News and Prophecy Staff

Pope Francis recently announced the canonization of “Mother Teresa” as a Roman Catholic saint. The pope “approved the findings of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints, which found the 2008 healing of a Brazilian man with a brain infection and kidney disease had been due to the intercession of Mother Teresa.

“About a dozen times in the last decade, sophisticated foreign hackers have gained enough remote access to control the operations networks that keep the lights on… The public almost never learns the details about these types of attacks—they’re rarer but also more intricate and potentially dangerous than data theft. Information about the government’s response to these hacks is often protected and sometimes classified; many are never even reported to the government. These intrusions have not caused the kind of cascading blackouts that are feared by the intelligence community.

“Japan will provide $12 billion of soft loans to build India’s first bullet train, the two nations announced during a visit by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that also yielded deeper defence ties and a plan for civil nuclear cooperation… Under defence deals announced on Saturday, the two sides will share technology, equipment and military information, but the long-awaited sale of Japanese aircraft in a deal worth about $1.1 billion was not concluded” (Reuters, December 12, 2015).

“An evangelical preacher from Northern Ireland who branded Islam satanic has been charged with spreading a ‘grossly offensive’ message. In a May 2014 sermon [broadcast online], James McConnell told worshippers… in Belfast: ‘Islam is heathen. Islam is satanic’” (AP, December 14, 2015). The prosecutor in the case claimed that Mr. McConnell’s comments had “nothing to do with religion or freedom of expression” (ibid.).

“Saudi Arabia said Tuesday that 34 nations have agreed to form a new ‘Islamic military alliance’ to fight terrorism with a joint operations center based in the kingdom’s capital, Riyadh… The new counterterrorism coalition includes nations with large and established armies such as Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt as well as war-torn countries with embattled militaries such as Libya and Yemen.