The Faithful Watchman

Polish minister suggests country could quit EU due to ‘blackmail’ over judicial reforms

RT – August 6, 2021

Poland’s justice minister, Zbigniew Ziobro, has indicated that his government could consider leaving the EU bloc over “illegal blackmail” attempts by its top court amid a dispute over proposed judicial reforms.

Speaking to Polish daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita, Ziobro slammed the EU ahead of an August 16 ruling to obey a decision from the Court of Justice or face potential financial repercussions, threatening that his country would not remain in the EU “at any cost.”

The warning to EU officials about their dictation of Poland’s domestic affairs was paired with a firm declaration that the government would not succumb “to the illegal blackmail of the European Union carried out by the Court of Justice.”

The belief that the EU is a good uncle and gives us money, and that we should accept all its demands at all costs, is propaganda and false.

Ziobro, who leads the United Poland party, the junior member of the governing coalition, has led the judicial reforms the EU have argued undermine the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law – a key principle of the bloc.

The disagreement between the EU and Poland centers on the member state’s judicial reforms, which began to be introduced after the Law and Justice Party took office in 2015. The reforms made changes to the retirement age of Supreme Court justices, resulting in the removal of 20 judges, changes to the term length of ordinary court judges, and the implementation of a measure allowing for justices to be investigated and punished for court rulings.

https://www.rt.com

In drought-plagued northern Mexico, tens of thousands of cows are starving to death

By Kate Linthicum – August 1, 2021

CAJEME, Mexico — In the parched hills of southern Sonora, Marco Antonio Gutierrez paced around a clearing, counting the dead.There were seven rotting carcasses — jutting ribs and shriveled hides — and two sun-bleached skulls. Nine cows, felled by heat and hunger.

“There’s nothing for them to eat,” said Gutierrez, a wide-brimmed hat shading his downcast eyes. “There used to be big ranches here. Now it’s pure sorrow.”

Two years of extreme drought have turned large stretches of northern Mexico into a boneyard. Between starvation and ranchers forced to prematurely sell or slaughter their livestock, officials say the number of cattle in Sonora has dropped from 1.1 million to about 635,000.

It’s an unimaginable loss for a state that is world-famous for its high-quality cows, and where beef is not just a central part of the diet and economy but also a tradition that binds families together.

This is a place, after all, with a bull on its state flag, and where families gather every Sunday around their charcoal grills. Red meat is considered a birthright: It’s not uncommon for folks here to eat beef three times a day — machaca scrambled with eggs for breakfast, arrachera for lunch and carne asada for dinner.

Gutierrez, 55, and pretty much everyone he knows was born ranching. By the age of 10, he and his friends had all learned from their fathers how to lasso, brand and even pull a calf from the womb.

Now, as they desperately watch the skies for rain, they wonder if there’s any future in it.

https://www.latimes.com

Now Americans are signing petition to jail ‘anti-vaxxers’

Bob Unruh – August 5, 2021

Man-in-the-street interview activist Mark Dice has released a video showing many, many Americans willingly signing a petition to have those who have not taken the experimental COVID vaccines arrested and jailed.

Several exclaimed “Yes” when Dice droned on about how “we don’t need those people walking among us,” and “we’ll have to decide for them what’s best.”

There were several who accused Dice of being a socialist for advocating such extreme government intervention in individual lives, and one astute passer-by took Dice out with “This is a joke.”

This person noted that those who signed? “They’re all idiots.”

The Gateway Pundit was among the sites posting the video online.

There, Dice was described as a “heavily censored YouTube creator.”

“This time, even he seemed shocked at the responses he received,” the report commented. “In his most recent social experiment, he hit the streets of California to find out how many people would support forcing their fellow Americans to get the jab under the threat of jail time.”

His petition was titled “Arrest Non-Vaxers,” and many simply signed without even reading.

The comments pointed out the video reveals Dice making “more and more ridiculous statements in an attempt to see where the vaxtivists would draw the line on trampling other people’s freedoms.”

He tells one signer, “We can put them into jail to make them think about why it is they are refusing.” The woman happily signs, with “Well that’s what I think should happen.”

https://www.wnd.com

The Arson Campaign Against Canada’s Churches

Lloyd Billingsley – August 6, 2021

In recent weeks, more than 40 Christian churches have been torched in Canada, supposedly a response to abuse of indigenous people in residential schools. The arson campaign has drawn a variety of responses, including “Not much difference between Islamophobia and Christophobia,” from Vancouver Sun columnist Douglas Todd.

He defines Islamophobia as “dislike of or prejudice against Islam or Muslims, especially as a political force.” Christophobia is “Intense dislike or fear of Christianity; hostility or prejudice towards Christians.” From these definitions Todd extrapolates symmetry of action.

“In Canada there is now no shortage of shocking displays of both Islamophobia and Christophobia,” Todd explains. “There have been assaults on Muslims, some deadly. There has been arson attack after attack on churches.” In reality, it’s not quite so simple.

Islamophobia is an incantation to ward off any discussion of subjects such as Islamic jihad, hatred of Jews, and Muslim violence against non-Muslims. What Todd calls “Christophobia” is nothing more than hatred of Christians, next to anti-Americanism surely Canada’s strongest hatred, particularly among the ruling class.

In the Vancouver suburb of Surrey, “a Coptic Orthodox Church, frequented mostly by immigrants from Egypt, was destroyed by fire.” The Copts are an ancient Christian community that, as Raymond Ibrahim notes, suffers horrible persecution in Egypt, and in the Sinai Copts cry, “They are burning us alive!”

Coptic Christians flee this hatred, now going on in Canada. Since the Copts have nothing whatsoever to do with Canada’s residential schools, a different dynamic must be motivating the arson against the Surrey Coptic Orthodox Church. Todd does not explore all the possibilities but does note that police are “silent about these being hate crimes.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com

University Admits Harvesting Kidneys From Unborn Babies While Their Hearts are Still Beating

Micaiah Bilger – August 5, 2021

The University of Pittsburgh may have inadvertently provided more evidence this week that aborted babies may be being born alive and left to die so that their organs may be used for scientific research, according to the Center for Medical Progress.

As LifeNews.com has extensively reported, earlier this week, Judicial Watch and the Center for Medical Progress exposed evidence of babies potentially being born alive in abortions and other disturbing practices in documents they obtained from a Freedom of Information Act request to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The documents show that the federal government gave the University of Pittsburgh at least $2.7 million in federal tax dollars over the past five years to become a “tissue hub” for aborted baby body parts for scientific research.

On Wednesday, a University of Pittsburgh spokesperson defended its practices in an interview with Fox News. However, the Center for Medical Progress said the university’s statements confirm that aborted babies’ hearts still are beating while their kidneys are harvested for scientific research.

Pitt is now admitting to the news media that the aborted babies are still alive at the time their kidneys are cut out for [National Institutes of Health] grant money,” said David Daleiden, founder and president of the Center for Medical Progress.

Daleiden continued: “Pitt’s grant application for GUDMAP advertised this to the federal government and that labor induction abortions, where the baby is pushed out of the mother whole, would be ‘used to obtain the tissue.’ The plain meaning of the GUDMAP grant application, and the University of Pittsburgh’s statement explaining it, is that Pitt and the Planned Parenthood abortion providers responsible for its ‘research’ abortions are allowing babies, some of the age of viability, to be delivered alive, and then killing them by cutting their kidneys out.”

The basis for this came from a statement university spokesman David Seldin made to Fox News about “ischemia time,” which he said “refers to the time after the tissue collection procedure.”

The Center for Medical Progress explained:

Ischemia starts when the organ (the kidneys primarily in Pitt’s GUDMAP project) is cut off from blood circulation. The NIH defines ischemia as “lack of blood supply to a part of the body.” The University states the fetal organs do not undergo ischemia—lose their blood supply—until “after the tissue collection procedure”. This means the organs are still receiving blood supply from the fetal heartbeat during the “tissue collection”.

In grant application documents provided by the federal government, the University of Pittsburgh mentions “labor induction” as a “procedure that will be used to obtain the tissue,” according to the Center for Medical Progress.

https://www.lifenews.com

Archaeologists astounded by tablet that ‘revealed first ever image of Tower of Babel’

Joel Day – August 4, 2021

ARCHAEOLOGISTS were astounded at being given unfettered access to a previously unseen site that revealed the “first ever image of the Tower of Babel”.

The Tower remains one of the most mysterious stories contained in the Bible. For years, whether or not the Tower was a real, physical thing was open for discussion. Many believed it was simply symbolic, acting as a message to the Bible’s dedicated followers.

Others claimed it was merely folklore or legend.

The fragile remains of the ancient city of Babylon, in modern day Iraq, have revealed many secrets; the greatest of all the discovery of a vast structure which ancient records suggest was the Tower of Babel.

These texts, as well as others found all around the Middle East – where Christianity originated – have given scholars some idea of what the building might have looked like.

Yet, none have given researchers a clear outline or description bound in solid imagery.

Things changed in 2017 when academics were given access to a privately owned tablet.

The artifact was explored during the Smithsonian Channel’s documentary, ‘Secrets: Tower of Babel’.

Here, the narrator said: “Inscribed on the tablet is an image that sensationally reveals exactly what the Tower of Babel looked like.”

Dr Andrew George, an expert in ancient texts at SOAS, University of London, said: “This is a very strong piece of evidence that the Tower of Babel story in the Bible was inspired by this real building.”

The remarkable tablet, which had never been filmed before, dates to the 6th century BCE, and was discovered in Babylon over a century ago.

Yet, no one had realized how important it was until Professor George was given the slab, and went on to decipher the inscriptions.

He explained: “At the top part there is a relief, depicting a step tower.

“And here, a great figure of a human being carrying a staff with a conical hat on.

“Below that relief is the text which has been chiseled into the monument, and the label is easily read: it reads, ‘The temple tower of the city of Babylon’.”

As the narrator noted: “This tablet provides the first-ever image of the real Tower of Babel.

https://www.express.co.uk

First Iranian kamikaze drone against Israeli tanker. As tension rises, Gantz vows “appropriate response”

Debkafiles – July 30, 2021

Iran for the first time launched a suicide drone on Friday, July 30, against an Israeli-operated merchant vessel, the Mercer Street, north of the Omani island of Masirah in the Indian Ocean. Two crewmen, a Briton and a Romanian, were killed as the ship caught fire. The US Navy rushed to the burning ship’s aid and escorted it to harbor in Abu Dhabi, in the UAE. It was attacked while on its way from Dar es Salaam to Fujairah with no cargo aboard.

The Israeli owners had transferred the vessel to Japanese ownership after previous less serious incidents against their ships in the same region, while continuing to operate it from their London-based Zodiac Maritime Office.

Defense Minister Benny Gantz called an urgent conference on Friday night with Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi and other senior commanders, following which Gantz announced that Israel would make an “appropriate response” to the attack.

DEBKAfile adds: The event broke new ground as indicated by the following:

1. It marked Iran’s first direct armed drone attack on an Israeli merchant vessel.
2. The drone was identified by a US official as a “one way” drone – although the Americans stayed clear of former incidents of this kind. He added that “other drones took part” indicating a concerted assault. This confirmed an earlier report from the private maritime intelligence firm Dryad Global of a drone sighting around the vessel prior to the attack.
3. Iranian sources, including the Al Alam Arabic language TV channel, reported that the Israeli vessel was attacked in reprisal for Israel’s air strike of July 22 against Revolutionary Guards bases at Qusayr, 25km from Aleppo in western Syria. They revealed that a number of Iranians were killed in that strike.
  (Russian officials claimed that all the missiles fired by Israeli jets in that attack had been intercepted by Russian-made air defense systems.)
4. This was the first time that Tehran had cited Israeli military action in Syria as justification for attacking an Israeli commercial vessel
5. Saudi sources disclosed that on that same Friday night, one of their ships was also attacked with armed drones wielded by Iranian-backed Yemeni Houthi rebels in the Red Sea.

https://www.debka.com

China on Cusp of Eliminating Cash, Pushing the World Toward Total Government Surveillance

George Thomas – July 28, 2021

The Chinese were the first in the world to invent paper money back in the 7th Century.

Now, more than 1,400 years later, China is again on the cusp of creating a new form of government currency that some say could pose a serious economic threat to America and the West.

“In effect, they are not cryptocurrencies, they are not so-called stable coins, in effect, they are the national physical currency of a country just represented in a digital form,” said Erik Bethel, former U.S. executive director with the World Bank.

Bethel says while the world fixates on private cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Beijing is busy building a digital version of its own currency, the Yuan, also known as the Renminbi, to control its citizens and eventually threaten the dominance of the U.S. Dollar.

“They’ve pretty much created all of the building blocks that will allow a central bank digital currency to flourish,” Bethel told CBN News.

Yaya Fanusie, a former economic and counterterrorism analyst in the CIA, says China’s goal is to replace cash with a digital currency that’s controlled by the communist government’s central bank.

“China has said for a while that it expects to be pretty much a cashless society in the future so the idea is that cash notes, coins will no longer be around and so people will be using digital currency that’s going to be in their wallets,” said Yaya Fanusie, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

That digital currency will also be issued by the government bank allowing what Congressman Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, says is unprecedented access to people’s financial transactions.”This will give them data on behavior and on how people spend,” Rep. McCaul (R-TX) told CBN News.

https://www1.cbn.com

Biggest in 50 Years: Alaska Rocked by Powerful 8.2 Earthquake, Follow-up Tsunami Warnings

Simon Kent – July 29, 2021

A powerful earthquake rocked Alaska’s southern coast early Wednesday morning, with prolonged shaking in the aftermath that prompted tsunami warnings across nearby coastal areas.

AP reports only minor damage was recorded, but officials said that could change after sunrise and people get a better look at an earthquake event set at the biggest in 50 years.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake was magnitude 8.2 and hit 56 miles (91 kilometers) east southeast of Perryville, Alaska at about 8:15 p.m. Wednesday.

The National Tsunami Warning Center canceled the warnings early Thursday when the biggest wave, of just over a half foot, was recorded in Old Harbor.

A tsunami warning that had also been issued for Hawaii was also canceled, and officials said there was no threat to Guam, American Samoa or the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands.

Patrick Mayer, the superintendent of schools for the Aleutians East Borough, told AP he was sitting in his kitchen in the community of Sand Point when shaking from the quake started.

“It started to go and just didn’t stop,” Mayer told the Anchorage Daily News. “It went on for a long time and there were several aftershocks, too. The pantry is empty all over the floor, the fridge is empty all over the floor.”

On the Kenai Peninsula, a steady stream of cars were seen evacuating the Homer Spit, a jut of land extending nearly 5 miles (8 kilometers) into Kachemak Bay that is a draw for tourists and fishermen.

https://www.breitbart.com

3,462 Christians Murdered in Nigeria in 2021: It’s the ‘Biggest Killing Ground of Christians’ in the World

Michael Foust – July 23, 2021

More than 3,000 Christians have been killed in Nigeria this year by Muslim militants amidst a massive wave of persecution that also has resulted in 300 churches being threatened, attacked or destroyed, according to a new report.

The report by the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law says 3,462 Christians have been killed by Muslim militants in the first half of 2021 – a shocking number that is nearly as many as the 3,530 killed in all of 2020.

International Christian Concern cited the report this week and urged the world to take notice.

“Nigeria is the biggest killing ground of Christians today, but few are aware of it,” ICC said in a July 19 news release.

The Fulani Herdsmen – described as the fourth deadliest terror group in the world by ICC – is responsible for the majority (1,909) of murders, the report says. Boko Haram, ISWAP and Muslim Fulani Bandits killed a total of 1,063 Christians, the report added.

“Christian farming villages are repeatedly attacked in Nigeria’s Middle Belt region, and tens of thousands have died over the last 20 years. In addition, hundreds of thousands of Christians have lost everything and are living as refugees,” ICC said.

The surviving victims often are not assisted or protected by the government from further harm, the report says.

“It is deeply saddening that till date those responsible for the anti-Christian butcheries in the country have continued to evade justice and remained unchecked, untracked, uninvestigated and untried; leading to impunity and repeat-atrocities,” the report says. “The surviving victims and families of the dead victims are also totally abandoned by the Government of Nigeria.”

An estimated 300 churches have been threatened, attacked, closed or destroyed this year, with at least 10 priests or pastors abducted or killed, the report said.

https://www.christianheadlines.com