Warning – Page 10 – The Faithful Watchman

NY Times Sunday crossword puzzles readers with swastika shape on Hanukkah: ‘How did this get approved’

The Jewish holiday of Hanukkah began on Dec. 18 and will end the evening of Dec. 26

The New York Times published a crossword puzzle on Sunday, the first day of the Jewish holiday Hanukkah, that many readers thought was shaped like a Nazi Swastika.

No one involved with the puzzle seemed to notice. In a Times column about the Sunday crossword, Caitlin Lovinger wrote, “I love the geometry in this puzzle — so many stair steps! — and feel that it contributes to a certain evenness in the solve.” Ryan McCarty, the puzzle’s constructor, described the design as a “fun whirlpool shape.”

But The Times was criticized heavily on Twitter by people across the political spectrum for what they thought what was clear to see.

“[W]hy is The New York Times’ crossword a swastika?” Daily Wire senior writer Ryan Saavedra asked in a tweet.

Keith Edwards, a Democratic strategist and Lincoln Project alum, tweeted, “This is the NYTimes crossword puzzle today on the first day of Hanukkah. What the hell, @nytimes?”

“I personally believe swastikas shouldn’t appear in the New York Times, intentionally or otherwise. Didn’t think that would be a controversial take,” he continued.

“I know that the @nytimes crossword wasn’t intentionally laid out as a swastika so I guess the sin here is bad editing. How did this get approved without somebody noticing?” Sam Sokol, a reporter at Haaretz.com, tweeted.

‘Jesus was trans!’ Protesters clash at ‘all ages’ drag show

Protesters demonstrated outside an “all ages drag brunch” in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, clashing with supporters who eventually accosted the protesters on the street, destroying their signs. The standoff ensued for more than two hours in freezing weather, according to independent reporter Abdusselam Bezirgan. No arrests were reported.

The drag show, titled “Waffle-y cute: an all ages drag brunch,” took place at the Attic, a bar that has hosted drag shows previously, in the liberal district of Inglewood, Calgary. The venue posted about the event boasting its “fully plant based brunch menu,” with protesters organizing on Facebook with a message of “protect the children.” The protest event page has since been deleted.

“Two women stole two protesters’ signs and the altercation forced them into oncoming traffic,” Bezirgan told Blaze Media.

“Police presence grew from two officers to 12 as tensions kept rising,” he continued. “The LGBTQ side chanted ‘Jesus was trans’ and called the protesters ‘Nazis’,” the reporter concluded.

BARR: Banks Might Start Closing Accounts Of Customers Who Buy Too Many Guns Or Too Much Ammo

For more than half-a-century, Uncle Sam has been giving banks the legal tools to snoop into the otherwise-private affairs of their customers. Now, they are monitoring the exercise of their Second Amendment rights.

Thanks to a recent move by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO, headquartered in Switzerland), U.S. banks are starting to build databases on their customers’ purchases of firearms and ammunition. And, of course, they are ready and quite willing to share that information with federal law enforcement in the name of providing a public service to identify “mass shooters.”

This invasion of privacy began in earnest with enactment of the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, which mandated that banks assist federal law enforcement in uncovering, investigating, and ultimately prosecuting violations of federal law.

Virginia Democrats Fight To Abolish Single-Sex Bathrooms in Public Schools

Virginia Democrats are fighting to abolish single-sex bathrooms in public schools and keep parents in the dark when their children assume different genders at school.

Democrats on the state legislature’s rules commission in a 5-4 vote on Monday rejected Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s (R.) plan to protect same-sex spaces and increase parents’ role in education. If the plan is adopted, administrators and teachers would have to seek parents’ consent before referring to children by different names or pronouns. The plan would also preserve sex-specific sports teams, locker rooms, and bathrooms.

The vote is the latest attempt by Virginia Democrats to block Youngkin’s transgender policies. Delegate Elizabeth Guzmán (D.) in October floated a bill designed to counter the governor’s policies, which would make it a crime for parents to ignore their children’s chosen name, pronouns, or sexual orientation. School districts in liberal enclaves across the state have pledged to flout Youngkin’s plan if implemented.

Praying Woman Arrested For Breaking Public Space Order Outside U.K. Abortion Clinic

United Kingdom authorities arrested a pro-life woman praying outside an abortion clinic for allegedly breaking a temporary Public Space Protection Order on four separate occasions earlier this month.

Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, a 45-year-old charity volunteer, was arrested and charged on four counts after she told police she “might” be silently praying near the U.K.’s leading provider of NHS-funded abortion services BPAS Robert Clinic in Kings Norton, Birmingham, according to local media.

Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) published footage earlier this week showing authorities approaching Vaughan-Spruce outside the clinic. During the interaction, authorities questioned why Vaughn Spruce was standing outside the abortion facility “of all places.”

“Are you standing here as part of a protest?” asked the officer.

“No, I’m not protesting,” Vaughan-Spruce said.

‘One Christian Killed Every 2 Hrs’: Biden State Dept. Refuses To Place Nigeria On Persecution Watchlist, Despite Genocide Of Christians

The Biden State Department once again has refused to designate Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC), despite Christians being killed by militant Muslim groups almost daily with no effective intervention by the Nigerian government.

Over the recommendations of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) and pleas from religious freedom advocates, the Biden administration, for the second year, left Nigeria off of a list of 12 other nations designated as CPCs in an announcement on Dec. 2. The Trump State Department had designated Nigeria as a CPC, but the Biden administration dropped that label in 2021.

The CPC designations are announced annually by the State Department to spotlight the world’s worst violators of religious freedom.

Since 2011, the terrorist groups Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) have murdered more than 40,000 Christians in Nigeria, in addition to thousands more killed by Muslim Fulani herdsmen, Genocide Watch reports. In 2021 alone, according to the persecution watchdog group Open Doors, some 4,650 Nigerian Christians were murdered by these groups—equal to one Christian killed every two hours.

Open Doors estimates that Nigerians made up nearly 80% of the world’s Christian martyrs in 2021.

The State Department’s announcement revealed a sharp disagreement over Nigeria between the Biden administration and the members of the USCIRF, which is an appointed commission mandated by the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act.

Hostility Against Churches Is on the Rise in the United States

Family Research Council analyzed publicly available data from the past five years to determine whether there has been a statistically significant increase in acts of hostility against churches in the United States over time.

Between January 2018 and September 2022, at least 420 acts of hostility against U.S. churches occurred. The types of acts identified include vandalism, arson, gun-related incidents, bomb threats, and more. There also appeared to be an increase in frequency over the course of the reporting period.

This increase in religious hostility should not be taken lightly. Such acts are destructive and have the potential to intimidate a religious community. Therefore, they deserve to be condemned.

Dark Chocolate May Pose Health Hazard, Report Says. Many Bars Contain Levels Of Lead, Cadmium.

A new report indicates that dark chocolate, often touted as a healthy food to add to your diet, may in fact contain elements dangerous to your health.

Consumer Reports examined 28 different dark chocolate bars sold to consumers and found that every single one of them contained amounts of cadmium and lead. Children ingesting lead can suffer brain and nervous system damage as well as slower growth and development in addition to hearing and speech problems. Low levels of cadmium have been linked to kidney cancer and fragile bones.

“For 23 of the bars, eating just an ounce a day would put an adult over a level that public health authorities and CR’s experts say may be harmful for at least one of those heavy metals,” Consumer Reports stated. “Five of the bars were above those levels for both cadmium and lead.”

“To determine the risk posed by the chocolates in CR’s test, we used California’s maximum allowable dose level (MADL) for lead (0.5 micrograms) and cadmium (4.1mcg),” Consumer Reports acknowledged.

“There are risks for people of any age,” Tunde Akinleye, the food safety researcher who led the Consumer Reports project, stated.

American Girl is accused of ‘stripping away all innocence’ in book that teaches children as young as THREE how to change gender by asking doctors for puberty blockers

The popular American Girl doll brand is facing backlash for pushing children as young as three years old into changing their gender.

A Smart Girl’s Guide: Body Image, contains lines that give advice to prepubescents on how to change their gender – without their guardians’ blessing. Parents have since slammed the book’s contents as ‘deceptive and dangerous.

A passage in the book – marketed to girls aged between three and 12 advises: ‘If you haven’t gone through puberty yet, the doctor might offer medicine to delay your body’s changes, giving you more time to think about your gender identity.’

It also provides a list of resources for organizations the children can turn to ‘if you don’t have an adult you trust’.

The book, penned by resident American Girl author Mel Hammond, is currently available on shelves in bookstores across the country and on the company’s website.

The release of the book comes amid a wave of increasingly woke content from the American Girl brand.

Earlier this year, its parent company Mattel, recently put a transgender Barbie doll on the market. Before that, American Girl, which sells more than 30million dolls a year, shilled an Asian doll when anti-Asian hate crimes were skyrocketing across the US.

The company has yet to comment on the contentious content.

In the book, it normalizes being transgender, and pushes children to use puberty blockers.

Federal Reserve set to introduce privacy-crushing digital currency that can be ‘controlled’ and ‘programmed’ by government bureaucrats

When Barack Obama was in the White House and Democrats controlled Congress for his first two years in office, they passed a bill dubbed “Obamacare” that was the first step toward giving federal government bureaucrats complete control over Americans’ health care.

Since all Americans require medical care during their lives, the move was seen by critics as the ultimate authoritarian move; after all, if the government controls all healthcare decisions, tyrannical government bureaucrats could then begin to dictate behaviors and reward or punish people based on behavior.

Now, the government is attempting yet another major authoritarian move: The creation of a “digital currency” with the endgame objective being to control behaviors through “programmable” money that can influence and/or block certain spending habits.

“The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Innovation Center, or NYIC, announced that it would be launching a 12-week proof-of-concept pilot for a central bank digital currency, or CBDC,” Coin Telegraph reported this week.

The outlet continued: “In a Nov. 15 announcement, the New York Fed said the program would explore the feasibility of an ‘interoperable network of central bank wholesale digital money and commercial bank digital money operating on a shared multi-entity distributed ledger’ on a regulated liability network. Banking giants including BNY Mellon, Citi, HSBC, Mastercard, PNC Bank, TD Bank, Truist, U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo will be participating in the pilot by issuing tokens and settling transactions through simulated central bank reserves.”