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
🧟 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.
💭 As an Ethiopian, this is probably the first time I have fully agreed with a decision coming out of Buckingham Palace. Please, don’t send him, and do not give money to the Addis Ababa regime!
The current regime in Ethiopia is not Ethiopian at all. It is not a regime that represents Ethiopia known during the reign of Prince Alemayehu. Today, a fascist Oromo regime reigns in Ethiopia. In the last two years alone, this barbaric regime massacred up to two million Orthodox Christians of northern Ethiopia, who are the relatives of Prince Alemayehu. The regime buried many of their corpses in mass graves with graders, and Hyenas and Vultures till today scavenge on corpses of many. Up to two hundred thousand women, including nuns and little girs were brutally raped by the soldiers of this regime. Equally unfortunate is this war criminal Oromo regime is supported by the West and the East ; by Britain and USA, by Russia and Ukraine, China and Pakistan, Israel and Iran, Turkey and Arab countries. Another thing that makes me angry is that Western media such as the Daily Mail do not try to provide their readers with the proper information about this issue, even if not as much as the Ukraine war. When they discussed the decision of the Buckingham Palace about Prince Alemayehu, they should have brought up the dire situation Ethiopia is in today. The fact that Britain do not hand over the remains of Prince Alemayehu to the fascist Oromo regime, which desperately needs money to buy drones, is highly supported.
💭 Buckingham Palace has said removing the body would affect the other buried
Buckingham Palace has refused to return the body of an Ethiopian prince who was buried at Windsor Castle in the 19th century.
A descendant of Prince Alemayehu – an orphan who was adored and supported financially by Queen Victoria and died at the age of 18 – has demanded that his remains be returned to Ethiopia.
However, Buckingham Palace has maintained that removing the body would affect others buried in the catacombs of St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle.
The Palace said that chapel authorities empathised with the need to honour Prince Alemayehu’s memory, but added they also had ‘the responsibility to preserve the dignity of the departed’.
It confirmed that in the past, the Royal Household ‘accommodated requests from Ethiopian delegations to visit’ the chapel.
Prince Alemayehu was brought to England after his father, Emperor Tewodros II killed himself as British forces stormed his mountain-top palace in northern Ethiopia in 1868.
The orphaned seven-year-old was adored by Queen Victoria and educated at Sandhurst military academy. But he tragically died at the age of 18 from pneumonia in 1879 and was buried in catacombs next to Windsor’s St George’s Chapel.
In 2019, the Queen refused to allow the repatriation of his bones, but in wake of a new book about his life campaigners have renewed calls to return them.
One of his descendants Fasil Minas told the BBC: ‘We want his remains back as a family and as Ethiopians because that is not the country he was born in’, and added ‘it was not right’ for him to be buried in the UK.
But a Buckingham Palace spokesman said: ‘It is very unlikely it would be possible to exhume the remains without disturbing the resting place of a substantial number of others in the vicinity [in the catacombs of St George’s Chapel].’
The statement added that the palace also had a ‘responsibility to preserve the dignity of the departed’.
Alamayu’s father, King Tewodros II, known as ‘Mad King Theodore’, had wanted to be friends with the British and wrote a letter to Queen Victoria in 1855.
After she failed to reply to that and a follow-up letter, Tewodros took the British consul and several missionaries hostage in a high mountain jail.
In retaliation, the Emperor held several Europeans, including members of the British consul, hostage.
An army of nearly 40,000 British troops were sent to rescue the 44 hostages. They lay siege in April 1868 to Tewodros’ mountain fortress at Maqdala in northern Ethiopia and emerged victorious.
As the successful mission neared its conclusion, Tewodros took his own life. Tewodros’s wife, Alamayu’s mother, died on her way down the mountain, leaving her son an orphan.
The British also plundered thousands of cultural and religious artefacts including gold crowns and necklaces, alongside the prince and his mother.
According to historian Andrew Heavens, this was done in order to keep them safe from the Tewodros’ enemies, who had been close to Maqdala.
Following his arrival in June 1868, he met the Queen at her holiday home on the Isle of Wight, off England’s South Coast. She later wrote in her diary that he was ‘a very pretty sight, a graceful boy with beautiful eyes and a nice nose and mouth, though the lips are slightly thick’.
Alamayu was swiftly put under the guardianship of Captain Tristram Charles Sawyer Speedy, who had accompanied the prince from Ethiopia.
Whilst the Queen had wanted him to remain on the Isle of Wight, he went first with Speedy to India before the Treasury ordered that he be properly educated.
He was sent to Cheltenham and Rugby and then on to Sandhurst, but struggled with his studies.
The prince caught pneumonia when he fell asleep outside one night. After refusing to eat, he passed away whilst living in Headingly, in Leeds.
After learning of his death, Victoria wrote: ‘It is too sad! All alone in a strange country, without a single person or relative belonging to him… His was no happy life, full of difficulties of every king.’
Near his burial spot is a plaque bearing the inscription: ‘I was a stranger and you took me in.’
The Ethiopian government first demanded the return of Alamayu’s remains in the 1990s. But Palace officials have previously insisted that they cannot recover them without disturbing those of others.
Campaigner Alula Pankhurst, who sits on Ethiopia’s cultural restitution committee, told The Times that the argument is just an ‘excuse for not dealing with it.’
‘Bringing this young man home means unearthing uncomfortable truths that people don’t want to think about.’
In 2019, Ethiopia’s ambassador to London, Fesseha Shawel Gebre, urged the Queen to consider how she would have felt if one of her relatives was buried in a foreign land.
‘Would she happily lie in bed every day, go to sleep, having one of her Royal Family members buried somewhere, taken as prisoner of war?’ he asked. ‘I think she wouldn’t.’
He insisted that the boy was ‘stolen’.
The Ethiopian government has previously said that it will repeat its demand at every meeting its ministers have with their British counterparts.
n 2007, the Ethiopian government wrote to the Queen requesting the return of his body so he could be buried beside his father.
‘Had he not been taken, had he not lost his father, he would have been the next king of Ethiopia,’ Mr Fesseha previously said.
The embassy claimed that a letter from the Queen’s private secretary said that she sympathised but there were concerns about disturbing the remains of others buried alongside him.
It is understood more than 40 bodies were buried in the catacombs between 1845 to 1887. It is claimed that it would therefore be impossible to identify and exhume his body.
Italy is suffering from extreme rainfall after weeks of drought.
The situation is assessed by the Italian authorities as “critical”.
Two people have died and thousands have been evacuated due to flooding in the north of the country.
Heavy rains have caused rivers to flood in the Emilia-Romagna region.
A high-risk regime has been introduced in the region.
Rivers literally flooded towns and villages.
People are forced to escape from the water on the roofs of buildings.
Heavy rains will not stop in the coming days.
‘It’s The End of The World’: Shell-shocked Italy struggles to come to terms with ‘apocalyptic’ tourist region floods that have devastated towns, killed at least eight and forced Italian F1 Grand Prix to be cancelled
At least eight people have died and thousands have been evacuated from holiday region in northern Italy
Desperate families have been forced to climb on to roofs of their homes in Italian region of Emilia-Romagna
This weekend’s Italian Emilia Romagna F1 Grand Prix has been cancelled due to the deadly floods
💭 Apocalyptic Italy Floods: At Least 8 Dead & Thousands Evacuated as Heavy Rains Inundate Northern Region
Italy Invited a Genocider, the Black Mussolini aka Ahmed Ali | Woe to Italy, Mount Etna is Boiling!
❖ 200.000 Orthodox Christian Women, children and nuns were Raped and abused by the fascist Oromo army of Abiy Ahmed, yet Italian PM Meloni & Black Mussolini aka Ahmed were on Their 2nd Date Holding Hands & Kissing
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Addis Ethiopia Weblog 