"For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths." Northwoods is a ministry dedicated to refreshing Christians and challenging them to search for the truth in Christianity, politics, sociology, and science
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Father God, thank you for the love of the truth you have given me. Please bless me with the wisdom, knowledge and discernment needed to always present the truth in an attitude of grace and love. Use this blog and Northwoods Ministries for your glory. Help us all to read and to study Your Word without preconceived notions, but rather, let scripture interpret scripture in the presence of the Holy Spirit. All praise to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
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A young brown bear hunts on a river in Shiretoko on Japan's northeastern island of Hokkaido, on October 2, 2013. A hiker was found dead Friday after a bear attack on the island. File Photo by Kimimasa Mayama/EPA
Aug. 15 (UPI) -- A 26-year-old man was found dead on a mountain of Japan's northernmost island on Friday, one day after the hiker was reported missing in a brown bear attack.
The body was found in eastern Hokkaido, the Asahi Shimbun reported. Police said rescuers found his shirt with bloodstains earlier in the day. Hokkaido, which is bordered by the Sea of Japan, the Sea of Okhotsk and the Pacific Ocean, is the second largest, but least developed, of Japan's four main islands.
The victim was identified as Sota Keisuke, a company employee from Tokyo's Sumida Ward, NHK reported.
The man and a friend, also in his 20s, were descending the 5,450-foot-tall Mount Rausu on the Shiretoko Peninsula, when a bear approached.
"He was trying to fend off the bear but was dragged into the forest," NHK quoted the man.
Fearing the bear dragged his friend away, he called the police.
Authorities then closed the trail.
Seventy-one people were airlifted out of the area.
A man's body was found on Friday morning, and his identity was confirmed at 3:20 p.m.
Hunters searching for the man shot and killed three brown bears at 1 p.m. Friday in the area where the body was later found.
On Sunday, another hiker was followed by a bear. A 68-year-old climber from Shikoku said he encountered the bear while hiking down the mountain. He said he was about 16 feet from an adult bear with two cubs.
He said he retreated with other hikers, but the bears returned to the trail and followed them uphill. When they reached the entrance to the Osawa area, they disappeared.
"It was the first time I encountered a bear on a hiking trail," said the man, who has climbed mountains in Japan and elsewhere, told The Asahi Shimbun. "Although they didn't show any signs of attacking, I felt tense."
Fifty-five people have been attacked by bears in Japan between April and July this year, according to the Environmental Ministry by the Japan Times.
Mount Rasau has a high population density of brown bears. The mountain was given World Heritage Status in 2005. The mountains straddle Rausu and Shari towns.
If people encounter a bear, the Hokkaido Prefectural Government advised them to slowly and quietly step backward.
"Don't throw rocks or shout and run way since it may provoke the bear," it said on its website.
On the other hand, if the bear is charging, you might consider jumping, shouting very loudly, picking up a good-sized rock, and if the bear is still charging try to hit him on the nose with the rock. And pray!
The Guardian reportedthat experts said attacks increased last year because of the scarcity of acorns and other staples. In addition, bears have traveled farther because of development.
But incidents dropped in March as food became more plentiful
In April, the government allowed bears to be shot in urban areas.
Are British citizens finally waking up to the shockingly bad leadership of the far-left Keir Starmer? The Labour party would not have attained power in the first place had it not been for the Conservatives’ betrayal of their constituency and the British people as a whole.
Since he took office in early September, Starmer has bulldozed his way to “unprecedented” unpopularity in record-breaking time. His downfall started almost immediately, with dissension in his own ranks. Some of his questionable actions: wasting taxpayer money to fund open-door immigration policies in a downward trending economy; a secret “Brexit reset” plan; training the military to use them as “peacekeepers” against the British population after widespread protests and riots; and his “state police” threatening to crack down on citizens outside Britain who oppose government views.
Starmer is downright scary. His “unprecedented” collapse in popularity is a first step. Those who value free societies can hope that he gets the boot as quickly as possible.
Keir Starmer suffers ‘unprecedented’ collapse in popularity for new PM
Sir Keir Starmer’s approval rating has collapsed more significantly after winning an election than any other prime minister in modern history, a new poll has shown.
Following the July election, which saw the Labour Party win a landslide majority of 174 seats, the prime minister approval rating reached a high of plus 11.
But by October, just days before Rachel Reeves’ Budget on Wednesday, new polling from More in Common showed that the prime minister’s personal approval rating has fallen to -38 – a net drop of 49 points.
His rating is now lower than that of former prime minister Rishi Sunak, which now sits at -31 following an increase of six points since he lost the election….
A Tokyo High Court ruled that a lack of protections for same-sex marriage in Japan was unconstitutional, becoming the second high court to do so. File Photo by Jiji Press/EPA-EFE
Oct. 30 (UPI)--The Tokyo High Court on Wednesday ruled that the government's refusal to recognize same-sex marriage was against the country's constitution, marking the second court to do so.
The court said the Japanese government's failure to protect same-sex marriage had "no rational basis" and has become a form of "legal discrimination based on sexual orientation."
So, if your sexual orientation is one of pedophilia, or bestiality, does that mean they have to be respected. Should a pedophile be able to marry, or adopt a small child. Should a man be able to have sex with his goat, or a woman with her dog?
The court cited Article 14 of the Constitution, which declares that everyone is equal under the law, and a paragraph of Article 24 stating that laws on marriage "shall be enacted from the standpoint of individual dignity and the essential equality of the sexes."
Wednesday's ruling follows another by the Sapporo High Court in March, which backed a lower court's 2021 ruling that the lack of same-sex marriage protection violated Article 14.
The Sapporo ruling also ruled the wording of the paragraph from article 24 could be interpreted to guarantee marriage for same-sex couples, countering the government's argument that the language excluded them.
"The degree of social acceptance for granting (same-sex couples) the same protection as heterosexuals has heightened considerably," Presiding Judge Sonoe Taniguchi said in her ruling, according to Kyodo News.
The plaintiffs took their case to the High Court after a Tokyo District Court in November rejected damages against the government while suggesting that the topic was one more suited to be resolved by the Japanese legislature.
The court, however, rejected the plaintiff's call for $6,500 in compensation from the government for not protecting same-sex marriage.
No court has approved financial compensation for plaintiffs in cases challenging the lack of same-sex marriage protection.
Taniguchi said in the ruling that the government could not be found liable to compensate plaintiffs as the Supreme Court has yet to rule on protections for same-sex marriage.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said during a press conference that introducing a same-sex marriage system "concerns the fundamentals of people's lives and is closely related to each parson's view of the family."
executives discussed calibrating censorship decisions to please what they assumed
would be an incoming Biden-Harris administration, a congressional investigation found.
The new details — contained in an interim report by the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on the weaponization of government — are emerging as former President Donald Trump leads in polls ahead of the Nov. 5 election and as his allies urge a house-cleaning at the FBI and possible new regulations or antitrust actions to punish and restrain platforms like Facebook.
According to a congressional investigation, the FBI warned major US tech companies before The Post published reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Internal Facebook communications, including a chat log, show that employees quickly discounted The Post’s reporting because it was the “[e]xact content expected for hack and leak.”
“Right on schedule,” another Facebook employee concurred.
“Obviously, our calls on this could colour [sic] the way an incoming Biden administration views us more than almost anything else…,” Facebook’s then-vice president of global affairs Nick Clegg wrote on the same day to vice president of global public policy Joel Kaplan.
The Post spent nearly a month verifying the authenticity of laptop files ahead of their publication, though it’s unclear to what extent the FBI was aware of that work as it prepared its prebuttal.
Then-Facebook executive Nick Clegg wrote on the day of The Post’s first laptop scoop that “our calls on this could [color] the way an incoming Biden administration views us more than almost anything else.”
AFP via Getty Images
The FBI has possessed Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop since December 2019 and knew that files cited by The Post in its coverage came from a Delaware computer repairman and not the Kremlin — but, after preemptively discrediting the world exclusive to Big Tech, the FBI kept silent publicly as 51 ex-intelligence officials suggested and then-candidate Joe Biden outright alleged that the files came from Russia.
The Post’s reporting showed that Biden, while vice president, interacted with international business associates of his son Hunter and brother James — including in countries where he helped steer US policy, such as China and Ukraine.
The reports were widely, if belatedly, corroborated by other news outlets and the files were even used by federal prosecutors in court — but only after Biden defeated Trump in November 2020 by narrow swing-state margins, which some Republicans say was in part due to the cloud of suspicion over the laptop.
Repairman-turned-whistleblower John Paul Mac Isaac provided the laptop, which Hunter failed to retrieve, to the FBI in December 2019, believing it had significant information about international corruption. He later provided copies of the same files to The Post.
Congressional Republicans accuse the FBI and tech platforms of collaborating to defeat Trump in the last election — a perception that social media company employees were aware of at the time.
“[W]hen we get hauled up to [Capitol] [H]ill to testify on why we influenced the 2020 elections we can say we have been meeting for YEARS with USG [the US Government] to plan for it,” a Facebook employee wrote in a July 15, 2020, message published in the new report.
Delaware computer repairman John Paul Mac Isaac provided Hunter Biden’s laptop files to The Post — as the FBI warned Big Tech that Russia was preparing for a similar document dump. Mac Issac had given the FBI the laptop nearly one year prior.
James Keivom
The FBI says it told some Twitter employees on the day of the first laptop story that the device was real, but that message did not appear to be widely circulated internally, and a similar acknowledgment has not emerged involving Facebook.
“[I]f the FBI’s intent was truly to help social media companies combat actual foreign influence operations, the FBI should have shared the single most important fact: the influence-peddling allegations in the Post story were based off of real, credible information, including information in the FBI’s possession,” says the Republican-drafted report, compiled under subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
“The FBI failed to do so. While the FBI eventually conceded that it had no indication that the allegations in the Post story were Russian disinformation — only after an FBI agent mistakenly revealed to Twitter that the laptop was ‘real’ — the FBI still withheld the fact that it had seized and authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop months prior.
An unidentified Microsoft employee wrote that the “FBI tipped us all off last week” about a Burisma story getting released — on the same day The Post’s first Hunter Biden laptop story was published, according to the investigation.
“As a result, Twitter and Facebook continued to censor the most significant news story of the election cycle, limiting the reach of allegations of Biden family corruption and ultimately benefitting the Biden-Harris campaign.”
The report blasted the FBI — led then, as now, by Director Christopher Wray — as other congressional Republicans fault the bureau’s role in investigating alleged Iranian hacking of Trump’s campaign in this election.
House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY) denounced on Sunday in a post to X“the FBI’s deep corruption regarding foreign election interference from Iran targeting President Trump” and alleged “a corrupt coverup” — a message retweeted by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).
Trump allies also remain furious about the FBI’s hard-charging and leaky investigation of Trump’s alleged links to Russia in the 2016 election — which turned up no evidence of a conspiracy after dominating more than half of Trump’s term of office — and the bureau’s role in a pair of unprecedented criminal prosecutions of the former president for allegedly mishandling national security records and challenging his 2020 loss to Biden.
