used as part of the coronation chair in Westminster Abbey come May 6.

Due to the remaining ambiguity in the Stone of Destiny’s very early history, the Historic Environment Scotland (HES) has renewed its investigation into the red slab ahead of the big royal event. Using a newly created 3D model, researchers now have access to fresh angles and details, showing off what appear to be Roman numerals on the stone’s surface for the first time.

“It’s very existing to discover new information about an object as unique and important to Scotland’s history as the Stone of Destiny,” Ewan Hyslop, head of research and climate change at Historic Environment Scotland, says in a news release. “The high level of detail we’ve been able to capture through the digital imaging has enabled us to re-examine the tooling marks on the surface of the stone, which has helped confirm that the stone has been roughly worked by more than one stonemason with a number of different tools, as was previously thought.”

Read more at: www.msn.com

Some with ‘body integrity identity disorder’ even desire amputation or other impairments — experts weigh in

A troubling societal issue called “transableism” is attracting attention these days.

Transableism is a newer term for BIID, or “Body Integrity Identity Disorder,” in which a person actually “identifies” as handicapped.

BIID has been relabeled to transableism to align with today’s trans community, according to some.

The point of “changing the identifier” from a psychiatric condition (BIID) to an advocacy term (transableism) is to “harness the stunning cultural power of gender ideology” to the cause of allowing doctors to “treat” BIID patients by “amputating healthy limbs, snipping spinal cords or destroying eyesight,” according to Evolution News and Science Today (EN), which reports on and analyzes evolution, neuroscience, bioethics, intelligent design and other science-related issues.

Culturally, transableism is “the next abyss,” that site also notes.

Read more at: www.foxnews.com

Today, April 23, is Saint George’s Day, which used to be widely celebrated, especially in England, as George is that nation’s patron saint.

To underscore just how much things have changed between England and its patron saint, consider the following “what if” scenario offered by English historian Edward Gibbon (1737-1794). Had the Muslims won at the pivotal Battle of Tours (732 A.D.), Gibbon predicted that:

Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people [meaning Brits would now be Muslim] the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Muhammad.

Today, of course, not only is the “revelation of Muhammad” being taught and honored at Oxford, but Christianity—including in the guise of Saint George—is being canceled for its sake. Most recently,

A decision by an Oxford university college not to celebrate St George’s Day with a formal dinner has been branded ‘barking mad.’ Magdalen College has decided against continuing an annual pre-pandemic banquet celebrating the English saint that drew together Oxford students, dons and fellows. Instead, the only occasion the college will observe on the day is Eid al-Fitr, the Islamic festival marking the end of Ramadan. The college will hold a formal dinner marking Eid on April 23, honouring a request made by its Muslim students. An email from college vice president Professor Nick Stargardt … outlines plans for a ‘festive dinner’ celebrating the occasion. The invitation, sent to hundreds of students and their lecturers, adds the meal will ‘follow Muslim customs.’ Cooks will prepare a halal meat dish with no alcohol served to diners.

Read more at: www.pjmedia.com

The president of the Pontifical Academy for Life said he is personally opposed to assisted suicide but would not exclude it for others who wish to avail themselves of it.

In an April 21 debate on end-of-life issues at the Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia said that he endorses “accompaniment” and care as the best approach to assisting the terminally ill but recognizes the legitimacy of laws permitting assisted suicide as furthering the common good.

“In our society, a practicable legal mediation allowing assisted suicide cannot be excluded,” Archbishop Paglia said, under the conditions specified by the Italian Constitutional Court.

These conditions stipulate that to be eligible for assisted suicide, the person must be kept alive by life-sustaining treatments and be suffering from an irreversible pathology, which is a source of physical or psychological suffering that he considers intolerable, and he must be fully capable of making free and informed decisions, the archbishop noted.

“Personally, I would not practice assisting suicide, but I understand that legal mediation can constitute the greatest common good concretely possible in the conditions in which we find ourselves,” Paglia added.

Read more at: www.breitbart.com

NASA is actively monitoring a strange anomaly in Earth’s magnetic field: a giant region of lower magnetic intensity in the skies above the planet, stretching out between South America and southwest Africa.

This vast, developing phenomenon, called the South Atlantic Anomaly, has intrigued and concerned scientists for years, and perhaps none more so than NASA researchers.

The space agency’s satellites and spacecraft are particularly vulnerable to the weakened magnetic field strength within the anomaly, and the resulting exposure to charged particles from the Sun.

The South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) – likened by NASA to a ‘dent’ in Earth’s magnetic field, or a kind of ‘pothole in space’ – generally doesn’t affect life on Earth, but the same can’t be said for orbital spacecraft (including the International Space Station), which pass directly through the anomaly as they loop around the planet at low-Earth orbit altitudes.

During these encounters, the reduced magnetic field strength inside the anomaly means technological systems onboard satellites can short-circuit and malfunction if they become struck by high-energy protons emanating from the Sun.

Read more at: www.sciencealert.com