Massachusetts church goes up in flames after being struck by lightning, after it was reported they were celebrating pride month.
A historic Massachusetts church went up in flames after being struck by lightning, fire officials said Saturday.
The 160-year-old church in the town of Spencer, about 10 miles west of Worcester, was engulfed and is a total loss, church and fire officials said.
The First Congregational Church had stood on that spot since its predecessor was also consumed by fire in 1862. According to church history, a building of worship has been on that land since 1743.
“We have recently experienced a tragic fire and devastating loss of our building,” First Congregational now headlines its website, with an announcement of where services will be relocated to for the time being.
The dramatic demise of the church was caught on video as fire devoured the structure, sending the steeple toppling into the body of the building and crushing the walls.
There were no injuries. Nonetheless residents watched in horror as nearly 100 firefighters from about 20 departments battled the blaze.
❖ 150-Year-Old Stained-Glass Window Reveals Jesus Christ With Dark Skin, Stirring Questions About Race
2000 Year Old Ethiopian Christianity With The Dark-Skinned Jesus
Ethiopia’s oldest icon (1370-98) made in Byzantium, or Siena
Harvard art historian claims 150-year-old stained glass window in Rhode Island church depicts Jesus as a person of color
A 150-year-old stained glass window that appears to show Jesus as a person of color has been uncovered in a Rhode Island church
The image is made using brown glass and was first spotted by Harvard art historian Hadley Arnold
Arnold has invited art historians and experts to view the window which is thought to be the first to ever depict Jesus as a person of color
Scholars think the window, commissioned in 1877, could be the first of its kind. ‘It should stand as a landmark in American culture,’ says art historian Virginia Raguin
A nearly 150-year-old stained-glass church window that depicts a dark-skinned Jesus Christ interacting with women in New Testament scenes has stirred up questions about race, Rhode Island’s role in the slave trade and the place of women in 19th century New England society.
The window installed at the long-closed St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Warren in 1878 is the oldest known public example of stained glass on which Christ is depicted as a person of color that one expert has seen.
“This window is unique and highly unusual,” said Virginia Raguin, a professor of humanities emerita at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and an expert on the history of stained-glass art. “I have never seen this iconography for that time.”
🛑 Two weeks ago we had powerful Earthquakes in MEXICO Baja CaliFornia + IDNONESIA + TURKEY (MIT – IMF)
🛑 Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston-Cambridge MA interested in the The Biblical Ark of The Covenant? Boston is the cradle of modern America. There is even ‘The Ark of The Covenant Spiritual Baptist Church’ in Boston.
🛑 International Monetary Fund finances the Turkey friendly Antichrist fascist Oromo regime of Ethiopia to wage a genocidal Jihad on the Keepers of the powerful biblical Ark of The Covenant in Axum, Ethiopia.
🛑 The leaders of MEXICO, INDONESIA, TURKEY, plus USA attended
the 17th G20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia a week ago. ETHIOPIA is Satnael’s goal.
🛑 A few weeks ago President Biden Pardons Two Thanksgiving Turkeys
💭 The agency’s aid into Tigray has been suspended since an internal investigation – due to deliver its findings any day – was launched in May.
The senior leadership of the World Food Programme in Ethiopia has resigned, shortly before the findings of a probe into the misappropriation of food aid in the country are due to be made public, according to several sources who witnessed the resignations.
The exact link between the resignations and the probe weren’t immediately clear, but neither WFP nor its aid partners in Ethiopia responded to several requests for comment in time for publication.
WFP country director Claude Jibidar and his deputy, Jennifer Bitonde, tendered their resignations at an all-staff meeting on 2 June, sources present at Friday’s “emotional” gathering told The New Humanitarian, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the information.
The move followed an internal investigation launched last month over reports that significant amounts of food meant for hungry people in Ethiopia’s war-affected northern Tigray region had been sold on the commercial market.
Both WFP and USAID suspended food distributions in Tigray – where millions are dependent on relief – pending the results of the internal inquiry. WFP said it needed to “ensure that vital aid will reach its intended recipients”. Food deliveries, suspended in May, are yet to resume.
WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain, who took the helm of the UN agency in April, said last month that those “found responsible must be held accountable” for food theft.
Both the Ethiopian federal government and the interim regional government in Tigray vowed to cooperate with WFP’s probe.
“We briefed [a US government] delegation on the progress in the investigation into allegations of aid diversion,” Getachew Reda, the head of the interim government in Tigray, tweeted today. “We have shared highlights of findings & reassured them that we will make the findings public & hold those responsible to account very soon.”
An aid worker in Ethiopia, who asked for anonymity so they could speak freely, told The New Humanitarian the pause in food distribution has caused “immense suffering” after two years of war, especially as Tigray enters the lean season ahead of the next harvest.
“There have always been delays in food deliveries, and diversions,” the aid worker said. “Clearly the system is broken.”
Jibidar, only appointed last year, announced his resignation “with immediate effect” at last week’s meeting, multiple WFP sources said. They told The New Humanitarian that numbers in need had allegedly “been inflated”.
The initial findings of the internal probe suggest that food aid diversion goes beyond Tigray and includes the drought-affected Somali region, WFP insiders said. More resignations are expected in the coming weeks as the Ethiopian country team is overhauled, they told The New Humanitarian, again speaking on condition of anonymity.
More than 20 million people in Ethiopia are affected by conflict, violence, and natural disasters, including 13 million people suffering the consequences of severe drought in the south and east of the country.
💭 Let’s Connect the dots…the following individuals and bodies had been ‘randomly and coincidentally’ awarded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee – four years in a row:
☆ 2019 Nobel Peace Prize to evil Abiy Ahmed Ali for a Pact of War vs Orthodox Ethiopia
☆ 2020 Nobel Peace Prize to WFP in anticipation of the following genocidal war (Nov. 2020) against Orthodox Tigray, Ethiopia
☆ 2021 Nobel Peace Prize to Dmitry Muratov of Orthodox Russia in anticipation of the coming war (Feb. 2022) between the two orthodox brothers; Russia-Ukraine
☆ 2022 Nobel Peace Prize to Ales Bialiatski from Belarus and the Russian human rights organisation, the Russian human rights organisation Memorial and the Ukrainian human rights organisation Center for Civil Liberties. – in anticipation of the coming nuclear war between the three orthodox brothers; Russia + Ukraine + Belarus
❖ On May 28, we commemorate Saint Elesbaan (Kaleb), King of Ethiopia.
The sixth-century King Kāleb is one of a few African historical characters that have left a visible trace in European art and literature. Venerated by the Catholic Church as Saint Elesbaan, he is frequently present in pre-modern and modern literature and iconography.
👑 King Kaleb of Ethiopia’s Axum — St. Elesbaan(አፄ ካሌብ) : The Black Saint Who Embodied Christianity for the African Masses
🧟 The Real Zombie Apocalypse – As in the days of Noah and Lot 🧟
Everyone knows that San Francisco is the nation’s largest public toilet – requiring the city to employ six-figure ‘poop patrol’ cleanup team, however a new report from the city Controller’s Office really puts things in poo-spective.
For starters, feces were found far more often in commercial sectors, covering “approximately 50% of street segments in Key Commercial Areas and 30% in the Citywide survey,” second only to broken glass as can be seen in the ‘illegal dumping’ section.
If you’re wondering about the city’s fecal methodology, look no further than a footnote on page 43;
Feces also includes bags filled with feces that are not inside trash receptacles. Feces that are spread or smeared on the street, sidewalk, or other objects along the evaluation route are counted. Stains that appear to be related to feces but have been cleaned are not counted. Bird droppings are excluded.
As far as where most of the poo is found, Nob Hill takes the top spot, followed by the Tenderloin and The Mission districts.
“It’s terrible; this street is covered,” Tenderloin resident Joe Souza told The San Francisco Standard earlier this month. “There’s poop everywhere. You always see it along the wall and in front of the garage there.”
San Francisco’s commercial and residential streets are also highly tagged up, with every neighborhood except one—Visitacion Valley—reporting high levels of graffiti last year. The issue is once again worse in commercial areas, of which 71% said they had severe or moderate graffiti.
“In terms of actual counts of graffiti observed, there were about 10 times (160,000 vs. 16,000 respectively) as many instances of graffiti reported in the Key Commercial Areas survey in comparison to the Citywide sample,” the report said.
And San Francisco’s favorite cleanliness fixation, human or animal feces, continues to be a sore spot for the city: Almost half of the surveyed commercial areas observed feces. Citywide, that figure was just 30%.
San Francisco’s POOPOCALYPSE comes amid a staggering commercial office vacancy rateas a combination of pandemic-era work-from-home policies, and people fleeing the city’s notorious violence and poo-covered streets have made the once-thriving city into a ghost town.
Nevertheless, based on HUD data, here are the cities with the highest homeless population in the US:
☆ New York City. Homeless Population: 77,943. …
☆ Los Angeles City. Homeless Population: 63,706. …
☆ Seattle. Homeless Population: 11,751. …
☆ San Jose. Homeless Population: 9,605. …
☆ San Francisco. Homeless Population: 8,124. …
☆ San Diego: 4,801
Four of the top 6 cities are in California.
☪ San Francisco earns its name as the gay mecca of the world
Like the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah of old, Oakland and San Francisco may soon have their day of reckoning but it won’t be coming from the heavens above – it will be destruction dealt from deep within the bowls of the earth – the mega-quake!
☆ ‘One of The Largest Human Experiments in History’ Was Conducted on Unsuspecting Residents of San Francisco
💭My Note: It’s amazing. It took them twenty-two years to catch this criminal?! Even in South Africa?! Well, better late than never!
The United States, which was willing to offer a reward of five million dollars, supports Isaias Afwerki/Abdella-Hassan, Left Revolutionist Ahmed Ali, Debre Zion and their allies, who massacred more than one million Christian Ethiopians, and wants to free them from their crimes. The same monsters who massacred more than a million innocents in Ethiopia – worse than Rwanda – are living in Addis Ababa, Asmara and Mekelle. European, American and Asian authorities visit and reward these criminals officially. Isn’t it because they all had planned this genocide and carried out the horrendous massacres together?! The evil world turned upside down!
💭 Fulgence Kayishema, a former police officer accused of ordering the killing of some 2,000 Tutsis who were seeking refuge in a church during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, has been arrested in South Africa, a UN war crimes tribunal and South African police said on Thursday.
Fulgence Kayishema was arrested on Wednesday in South Africa, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT), which was set up by the United Nations, said.
Kayishema, who is believed to be in his early 60s, had assumed a false identity and gone by the name Donatien Nibashumba, South African police added.
He was captured in a joint operation by the tribunal’s fugitive tracking team and South African authorities following an investigation that had tracked him across several African countries, including Mozambique and Eswatini, since his indictment in 2001.
The United States had offered a $5 million (£4 million) reward for information leading to Kayishema’s arrest through its Rewards for Justice program. He was eventually captured at a vineyard in Paarl, a small town in a wine-making region about 30 miles east of Cape Town.
More than 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda’s genocide, which took place over the course of three months in 1994.