U.S. troops strengthen their position inside Syria.
California flooding could bring on the next big San Andreas earthquake.
And President Trump accuses Barack Obama of having his offices wiretapped during the campaign.
It's Skywatch TV for Monday, March 6, 2017.
I'm Derek Gilbert.
First up, pro-Pope Francis Cardinals inside the Vatican want him to resign to prevent
a schism in the Roman Catholic Church.
They're looking to replace him with Cardinal Pietro Perolan, which is interesting because
he would be Peter the Roman in the Prophecy of the Popes then.
They fear that Pope Francis' reforms will cause a schism more damaging than the Reformation.
More damaging from a Roman Catholic perspective, that is.
Then expert Antonio Sochi, a prominent Roman Catholic journalist in Italy, says that the
curial faction of the Holy See that backed the election of Jorge Bergoglio, Pope Francis,
is now run out of patience.
And it's interesting to note that this faction that supported the election of Pope Francis
is not the conservative faction that is opposed to his reforms.
This bears watching, we could see the resignation of two Popes within our lifetime, something
that hasn't happened in hundreds of years if not ever.
Meanwhile, in England, two street preachers have been found guilty of intentionally alarming
the public with open air preaching.
That's what good preaching is supposed to do, you know, make you realize you're a sinner
in need of salvation.
This verdict was heard in the magistrates court in Bristol, handed down by a judge against
Michael Overd and Michael Stockwell, who is from the United States.
Stockwell Overd is from the UK.
They were arrested last July and accused of causing a disturbance, engaging in antisocial
behavior because some of the listeners were offended by their speech against Islam, Buddhism,
homosexuality and divorce.
The prosecutor told the court some of the statements made by the preachers might have
been fine in the King James Bible translated in 1611, but not acceptable in 2016.
Gang members in Houston who had a satanic shrine in an apartment there are accused of
killing a girl to appease an insulted demon.
These are allegedly members of the gang MS-13, which began as special forces troops from the
Mexican military trained by American soldiers.
These gang members shot the girl in the head and chest as a sole sacrifice to a demonic
force they called the Beast.
22 year old Miguel Angel Alvarez Flores known as Diabolico and 18 year old Diego, Alex
Hernandez Rivera laughed as charges were read against them in court last week.
According to prosecutors, the members of MS-13 originally from El Salvador allegedly
kidnapped the school girl in early February, held her in the apartment in Houston where
she was repeatedly raped.
After four days, girl was taken to a different apartment where six gang members lived and
where Flores kept this makeshift shrine to this demon.
Authorities say she was held for two weeks against her will, applied with drugs and alcohol
to keep her disoriented and then sexually assaulted repeatedly by the men.
Detectives are told by the girl that there was a second girl in the apartment known only
as Genesis.
After she lashed out and destroyed the shrine, Flores said the Beast required a sacrifice.
When the 14 year old girl woke up the next day, Genesis was gone.
She was found later shot in the head and chest.
Police say that Rivera has confessed to the shooting.
The presidency of Donald Trump, never boring, got more interesting again on Saturday morning
when the president tweeted out that his predecessor Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump towers
in October before the election.
Trump compared the activity to Nixon's bugging of the Watergate Hotel and actually if this
is true, this is like Watergate on steroids and Democrats really need to recognize this.
It was not immediately clear what evidence President Trump was referring to, but there
was a report published by Breitbart News on Friday night regarding a claim by radio host
Mark Levin that Obama has executed a silent coup using police state tactics.
Now radio talk show host Laura Ingram on Monday morning reviewed news reports from January
that indicated that there was in fact an investigation by the FBI into alleged contact between members
of Trump's advisory team and members of the Russian government that included wiretapped
information.
It's also possible that since President Trump is, you know, the president, he might actually
have some information that's not available to the media, which for the most part is spinning
this as President Trump being paranoid.
The truth of the matter, though, is that President Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama,
and his predecessor, George W. Bush, they basically wiretapped all of us.
All of our telephone communications, email, basically being routed through the National
Security Agency.
They cast a very wide net.
In fact, there was a lawsuit that was filed during the Bush presidency against the NSA.
Barack Obama campaigned against it as a violation of privacy.
Then when he became president, his Justice Department defended the NSA and AT&T in this
lawsuit.
And the suit was dismissed because the judge said that because the wiretap included everybody,
no one person, no individual had standing to file a lawsuit.
The fact that it's unconstitutional, notwithstanding.
We'll see what happens with this.
Just as a reminder to those of us who were pleased at the outcome of the presidential
election, that there are powers and principalities behind the figureheads that we sent to Congress,
what are the Republicans hiding in their replacement for Obamacare?
I mean, you remember when Nancy Pelosi said we have to pass the bill so we can find out
what's in it?
Apparently the Republicans in Congress are now adopting the same strategy with their
Obamacare replacement.
Not even members of the United States Senate are apparently allowed to see this legislation.
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who wants to just overthrow the whole thing, and I agree
with him on that point, has made repeated attempts to view the legislation that he is
calling Obamacare light, and he has so far been unable to get his hands on a copy of
the bill.
He even went so far as to wheel a copy machine to where this bill is supposedly being kept,
but he was denied access.
So just a reminder that we shouldn't put our trust in government because there is only
one ruler who we can absolutely trust to keep his word, and thank God that you and me as
Christians are members of a theocracy.
I'm talking about God in case you didn't.
You knew what I meant.
In Syria, where the United States was not supposed to have any boots on the ground, American
soldiers are strengthening positions around the Syrian town of Manbij that's northern
Syria east of Aleppo.
Concerns are growing with the deployment of U.S. soldiers there that fighting could break
out between the various militias on the ground and Syrian and Turkish armed forces.
And of course, American troops are kind of in there as a buffer, doesn't mean they won't
get shot at, but they're there to try to keep all these squabbling factions apart.
Photographs of U.S. troops in striker vehicles and armored Humvees flying the American flag
popped up on social media over the weekend.
Spokesman for the U.S. military said the coalition has increased its force presence in and around
Manbij to deter any hostile action against the city and its civilians, to enhance local
governments, governance rather, and to ensure that there is no persistent YPG presence.
The YPG is the Kurdish militia.
And as we've reported before, the government of Turkey has a real problem with the YPG
holding any territory along its border with Syria.
This is a combustible mix.
All it will take is a single spark to touch this off and embroil American troops in a
Syrian civil war.
I ask this during the Obama presidency.
I ask it again now, what possible benefit to the American people comes from this particular
foreign policy adventure.
Speaking of Syria, Russian special operations forces and the Russian aerospace forces, Air
Force, have played a key role in liberating Palmyra from the Islamic State for a second
time now.
This was payback because Russian special forces were in Palmyra and got caught off guard by
ISIS in December, forced out of the city.
So they've retaken the city and the Kremlin now say that they will move further east toward
the besieged city of Deir ez-Zor.
Coming up, protecting hacking tools used by the national security agency apparently more
important than sending a prominent child pornographer to jail.
Straight ahead on Skywatch TV.
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A suspect in a child porn case is going to walk because the government says it's more
important to keep its investigative techniques secret than to send this guy to jail.
Rather than share the classified techniques investigators used to locate a child porn
suspect, federal prosecutors in Washington state have dropped all charges against a
man accused of accessing Playpen, which is a notorious website that serves up child porn.
The case is one of about 200 cases nationwide that are raising questions about appropriate
limits on the government's ability to hack criminal suspects.
Federal prosecutor in this case in Washington wrote Friday, the government must now choose
between disclosure of classified information and dismissal of an indictment.
Disclosure is not currently an option.
And so the suspect is going to walk.
All charges dropped.
The Department of Justice is currently prosecuting more than 135 people nationwide whom they
believe accessed this illegal website.
But to find these people, federal authorities seized Playpen and operated the child porn
site for 13 days before they shut it down.
During that period, the FBI used an exploit of something called TOR.
TOR is a process by which users of the Internet can obscure their IP addresses so that investigators
can't find out where you are.
The IP address of your computer when you're online basically identifies it and where it
is.
By anonymizing it with something like TOR, you can hide your identity from people who
you don't want to know what you're doing.
But by operating the site and using what investigators call an exploit, what others, IT experts
call malware, they were able to identify these computers and begin the prosecution.
But defense attorneys in the discovery phase want to know the source code that was used
to identify their clients.
Last year, a U.S. district court ordered the government to turn over the source code in
this particular case in Washington state.
Since that order last spring, the government classified the code and so now the discovery
for the defense attorneys in these other 135 cases, they're out of luck.
In this one case, in order to avoid disclosing the tool used and disclosing the method prosecutors
use to find these people, they're just dropping the charges.
Speaking of tech and IT, we have to ask now, based on interesting information you can see
by this handy little chart here, whether major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington
Post are buying clicks from China, where it's known that people will be paid to just sit
and click on certain websites in order to change statistics, viewing statistics for
advertisers.
The reason we ask, you look at the traffic, this is for the New York Times, the spike
there began in December, this past December.
Traffic from China for New York Times readership has gone from almost nothing to half of all
online readers in the last two months.
Last week, the New York Times published an article crediting Donald Trump and his incredible
upset victory in the presidential election for generating more subscribers to the New
York Times online than in the last three months of 2016, than in the entire year 2015, claiming
276,000 new digital-only subscribers.
Yeah, the Times is doing so well that it's actually vacating eight floors of its headquarters
building in New York so they can rent it out and generate some income.
While the subscriber count has allegedly increased, as you'll see in this chart, the viewership,
readership online didn't really start going up until December after the election.
So Trump couldn't have been responsible.
And here's the other bit of information that's interesting.
Taking a traffic by country, viewership from China went from 5% of all-site traffic through
most of the year to 49% in two months.
Now, bear in mind that the New York Times' website and the Apple App Store apps for the
New York Times have been banned in China.
But the New York Times' owner is Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, who is not happy with President
Trump's immigration policy.
And the Chinese government is not happy with President Trump's new policy of, well, let's
say abandoning the one China policy that the U.S. government has sort of had unofficially
for years by being friendly towards Taiwan, which China considers part of its, in just
a rebel province.
So it makes you wonder, because the Washington Post has also shown a very similar traffic
pattern over the last six months or so.
No Chinese readers until December, and then suddenly, boom, makes you wonder if the Chinese
government is helping out the voices of the opposition, because the New York Times and
the Washington Post are basically the voice of official Washington, in other words, open
borders and free trade.
Experts are asking whether the flooding in this very wet winter in California may trigger
the big one.
Geologists have been warning of the risks from melting snowpack and rising reservoirs
across the state.
And they've been worried about this for some time anyway, because it's been so long since
the San Andreas Fault really triggered a major quake, 1857, really the last time.
The magnitude 7.9 quake then.
And since then, the tectonic plates that meet along the San Andreas Fault, that's the red
line, move at about two inches a year.
Which means that since that last big quake, the two plates have moved about 26 feet relative
to one another, adding additional stresses on those two plates that will only be relieved
when the big one finally hits.
Los Angeles Times reporting over the weekend that the recent flooding in California has
some scientists worried that the additional weight of water in reservoirs may cause plates
to shift or increasing pressure created from refilling underground aquifers might reduce
friction by pushing the plates apart, thus allowing them to move more easily.
We'll wait and see what happens there.
Dozens of students in a Minnesota school district were ordered out of class last week Wednesday.
Rochester school district.
It said 71 students failed to provide documentation showing that they received mandatory vaccines.
The public school board in Rochester voted last week to enforce a state law requiring
students be immunized or officially exempt for reasons such as health or religion.
Students had to submit the proper paperwork to the school district to prove that they
were exempt by Wednesday.
Those who didn't, not allowed in school.
Some of the vaccines required by the state of Minnesota include measles, mumps, chicken
pox and tetanus.
It sanctioned marriage, could be a thing of the past in Alabama, a bill that would abolish
marriage licenses in the state and nullify basically both sides in the contentious argument
over marriage.
Man and woman or man and man, woman and woman and possibly at that point, you know, whoever
could be a thing of the past as well if this bill passes in the state of Alabama.
The legislation would abolish all requirements to obtain a marriage license except people
between the ages of 16 and 18 still need parental approval.
You'd still need a blood test so it could not be relative, related or already married.
But other than that, civil religious ceremony in front of a probate judge and the state
would only recognize the legal contract signed by two parties entering into the marriage.
This is a lesson for Christians.
If we want the government to sanction Christian morality by putting state sanction on a marriage
contract under the U.S. Constitution, we have to be aware that the other side will turn
that around and unless the government starts making decisions about what is and what is
not an official religion, best course of action may be just to get the government out of things
like marriage altogether.
Back to Syria for a minute.
This is actually Iraq.
This is an interesting discovery, unintentional discovery, but interesting and nonetheless.
The palace of the Assyrian king Sennacherib was discovered beneath the tomb of the prophet
Jonah or at least what was believed to be Jonah's final resting place in the city of Mosul.
And it happened because the Islamic State tried to blow it up.
According to tradition, this was the burial site of Jonah in Mosul.
It was destroyed by ISIS in July of 2014 after they took the city.
Iraqi forces liberated Mosul just a few weeks ago.
Archaeologists went in and found that not only had ISIS dynamited the tomb of Jonah, but they
had tunneled underneath the tomb and emptied out valuable artifacts to sell on the black
market.
However, in so doing, ISIS tunnelers inadvertently revealed a 23-hundred-year-old palace belonging
to Sennacherib who was described in the Bible, mentioned in the Bible for his campaign against
the southern kingdom of Judah during the reign of King Hezekiah.
During the reign of Sennacherib Nineveh, where of course Jonah preached and the city repented,
was one of the wealthiest cities in the world, Sennacherib ruled between 705 and 681 BC.
Later the palace expanded by a son, Esserheden, who ruled until 669 BC.
The palace destroyed when Nineveh was sacked in 612 BC.
And finally, in Russia, the government there may ban Disney's live-action film Beauty and
the Beast because of the inclusion of a gay character in the plot.
This is a remake of the cartoon version that you may remember.
Back in 2013, the Russian Duma passed a law that prohibits gay propaganda aimed at children.
The Tely Milanov, a lawmaker with the ruling United Russia Party, has asked the culture
minister to view the movie before it's released there later this month.
But if the film has elements of homosexual propaganda, he wants it banned.
The remake features Disney's first openly gay character, Lafou, who is described by
the film's director as somebody who one day wants to be Gaston, the villain, and on another
day wants to kiss Gaston, not your father's Disney.
And finally, you may be aware of news that broke over the internet over the weekend,
and that is the passing of our friend and colleague, Chris Putnam.
Chris was a member of the team here for a time last year, passed away Wednesday evening
at the age of 51.
We really don't know much about the details.
In fact, Tom Horn published a short piece at SkywatchTV.com Sunday morning.
But if you've read that piece, then you know everything that we know about his passing.
We'll have more to say as we remember Chris Putnam on SkywatchTV later in the week.
But he will be missed, and our prayers are with Shelley and with the Putnam family.
You can find us online at SkywatchTV.com.
You'll find my website, interviews that I conduct outside of SkywatchTV online at DerekPGilbert.com.
And we thank you for watching as we keep watching.
I'm Derek Gilbert, and this is SkywatchTV.
