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This newsletter is available online by
clicking here. The archived newsletter are also available by
clicking here.
The News In Review newsletter is a service
provided
by Understand The Times that
is a compilation of the news articles
previously posted
on our site . Understand The Times does not
endorse these events but rather is
showing the church the current events.
The
purpose of posting these articles is to warn the church of deception from a
Biblical perspective.
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January 15 - IBM Reveals Five Innovations That Will Change Our Lives within Five Years
Artical: Technology For Global Monetary System
Today IBM (NYSE: IBM)
formally unveiled the sixth annual "IBM 5 in 5" (#ibm5in5) - a list of
innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and
interact during the next five years:
People power will
come to life:
Anything that moves or
produces heat has the potential to create energy that can be captured.
Walking. Jogging. Bicycling. The heat from your computer. Even the water
flowing through your pipes. Advances in renewable energy technology will
allow individuals to collect this kinetic energy, which now goes to waste,
and use it to help power our homes, offices and cities.
You will never
need a password again:
Your biological makeup is
the key to your individual identity, and soon, it will become the key to
safeguarding it.
You will no longer need
to create, track or remember multiple passwords for various log-ins.
Imagine you will be able to walk up to an ATM
machine to securely withdraw money by simply speaking your name or looking
into a tiny sensor that can recognize the unique patterns in the retina of
your eye. Or by doing the same, you can check your account balance on your
mobile phone or tablet.
Each person has a unique biological identity and behind all that is
data. Biometric data - facial definitions, retinal scans and voice files -
will be composited through software to build your DNA unique online
password.
Mind reading
is no longer science fiction:
IBM scientists are among
those researching how to link your brain to
your devices, such as a computer or a smartphone. If you just need to think
about calling someone, it happens. Or you can control the cursor on a
computer screen just by thinking about where you want to move it.
Scientists in the field
of bioinformatics have designed headsets with advanced
sensors to read electrical brain activity that can recognize facial
expressions, excitement and concentration levels, and thoughts of a person
without them physically taking any actions.
The digital
divide will cease to exist:
In our global society,
growth and wealth of economies are increasingly decided by the level of
access to information. And in five years, the gap
between information haves and have-nots will narrow considerably due to
advances in mobile technology.
There are 7 billion
people inhabiting the world today. In five years there will be 5.6 billion
mobile devices sold - which means 80% of
the current global population would each have a mobile device.
Junk mail will
become priority mail:
Think about how often
we're flooded with advertisements we consider to be irrelevant or unwanted.
It may not be that way for long. In five years,
unsolicited advertisements may feel so personalized and
relevant it may seem spam is dead. At the same time, spam filters will be so
precise you'll never be bothered by unwanted sales pitches again.
IBM is developing technology that uses real-time analytics to make
sense and integrate data from across all the facets of your life such as
your social networks and online preferences to present and recommend
information that is only useful to you. From news, to sports, to politics,
you'll trust the technology will know what you want, so you can decide what
to do with it.
Read Full Article....
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January 18 - Pope says uniting Christianity requires conversion
Article: One World Religion
Pope Benedict XVI said
today that achieving Christian unity
requires more than "cordiality and cooperation" and that it must be
accompanied by interior conversion.
The Pope asked for "the
Lord in a particular way to strengthen the faith of all Christians, to
change our hearts and to enable us to bear united witness to the
Gospel." In this way, he said, they
"will contribute to the new evangelization and
respond ever more fully to the spiritual hunger of the men and women of
our time."
He said that
the "unity for which we pray requires
inner conversion, both shared and individual," and it cannot be "limited
to cordiality and cooperation." Instead, Christians must accept "all the
elements of unity which God has conserved for us."
Ecumenism, the Pope stated,
is not an optional extra for Catholics but is "the
responsibility of the entire Church and of all the baptized."
Christians, he said, must make praying for unity an "integral part" of
their prayer life, "especially when people from different traditions
come together to work for
victory in Christ over sin, evil, injustice and the violation of
human dignity."
Pope Benedict then
touched on the lack of unity in the
Christian community, which he said "hinders the effective announcement
of the Gospel and endangers our credibility."
Evangelizing formerly Christian countries and spreading the Gospel to
new places will be "more fruitful if all Christians together announce
the truth of the Gospel and Jesus Christ, and give a joint response to
the spiritual thirst of our times," he explained.
The Pope concluded
his comments with the hope that this year's Week of Prayer for Christian
Unity will lead to "increased shared
witness, solidarity and collaboration among Christians, in expectation
of that glorious day when together we will all be able to celebrate the
Sacraments and profess the faith transmitted by the Apostles."
Read Full Article....
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January 15 - Russia: Attack on Tehran is Attack on Moscow
Article:Wars And Rumors Of Wars
Russia has given
Iran its bear hug and warns Israel and the West that an attack on Tehran
would be considered an attack on Moscow. The threat heightens the
prospect of World War III in the event of a military strike on Iran.
"Iran is our neighbor," Russia's outgoing
ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, told reporters in Brussels.
"And if Iran is involved in any
military action, it's a direct threat to our security."
Kremlin Security Council head Nikolai
Patrushev accused Israel of provoking the United
States towards war against Iran, the Russian Interfax
news agency reported Friday. "But at the same time,
we believe that any country has the right to have
what it needs to feel comfortable, including Iran,"
he added.
Rogozin warned on Friday that
more attacks on Iran could cause "a scorching Arab
Summer."
Russia also has
come to the defense of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad,
warning
Western nations not to intervene in Syria with military forces. Russia
is a major arms supplier to Syria and has a heavy investment in Iran's
nuclear facilities.
Japan also is drifting towards Iran,
backtracking from its promise last week to back American sanctions aimed
at persuading Iran to halt its unsupervised nuclear development. Last
week's assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist has
aroused more "Death to America" and "Death to
Israel" protest rallies in Iran, where the scientist
was buried on Friday.
Read Full Article....
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January 4 - Now You See It, Now You Don't: Time Cloak Created
Article: Miscellaneous
It's one thing to make an
object invisible, like Harry Potter's mythical cloak.
But scientists have made an entire event impossible to
see. They have invented a time masker.
What scientists at Cornell University did was on a much
smaller scale, both in terms of events and time. It
happened so quickly that it's not even a blink of an eye. Their time cloak
lasts an incredibly tiny fraction of a fraction of a second. They
hid an event for 40 trillionths of a second, according
to a study appearing in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature.
We see events happening as light from them reaches our eyes. Usually it's a
continuous flow of light. In the new research, however,
scientists were able to interrupt that flow for just
an instant.
Other newly created invisibility cloaks fashioned by scientists move
the light beams away in the traditional three dimensions.
The Cornell team alters not where the light flows but how fast it
moves, changing in the dimension of time, not space.
They tinkered with the speed of beams of light
in a way that would make it appear to surveillance cameras or laser security
beams that an event, such as an art heist, isn't happening.
Another way to think of it is as if scientists edited or erased a split
second of history. It's as if you are watching a movie with a scene inserted
that you don't see or notice. It's there in the movie, but it's not
something you saw, said study co-author Moti Fridman, a
physics researcher at Cornell.
The scientists created a lens of not just light, but time. Their method
splits light, speeding up one part of light and slowing down another.
It creates a gap and that gap is where an
event is masked.
"You kind of create a hole in time where an event takes place,"
said study co-author Alexander Gaeta, director of Cornell's School of
Applied and Engineering Physics. "You just
don't know that anything ever happened."
"It is significant because it opens up a
whole new realm to ideas involving invisibility," McCall
said.
Read Full Article....
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January 10 - Unnatural selection: Is evolving reproductive technology ushering in a new age of eugenics?
Article: Cloning And Genetic Gengineering
Humanity has long dreamed of
perfection, striving to be faster, stronger and brighter, pushing nature to the
limit. With the birth of Louise Brown in 1978, the test tube finally succeeded
where the pumpkin had failed, and the year she turned 11, scientists moved
beyond making life in a lab: They found a way
to peer into an embryo's genes and predict what that life might be like.
That ability is now morphing into a whole new approach to baby-making, one that
gives people an unprecedented power to preview, and pick, the genetic traits of
their prospective children.
Just as Paracelsus wrote that his recipe worked best if done
in secret, modern science is quietly handing humanity something the quirky
Renaissance scholar could only imagine: the capacity to harness our own
evolution. We now have the potential to banish
the genes that kill us, that make us susceptible to cancer, heart disease,
depression, addictions and obesity, and to select those that may make us
healthier, stronger, more intelligent. The question is, should we?
Recent breakthroughs have made it possible
to scan every chromosome in a single embryonic cell, to test for genes involved
in hundreds of "conditions," some of which are clearly life-threatening while
others are less dramatic and less certain - unlikely to strike until adulthood
if they strike at all.
And science is far from finished. On the
horizon are DNA microchips able to analyze more than a thousand traits at once,
those linked not just to a child's health but to enhancements - genes that
influence height, intelligence, hair, skin and eye colour and athletic ability.
Such tests were devised to help those suffering from
infertility.
But people well able to have babies the old-fashioned way now opt
for IVF and embryo screening, paying a steep premium in return for the chance to
have greater genetic control over their offspring.
Read Full Article....
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January 16 - Nearly Half of Churchgoing Americans Say Church Doesn't Have an Effect on Their Lives
Article: Miscellaneous
Church is widely regarded as
a regular action that can assist one in cultivating his or her faith, while
subsequently experiencing personal benefits. While this characterization may
hold validity for some, there's a new study out that shows that,
for nearly half of attendees, church isn't doing
anything to impact or change individuals' lives.
According to the Barna Group, an evangelical company
that studies faith in America,
nearly half (46 percent) of churchgoing Americans report that their lives
have not changed at all as a result of attending church. While this is
startling, 26 percent of individuals who reported having been to church
before said that their lives had been changed or impacted "greatly" by the
experience; 25 percent said that church was "somewhat" influential.
One-third of all adults in the country
report connecting with God at least monthly (35%) via a congregational
setting. Among those who attend church every week, 44% said they experience
God's presence every week and 18% do so on a monthly basis.
Considering the large portion of churchgoers who felt no impact on
their lives as a result of attending, the fact that most people can't recall
gaining new spiritual insights isn't entirely surprising.
Six-in-ten church attenders, when asked to recount their last visit to a
house of worship, couldn't remember any significant insight they gained
related to their faith. Even more startling, among those who attended church
in the past week, half said that they couldn't recall any spiritual tidbits.
These results offer an overall picture that should
concern pastors and faith leaders, but there were some positives. The
majority of people feel connected to their church community. Additionally,
people see their churches as caring for and being engaged with the poor - an
important facet of Biblical teaching.
"Yet, the research results are also a reminder that faith leaders cannot
take these things for granted," Kinnaman said.
"Millions of active participants find their
church experiences to be lacking."
Read Full Article....
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January 16 - Fatah's Top Religious Authority Calls for Genocide of Jews
Article: Israel And The Last Days
Last week, the principal
Palestinian Authority religious leader, the Mufti Muhammad Hussein,
presented the killing of Jews by Muslims
as a religious Islamic goal. At an event celebrating
the 47th anniversary of the founding of Fatah, he cited the Hadith
(Islamic tradition attributed to Muhammad) saying that
the Hour of Resurrection will not come
until Muslims fight the Jews and kill them:
"The Hour [of Resurrection] will not come until you fight
the Jews.
The Jew will hide behind stones or trees.
Then the stones or trees will call:
'Oh Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill
him.'"
Palestinian Media Watch reported regularly during the PA terror
campaign (Intifada, 2000-2005) on the repeated use of this Hadith by PA
clerics on official PA TV to motivate Palestinians to terror attacks,
preaching that Muslims had an Islamic
obligation to kill Jews. The fact that the Mufti quotes this now
indicates that this may have remained part of the PA's religious
establishment's teachings, even though it is less
frequently promoted on PA TV.
The years of PA promotion of killing
Jews and PA religious leaders' citing this Hadith to justify it, may
have contributed to the high acceptance of it in PA society. A poll
sponsored by the Israel Project last year found that 73% of Palestinians
"believe" this Hadith. [July 2011, Greenberg Quinlan
Rosner.]
The moderator who introduced the Mufti at the Fatah event last week
reiterated another Islamic belief;
that the Jews are the descendants of apes and pigs:
"Our war with
the descendants of the apes and pigs (i.e., Jews) is a war of religion
and faith."
This
is not the first time the Mufti has incited to hatred against Jews in
the name of Islam. In a
sermon at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in 2010, he preached that the Jews are the
"enemies of Allah."
Read Full Article....
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We hope the Weekly News In Review has been a
blessing to you.
Sincerely,
Roger Oakland
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