By: Tzvi Joffre – The Jerusalem Post; jpost.com
Some 24 firefighting teams and six firefighting planes reported that they were battling a large, wind-driven fire near Hadassah-University Medical Center, in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem on Monday.
Teams from the Jerusalem, Dan and central divisions and the Israel Fire and Rescue Service’s special Lehava unit are working to stop the fire from spreading to public buildings located nearby.
By: Leah Marieann Klett – The Christian Post; christianpost.com
A member of China’s Early Rain Covenant Church says the Chinese Communist Party continues to persecute members of the church by threatening to send their children to government re-education camps or forcibly remove adopted children from their parents.
In a video released Wednesday alongside a new report by International Christian Concern, Liao Qiang, a member of ERCC in Chengdu, said that despite shuttering the church and jailing Pastor Wang Yi in December of 2018, the CCP continues to harass its members.
Qiang said in the video accompanying ICC’s new report on Religious Suppression in China that his family was forced to leave China and flee to Taiwan with his extended family “because the Chinese Communist Party is limitless in its persecution.”
By: Marcy Oster – Jewish Telegraphic Agency; jta.org
The remains of 286 Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust were found in two basements in a town in southwest Ukraine.
The remains, mostly women and children, will be buried in a mass grave in the ancient Jewish cemetery in Sataniv, Ynet reported.
The town had an organized Jewish community for about 500 years before the Nazis captured it in 1941 and began systematically killing its Jews, according to the Yad Vashem website.
By: Leah MarieAnn Klett – The Christian Post; christianpost.com
Amid the coronavirus outbreak, poor Christian villagers in China have been ordered to renounce their faith and replace displays of Jesus with portraits of Chairman Mao and President Xi Jinping or risk losing their welfare benefits.
Religious liberty magazine Bitter Winter reports that in April, officials with China’s Communist Party visited believers’ homes in Linfen, a prefecture-level city in the northern province of Shanxi. While there, they ordered residents who receive social welfare payments from the government to replace crosses, religious symbols, and images in their homes with portraits of China’s communist leaders.
By: Lahav Harkov – The Jerusalem Post; jpost.com
Dutch civil servants took a picture with one of the terrorists charged with killing 17-year-old Rina Schnerb, The Jerusalem Post has learned, despite their government’s denial of any known connection between organizations they fund and terrorist groups.
The photograph from 2017, which can be found on the Netherlands Representative Office in Ramallah’s Facebook page, features Dutch officials, including Head of Cooperation in Ramallah Henny de Vries, and leaders of the Palestinian-run organization Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), to which the Dutch representative in Ramallah pledged nearly $20 million in 2013-2021.
By: Michael Freund – The Jerusalem Post; jpost.com
A number of years ago, on a visit to Manhattan, I entered one of the countless souvenir stores that dot the area in Times Square which are affectionately known as “tourist traps.”
Amid the refrigerator magnets declaring one’s love for New York, the fake subway signs and plastic snow globes enveloping the Statue of Liberty, I came across a hidden treasure that I continue to adore until this very day. It is a small purple pin which declares simply and with unvarnished irony: “Forty percent of all statistics are false.”
If you have even a sliver of cynicism somewhere in your body and you take a moment and think about that sentence, it should bring a smile to your face because it sums up quite nicely what most of us already know to be true. In our data-drenched world, statistics are just about as reliable as pre-election promises made by politicians.
My thoughts turned to that pin the other day when I read through the US State Department’s “2019 Country Report on Human Rights Practices: Israel, West Bank, and Gaza,” which was released on March 2 of this year. It contains what can most charitably be described as nothing less than an obscene distortion of reality.
By: Herb Keinon – The Jerusalem Post; jpost.com
There is no harm in trying, goes a well-worn axiom.
Except that often times there is. Take, for example, the July 2000 Camp David summit.
It was 20 years ago this week that US president Bill Clinton welcomed prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat to the storied Camp David compound in the Maryland woods to try and solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
No further proof of the failure of that summit is needed than noticing that the 20th anniversary of the convening on July 11, 2000, of this two-week summit passed without many people taking note. Hardly an academic conference on the matter was held, even via Zoom; few television or radio programs were devoted to the anniversary and the sparse coverage in the print media for the most part sufficed with interviews with some of the participants.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/20-years-since-camp-david-summit-there-was-harm-in-trying-635318
By: Yonah Jeremy Bob – The Jerusalem Post; jpost.com
Nearly three-quarters of Iran’s main centrifuge assembly hall was destroyed by the recent explosion there, Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) president David Albright told The Jerusalem Post.
Albright indicated that this latest revelation is based on two new satellite overviews showing a much fuller picture than footage that was released last weekend, indicating that the vast majority of the centrifuge assembly hall was wiped out.
By: Yaakov Lappin – Jewish News Syndicate; jns.org
The “Ofek 16” spy satellite launched from central Israel at 4 a.m. on Monday morning is due to significantly upgrade Israel’s ability to monitor the dangerous activities of its adversaries throughout the Middle East, foremost among them Iran.
The satellite was launched successfully by the Defense Ministry and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) following years of research and development, and a working schedule that in recent months had to be adapted to restrictions created by the coronavirus pandemic.
IAI officials said they viewed the satellite’s launch as a top priority. This is due to the fact that “Ofek 16” is designed to provide the Israeli defense establishment with a higher than ever resolution camera in space.
By: Brandon Showalter – The Christian Post; christianpost.com
New COVID-19 guidelines in California forbid singing during worship services to prevent further spread of the coronavirus.
Issued Wednesday, the updated policies from the state’s department of public health require churches and other houses of worship to “discontinue singing and chanting activities.” Whereas official guidelines in late May permitted singing, group recitation, and other practices and performances but advised against them, such things are now formally prohibited.