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“Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves!” (2 Corinthians 13:5). True believers will see the glory of Christ reflected in their lives when they examine the genuineness of their salvation. Assurance of one’s salvation has been a key issue throughout the history of the church, especially the Reformers’ reaction to the Roman Catholic Church’s assertion that since salvation is a joint effort between man and God, the outcome is in doubt until the end. John Calvin, the leading sixteenth-century Reformer, taught that believers can and should be assured of their salvation. He made the grounds...

ST. PAUL, Ore. (AP) — On his 38th birthday, Sebastian Francisco Perez, an immigrant from Guatemala, played chess with his nephew. The next day, he went to work at a nursery in a rural Oregon town as the thermometer soared well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius). Perez collapsed that day, June 26, as a heat wave baked the Pacific Northwest in all-time, record-high temperatures. The workers had been moving irrigation lines when they noticed Perez wasn’t there and found him. They called his nephew, Pedro Lucas, who arrived to find his uncle unconscious and dying. Paramedics tried to revive...

Army Sergeant Daniel Perry has been indicted on murder charges on Thursday for shooting AK-47-wielding Black Lives Matter “protester” Garrett Foster. Perry shot Foster after his car was surrounded by a mob and Foster allegedly lifted his rifle towards him during the “protest” in downtown Austin a year ago. All evidence points to clear self-defense, however, a newly-elected District Attorney, Jose Garza, has indicted Perry. Garza, to no surprise, is funded by George Soros. After the July 25, 2020 shooting, Perry was released without charges, but D.A. Garza wants to transform Austin into the new St. Louis by criminalizing self-defense....

The spectator whose cardboard sign sent riders tumbling to the road was charged with reckless endangerment and involuntarily causing injuries. A Tour de France spectator on the side of the road held up a sign that hit the German rider Tony Martin. He fell and caused a pileup of dozens of more. [snip] Camille Miansoni, the prosecutor in Brest, France, who had opened an investigation into the case, said that the spectator, a 30-year-old French woman, had been released from police custody pending her trial. She turned herself in on Wednesday. The charges under consideration carry a possible one year...

In late April, after amassing 40,000 troops on the border of eastern Ukraine and another 40,000 in the disputed Crimean peninsula, Russia removed most of its forces and walked back its naval presence in some areas of the surrounding Black Sea where it concentrated. Many Western commentators read this as ‘saber rattling,’ a popular phrase in the press, on behalf of Putin to remind a new U.S. administration of Russia’s strength, part of the routine cycle of provocation and de-escalation Putin uses to conduct diplomacy. The conventional thinking is that these patterns tend to ‘flare up,’ another popular phrase, but...

The 10-member panel on the House Ethics Committee voted Thursday to drop the $5,000 fine issued to Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), who challenged the report by the Capitol that said she failed to complete a security screening before entering the House building. This is the third time a majority of the evenly split bipartisan panel voted in favor of waiving the metal detector fee since the Jan. 6 protest at the Capitol. In May the Capitol Police issued a report that documented an incident where Foxx set off a metal detector in front of a door to the House chamber....

President Joe Biden again snapped at reporters on Friday after delivering remarks to celebrate the substantial employment gains in June. After finishing his remarks, Biden took a few questions from the attendant media, but immediately complained they were too negative. One reporter asked him about the future of Afghanistan and his proposed timeline of withdrawal of troops from the country. U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks about the June jobs report in the South Court Auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on July 02, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Biden defended the withdrawal of troops, noting the...

The audit in Maricopa County, Arizona, is nearing completion. Late on Thursday, audit volunteers prepared the 2020 election ballots and machines to be transported out of The Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum. The auditors, volunteers, and other members are leaving the coliseum after completing both the hand recount and paper evaluation of nearly 2.1 million ballots in the massive county.

Nothing underscores this more dramatically than the mega-fiasco surrounding the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. As the world knows now, some 135,000 non-existent votes were somehow magically injected into the system. The winner of this supposed “ranking system” election (it certainly was “rank” in every sense of the world) is naturally suing and we seem headed for a do-ever. This primary was, needless to say, virtually the city’s mayoral election since New York voters these days seem constitutionally allergic to Republicans, or to civic health, for that matter. They already showed their great intelligence electing Bill De Blasio in...

A cargo plane made an emergency landing in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Hawaii early Friday and both people on board have been rescued. The pilots of the Transair Flight 810 had reported engine trouble and were attempting to return to Honolulu when they were forced to land the Boeing 737 cargo aircraft in the water, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement.

For twenty years after the handover of power from Britain to the People’s Republic, Hong Kong existed as a bastion of relative openness and liberty in China. Now, it’s all crashing down as Beijing aggressively imposes new controls on the territory. One of the latest dominoes to fall is the Apple Daily, a vocal anti-Beijing newspaper. Hong Kong police arrested a senior journalist from the Apple Daily newspaper at the airport Sunday as he attempted to leave the city, four days after the paper’s forced closure, in the latest crackdown by Beijing under the sweeping new national security law. Police...

US forces have left their main military base in Afghanistan - the hub for a 20-year mission against the Taliban and al Qaeda - in the clearest sign yet America's longest war is ending. The sprawling Bagram airfield, about 40 miles north of Kabul, is being handed over to the Afghan security forces in a symbol of the US military's departure from a battlefield that's still raging, amid warnings of a looming civil war. Sponsored link US President Joe Biden said earlier this year all of between 2,500 to 3,500 US troops in Afghanistan would leave by 11 September, the...

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating after a cargo plane crashed in waters off West Oahu with two people on board. It happened around 1:45 a.m. about two miles off Kalaeloa Airport, according to the state Department of Transportation. Officials said Transair Flight 810, a Boeing 737 cargo aircraft, departed from the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport and was heading to Kahului, Maui. That’s when the two pilots reported engine trouble and were attempting to return to Honolulu when they were forced to make an emergency landing in the water, the FAA...

Over years of studying antibody responses against the flu in the Wilson lab at the University of Chicago, researchers kept coming up with a strange finding: antibodies that seemed to bind not only to the flu virus, but to every virus the lab could throw at them. Since antibodies are usually highly specific to individual pathogens, in order to maximize their targeted protective response, this pattern was extremely unusual. Until finally, they realized: The antibodies weren't responding to the viruses, but rather to something in the biological material in which the viruses had been grown. In every case, the virus...

The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Friday to hear a case from a Christian florist challenging Washington state law which forced her to provide her services for same-sex weddings. Justices Clarence Thomas, Thomas Alito, and Neil Gorsuch declared their willingness to hear the case but other conservative-leaning Justices such as Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett did not join the vote putting the case below the threshold necessary for a ruling. That case is Arlene's Flowers v. Washington. Justices Thomas, Alito & Gorsuch indicate that they voted to hear the case. Because it takes four votes to hear a case,...

The Supreme Court on Friday rejected an appeal from former President Donald Trump to rule against funding used for the wall along the southern border. In an unsigned order, the court sent the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit with instructions to vacate its judgments. It also instructed a district court in the case to "consider what further proceedings are necessary and appropriate in light of the changed circumstances in this case," namely that Trump is no longer president. SUPREME COURT SUSPENDS TRUMP BORDER WALL CASE The case, Trump v. Sierra Club, frequently made...

WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security is warning of a possible violent militia rally on July 4 in Washington, D.C., according to a law enforcement document obtained by Yahoo News. The report, dated July 1 and produced by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, says that FBI reporting indicates that suspected violent extremists may be planning to attend a large public gathering for the July 4 holiday on Capitol Hill. As of mid-June, a private social media platform contained a discussion from four suspected militia members about the “Million Man Patriots Gathering,” the DHS report...

The Biden administration has announced that the State Department will allow people to choose their gender identity on passports, even if it contradicts their biological sex. It's also looking to add an X marker for those who identify as nonbinary. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced Wednesday that the State Department will update “our procedures to allow applicants to self-select their gender as ‘M’ or ‘F’ and will no longer require medical certification if an applicant’s self-selected gender does not match the gender on their other citizenship or identity documents.” “The Department has begun moving towards adding a gender marker...

On September 14, 1814, Francis Scott Key penned "The Star-Spangled Banner." Set to the British tune "To Anacreon in Heaven," "The Star-Spangled Banner" is inarguably one of the most difficult national anthems to sing. The backdrop of the song was the British attack on Baltimore during the War of 1812. Key had been sent to negotiate a prisoner release and boarded the British flagship HMS Tonnant. During the negotiations with British Vice Adm. Alexander Cochrane, Key overheard the war plans. Consequently, the British held Key captive until after the assault on Fort McHenry, forcing him to stay on the HMS...

Arkansas on Thursday reported its largest single-day increase in coronavirus cases for the second time in a row in four months amid urging from Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) for residents to get vaccinated as soon as possible. The state recorded 700 new infections Thursday, up from the 686 new cases the day before, according to a state department of health graphic Hutchinson tweeted Thursday. The state also reported 12 new coronavirus-related hospitalizations Thursday, bringing the total to 337, though Arkansas recorded no new fatalities due to the virus.