WASHINGTON, DC — North Korea stands at the top of a list of 50 countries where at least 215 million Christians faced the most severe persecution in 2017, resulting in 3,066 deaths and 1,020 rapes mainly targeting women, revealed Open Doors, an organization that monitors ill-treated Christians worldwide.
At the National Press Club on Wednesday, David Curry, the president and CEO of Open Doors, unveiled the 2018 World Wide List (WWL) of the top 50 “most dangerous” countries to worship Jesus. Referring to North Korea, he declared:
Imagine in your mind a leader that thinks he’s god but acts like an animal — devouring his own people with his teeth where people are forced to worship at the statute of Kim Jung Un and bow down and lay flowers at his feet as if he was a god.
Yet, [Kim] sets up controls mechanisms, neighborhood watches that surround communities rewarding citizens for spying on each other giving them more food if they find somebody who has a Bible and who purports to a be a Christian and that makes Christians the number one enemy of the state in North Korea and that’s why it is the number one on the world’s watchlist.
Open Doors pointed out that thousands of Christians are facing death worldwide for practicing their faith, particularly in North Korea.
According to the monitor group’s 2018 World Watch List (WWL), “215 million Christians experience high levels of persecution in the [50] countries on the World Watch List,” with the majority of them in North Korea, considered “the worst place for Christians” for 16 consecutive years since 2002.
Open Doors reported:
The primary driver of persecution in North Korea is the state. For three generations, everything in the country focused on idolizing the leading [Kim Jung Un] family. Christians are seen as hostile elements in society that have to be eradicated.
Due to the constant indoctrination permeating the whole country, neighbors and even family members are highly watchful and report any suspicious religious activity to the authorities…The situation for Christians is vulnerable and precarious. They face persecution from state authorities and their non-Christian family, friends and neighbors. Pray for their protection.
There are many Christians languishing, starving, and enduring hard labor in North Korea prisons for merely owning a Bible and having faith in Jesus Christ.
Since the U.S.-led war that started in Afghanistan soon after September 11, 2001, the United States has spent at least $877 billion on the war-devastated country, including on the promotion of religious freedoms.
Nevertheless, Afghanistan came in second place in the list of the top 50 worst countries in terms of persecution — where the cost of being a Christian can quickly turn into a nightmare and the last breath one ever takes.
During the 2017 reporting period covered by the latest World Watch List, persecutors killed 3,066 Christians, kidnapped 1,252, raped 1,020, and attacked 793 churches, noted Open Doors.
Of the top ten countries, eight are tormented by “Islamic Oppression,” which mainly refers to hostility against Christians. Eritrea and North Korea are the exceptions.
Meanwhile, persecution against Christians at the hands of “Hindu extremists” in India is on the rise, resulting in deaths and rape of Christian women.
“A shocking trend in the world watchlist I want to highlight for you today is the increase in persecution of Christian women,” stated Curry. “The data seems to prove that Christian women are the most vulnerable population today with sexual harassment and rape and forced marriage being prime tactics from extremists against the world against Christians.”
Pakistan, India’s regional enemy, has accused Hindu extremists of persecuting Christians and Muslims and forcing them to convert to their religion.
Hindu nationalist groups are reportedly affiliated with Indian President Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Pro-Hindu nationalism “President Modi only wants one religion,” proclaimed Curry.
Every day, Christian women reportedly face sexual harassment, rape, and forced marriage, all common in India, which is ranked 11 on the persecution list.
The justice for Christians in India is “poor,” determined Curry, noting that 635 Jesus followers were held and detained in the nation without trial last year alone, often called one of the largest democracies in the world.
Of the 50 nations on the Open Doors World Watch list, at least two Western Hemisphere countries made the cut joining the very few predominantly Christian nations on the list — Latin America’s Mexico (39th place) and Colombia (49th) where persecution is reportedly driven by “organized crime and corruption.”
The monitor group identifies North Korea’s communist and post-communist oppression as the primary source of persecution against Christians, which make up a little over 1 percent (300,000) of the 25.4 million population.
The assessment deems more than 60 percent of the persecution tactics employed by Kim as violent.
These idiots will never get it so make sure you don’t forget next year.
The revolution will be televised, that’s the word coming down from NBC executives who say they will televise any player who chooses to protest the anthem during the Super Bowl.
“When you are covering a live event, you are covering what’s happening,” NBC Sports EP Fred Gaudelli told reporters at the Television Critics Association on Tuesday.
“If there are players who choose to kneel, they will be shown live,” he said.
Gaudelli explained that, if a player chose to protest during the anthem, NBC broadcasters Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth would likely give the players’s name, some background on the a protests, and then “get on with the game.”
According to Fox News, “The anthem will be aired live and is scheduled to be performed by Pink. Potential protesters will have an opportunity to make a statement in front of a massive audience, as 112.2 million people watched Super Bowl LI last season – the fifth most-watched program in television history.”
The NFL’s anthem protest movement began in the preseason of 2016, when then-49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick first sat, then knelt, in protest against police brutality. Kaepernick continued his protest throughout the 2016 season, but has not suited-up for another NFL team since walking away from his contract in San Francisco at the end of that year.
Despite Kaepernick’s absence in 2017, the protest movement he began continued without him. Increasing in intensity during Week 3 of the season, after President Trump blasted the protesting players at a political rally. During that weekend over 200 players, executives, and coaches, protested the anthem and President Trump.
However, after that weekend, the number of protesting players dwindled to the point where only 19 players protested in the final week of the season.
Google Lies All The Time And The Government Should Break Up The Google And YouTube Monopoly.
Google, the most powerful search engine in the world, is now displaying fact checks for conservative publications in its results.
No prominent liberal site receives the same treatment.
And not only is Google’s fact-checking highly partisan — perhaps reflecting the sentiments of its leaders — it is also blatantly wrong, asserting sites made “claims” they demonstrably never made.
When searching for a media outlet that leans right, like The Daily Caller (TheDC), Google gives users details on the sidebar, including what topics the site typically writes about, as well as a section titled “Reviewed Claims.”
Vox, and other left-wing outlets and blogs like Gizmodo, are not given the same fact-check treatment. When searching their names, a “Topics they write about” section appears, but there are no “Reviewed Claims.”
In fact, a review of mainstream outlets, as well as other outlets associated with liberal and conservative audiences, shows that only conservative sites feature the highly misleading, subjective analysis. Several conservative-leaning outlets like TheDC are “vetted,” while equally partisan sites like Vox, ThinkProgress, Slate, The Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Salon, Vice and Mother Jones are spared.
Occupy Democrats is apparently the only popular content provider from that end of the political spectrum with a fact-checking section.
Big name publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times are even given a column showcasing all of the awards they have earned over the years.
The Robert Mueller fact check (pictured above) is a case in point for Google’s new feature.
Ostensibly trying to sum up the crux of the post, the third-party “fact-checking” organization says the “claim” in a DC article that special Counsel Robert Mueller is hiring people that “are all Hillary Clinton supporters” is misleading, if not false.
The problem is that TheDC’s article makes no such claim. Their cited language doesn’t even appear in the article. Worse yet, there was no language trying to make it seem that the investigation into the Trump administration and Russia is entirely comprised of Clinton donors. The story simply contained the news: Mueller hired a Hillary Clinton donor to aid the investigation into President Donald Trump.
Still, the Washington Post gave the claim, which came from Trump himself, its official “Three Pinocchios” rating. The method applies to several other checks. Claims concocted or adulterated by someone outside the TheDC are attributed to TheDC, in what appears to be a feature that only applies to conservative sites.
Examples of such misattribution and misrepresentation are aplenty.
For instance, using Snopes.com, an organization with highlydubious fact-checking capabilities, Google’s platform shows an article by TheDC to have a so-called “mixture” of truth.
The “claim” made, according to Snopes.com and Google, is “a transgender woman raped a young girl in a women’s bathroom because bills were passed…”
A quick read of the news piece shows that there was no mention of a bill or any form of legislation. The story was merely a straightforward reporting of a disturbing incident originally reported on by a local outlet.
And like Snopes, another one of Google’s fact-checking partners, Climate Feedback, is not usually regarded as objective.
Snopes and Google also decided to “fact-check” an obviously tongue-in-cheek article in which a writer for TheDC pokes fun at a professor saying the solar eclipse in 2017 was naturally racist.
Even Vox pointed out the absurdity of the educator’s literary tirade on Mother Nature’s purported racial prejudice, and the damage it might have done to real arguments of apparent racism. While Snopes got some flak for its choice, no one seems to have noticed the absurdity of the world’s go-to search engine providing fact-checks to purposefully irreverent content, rather than hard news stories.
Overall, such inclusion embodies Google’s fact-checking services, which, as many presciently feared, are biased, if not also downright libelous.
Google acknowledged it received an inquiry from TheDCNF, but did not fully respond by time of publication.
If Donald Trump signs this that means he lied about putting America First.
The president said lawmakers should “put country before party” in push to tighten border-control laws in exchange for providing legal status to immigrants brought to the country illegally as children.
WASHNGTON—U.S. President Donald Trump declared Tuesday he wants Congress to pass a “bill of love” to protect younger undocumented immigrants from deportation, but he reiterated his demands for a border wall and cuts to legal immigration that Democrats have opposed.
Ahead of a bipartisan meeting with lawmakers at the White House, Trump challenged them to “put country before party” in his push to tighten border-control laws in exchange for providing legal status to immigrants brought to the country illegally as children, a group known as “dreamers.”
“I really do believe Democrat and Republican, the people sitting in this room, really want to get something done,” Trump said.
WASHNGTON—U.S. President Donald Trump declared Tuesday he wants Congress to pass a “bill of love” to protect younger undocumented immigrants from deportation, but he reiterated his demands for a border wall and cuts to legal immigration that Democrats have opposed.
Ahead of a bipartisan meeting with lawmakers at the White House, Trump challenged them to “put country before party” in his push to tighten border-control laws in exchange for providing legal status to immigrants brought to the country illegally as children, a group known as “dreamers.”
“I really do believe Democrat and Republican, the people sitting in this room, really want to get something done,” Trump said.
This is what liberals do. They waste taxpayers damn money.
DeWitt, N.Y. — In 2014, the development arm of SUNY Polytechnic Institute agreed to build, with $90 million in state money, a factory in DeWitt for an LED light bulb manufacturer.
The company, California-based Soraa, agreed to create 250 full-time, high-tech jobs at Collamer Crossing Business Park and to encourage Soraa contractors and suppliers to create another 170 jobs in Central New York.
In return, the company would be allowed to lease the factory for $1 a month for 10 years.
But the deal with SUNY Poly’s Fort Schuyler Management Corp. did not require Soraa to spend any of its own money to build or equip the factory. And it contained no penalties if the company did not occupy the building or create the promised jobs. The company never even signed a lease.
So when Soraa recently said it no longer needed the factory and pulled out of the deal just as the state was completing construction of the 82,000-square-foot building, there was nothing the state could do about it.
The state was left with a factory, nearly fully equipped, but no company to use it.
One expert said using state money to custom-build a factory for a specific tenant is bad policy.
Obama did the same thing with Solyndra and liberals said nothing. Look at the beautiful facility that Socialist liberals built for nothing.
“You have a situation where the state could potentially wind up with a white elephant,” said John Bacheller, former head of policy and research for the state’s economic development office, Empire State Development. “I think it’s too much risk. When you provide a grant, the risk is limited to the amount of the grant.”
The state has found another company, but taxpayers will have to spend up to another $15 million to properly equip the building for the new company.
This time, state officials say they won’t repeat the mistake made in DeWitt again.
Empire State Development, a state economic development agency, took over the project from SUNY Poly a year ago after the college’s president, Alain Kaloyeros, was arrested on corruption charges and resigned from the university. ESD said a deal with a new tenant will include financial penalties if the company fails to meet its job commitments.
Alain Kaloyeros, seen here during a visit to Syracuse Media Group in 2015, was president of SUNY Polytechnic Institute when the college agreed to build a $90 million factory in DeWitt for Soraa, a California-based LED lighting manufacturer. He resigned in 2016 after he was arrested on corruption charges. (Ellen M. Blalock | syracuse.com)
Jason Conwall, a spokesman for ESD, said the penalties, or “clawbacks,” will be included in a grant disbursement agreement with NexGen Power Systems, a California start-up. ESD’s board of directors voted Dec. 21 to approve a grant of up to $15 million to NexGen for tooling and equipment for the factory.
In return, the company has pledged to create 290 full-time, high-tech jobs for the production of semiconductors at the facility and agreed to invest $40 million of its own money into the building. It will pay rent of $1 the first year and increasing amounts up to full market value in the 10th year, ESD officials said.
Conwall said the grant will be contingent on the company meeting its job commitments. Details of the grant’s terms will not be available until the grant disbursement agreement is executed later this month, but they will follow ESD’s standard practice of requiring companies to return a grant, or portions of it, if they fail to meet hiring milestones, he said.
ESD’s agreements generally require a company to meet a certain minimum amount of their job commitments within a specified period or be required to return a grant. In some cases, a company is required to return only a portion of the money if it falls just a little short of its hiring commitments.
ESD officials said no such “clawbacks” were put into SUNY Poly’s deal with Soraa because none of the $90 million in state grants used to build the factory went directly to Soraa. All of the money went into the building, which is still owned by the state, so there was no money to take back from the company, they said.
Former state budget director Robert Megna, who was appointed president of the non-profit Fort Schuyler Management Corp. in February 2017 following Kaloyeros’s departure, said the fact that Fort Schuyler retained ownership of the building was a good thing.
“While we can’t speak to the reasoning behind all the terms of the agreement with Soraa, which were made by the previous leadership, the facility was constructed to accommodate Soraa’s gallium nitride lighting business and no funding was provided to Soraa,” he said in a statement.
“All state funds were provided to the not-for-profit Fort Schuyler Management Corporation, and the building and the equipment are all owned by FSMC on behalf of New York State,” he said. “This model enabled the state to quickly adjust to changes in a very dynamic industry and make the facility available to NexGen for its production of gallium nitride semiconductor devices, modules and systems.”
Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks at the Central New York Hub for Emerging Nano Technologies in DeWitt on Oct. 29, 2015, during his announcement LED lighting manufacturer Soraa would operate a state-built, $90 million factory in DeWitt. (Stephen D. Cannerelli | syracuse.com)
Conwall said Empire State Development takes a much different approach. It provides grants to assist companies with the cost of building facilities in the state, but it does not go the riskier route of building entire factories for them, he said.
He said ESD was fortunate to have found a new tenant to go into the DeWitt building. NexGen plans to make semiconductor power devices from gallium nitride, the same material that Soraa uses to make LED lighting. That means that NexGen can use much of the equipment already installed in the factory.
“It worked out because we owned the facility and found another tenant quickly that aligned really well,” the ESD spokesman said.
Though ESD has agreed to provide up to $15 million to NexGen for the purchase of tools and equipment, some of the $7 million not yet spent from the original $90 million in grants for the building could be used toward that $15 million commitment, he said. (The state had spent about $83 million of the $90 million on the factory and equipment by the time Soraa pulled out, officials said.)
NexGen was formed in California last year to make semiconductors for the electronics industry. It does not yet manufacture anything. The DeWitt facility will be its first manufacturing operation.
Dinesh Ramanathan, NexGen’s president and CEO and one of its founders, also was CEO of Avogy Inc., a Silicon Valley start-up that planned to make power sources for electronic devices such as computers.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced in 2016 that Avogy had committed to moving from California to a state-owned cleanroom facility in Rochester that the state agreed to upgrade with a $35 million investment of state money. The state never made the investment, however, and Avogy never made the move.
Avogy went out of business later in 2016. NexGen bought its technology and is starting up with new money from investors, according to Ramanathan.
NexGen has not publicly disclosed who its investors are.
Prior to Avogy, Ramanathan served as the executive vice president at Cypress Semiconductor for almost nine years, where he managed the company’s Programmable Systems Division and its Data Communications Division, according to NexGen’s website.
Prior to joining Cypress, Ramanathan held senior marketing and engineering positions at Raza Microelectronics; Raza Foundries, described as an “incubating venture capital company”; and Forte Design Systems, an electronic design automation company, according to the website.
ESD officials said they are confident that NexGen will succeed in DeWitt.
“NexGen is led by a management team and investors with a proven record and decades of combined experience building and operating high-tech businesses,” Empire State Development President, CEO and Commissioner Howard Zemsky said in a statement. “This gives us the confidence that the company will meet its commitment to bring hundreds of new, good-paying jobs to Central New York.”
The state may be fortunate in this case if NexGen is able to use the factory constructed for Soraa. But custom-built factories can be hard to sell or lease if a tenant walks away, Bacheller said.
The state should always require companies to invest more money into a project than the state does so they have a strong motivation to stick around and make the development work, he said.
“You always want the company to have skin in the game,” he said.
He said SUNY Poly may also have made a mistake constructing a factory for an LED light bulb maker, given the fact that LED light bulb production is increasingly dominated by low-cost Chinese manufacturers who have brought the price of LED bulbs almost down to that of incandescents.
“Unless you’re in a niche that the Chinese aren’t in, it’s the kind of business that is very risky,” he said.
NexGen says its semiconductor devices can be used in a wide array of applications such as LED power supplies, solar inverters, data centers and automotive applications.
The company will be getting the use of a building with up to $105 million in state money invested in it. NexGen’s capital investment will be far less by comparison – $40 million.
Bacheller said the state appears to be taking a substantial risk with NexGen, given that the company is a start-up with no manufacturing or sales track record of its own. However, he said Empire State Development may be making the best deal it could after inheriting a bad situation from SUNY Poly.
“They’ve already got a building up and they’re stuck with it,” he said.
Soraa walks away from $90M factory that NY built; $15M more brings new tenant
Soraa said they would not come without “tens of millions” in additional money from NY state.
Liberals can’t stop calling Trump Crazy and and idiot but he is winning.
CNN’s Jake Tapper Cuts Off Stephen Miller: ‘I’ve Wasted Enough of My Viewers’ Time’
by PAM KEY7 Jan 2018
Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” White House adviser Stephen Miller had a heated interview with host Jake Tapper over Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”
Miller said, “The book is best understood as a work of very poorly written fiction.”
Things got heated when Miller said, “Your network’s been going 24/7 with all the salacious coverage and I know it brings a lot of you guys a lot of joy to try to stick the knife in, but the reality is that page after page after page of the book is purely false. I see sections of the book where events I participated in are described and I have firsthand knowledge as they’re described they’re completely and utterly fraudulent.”
Tapper shot back, “Nobody at CNN is sticking knives in anybody.”
After several exchanges where the pair talked over each other, Tapper said, “The only person who has called themselves a genius in the last week is a president.”
Miller said, “Which happens to be a true statement. a self-made billionaire who revolutionized — ”
Tapper quipped, “I’m sure he’s watching and he’s happy you said that.”
Miller shot back “You can be as condescending as you want.”
At one point in the interview, Tapper hushed his guest: “Stephen, settle down, settle down. Calm down.”
Tapper ended the interview saying, “I think I’ve wasted enough of my viewers’ time.”
After the segment aired, President Trump tweeted that Miller “destroyed” Tapper.
Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller of the Trump Administration. Watch the hatred and unfairness of this CNN flunky!
