The Jim Bakker Show

Cris Putnam, Morningside remembers…

Cris Putnam June 15th, 1965 - March 1, 2017

by Kami Klein

Morningside was saddened to hear of the loss of Cris David Putnam. Cris and Tom Horn have graced the stage of Morningside and The Jim Bakker Show several times. Cris passed away unexpectedly on Wednesday evening March 1, 2017 at the age of 51.

As a multiple times bestselling Christian author, he was often times featured in major media and was an accomplished apologist and theologian. We all can agree that his works will continue to inform and inspire others to seek answers to the supernatural events of this world until Christ’s return.

Tom Horn and Cris Putnam at our July 4th celebration!

Our prayers are with his wife, Michelle, his friends and loving family as they mourn the loss of someone so dear to them.
SkyWatch TV will be broadcasting a tribute to Cris in the days ahead.

Tens of thousands flood into Sudan from famine-hit South Sudan

A woman waits to be registered prior to a food distribution carried out by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in Thonyor, Leer state, South Sudan.

KHARTOUM (Reuters) – More than 31,000 South Sudanese refugees – mostly women and children – have crossed the border into Sudan this year, fleeing famine and conflict, the United Nations refugee agency said on Monday.

The United Nations declared famine last week in parts of South Sudan’s Unity State, with about 5.5 million people expected to have no reliable source of food by July.

“Initial expectations were that 60,000 refugees may arrive through 2017, but in the first two months alone, over 31,000 refugees arrived,” a statement from the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Khartoum said.

More than a million people have fled South Sudan since a civil war erupted in 2013 after President Salva Kiir’ fired Vice President Riek Machar. Fighting between government forces and Machar-led rebels has caused the largest mass exodus of any conflict in central Africa since the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Women and children wait to be registered prior to a food distribution carried out by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in Thonyor, Leer state, South Sudan, February 26, 2017. REUTERS/Siegfried Modola

Some 328,339 South Sudanese refugees have sought refuge in Sudan, including about 131,000 in 2016, many exhausted, malnourished and ill, having walked for days. More than 80 percent of the latest arrivals were women and children.

The fighting has uprooted more than 3 million people and the U.N. says continuing displacement presented “heightened risks of prolonged (food) underproduction into 2018”. In the fighting, food warehouses have been looted and aid workers killed.

South Sudan is rich in oil resources. But, six years after independence from neighbouring Sudan, there are only 200 km (120 miles) of paved roads in a nation with an area of 619,745 square km (239,285 square miles).

(Reporting by Khalid Abdelaziz; Writing by Ahmed Aboulenein; Editing by Louise Ireland)

One dead after man drives into crowd in Germany, no sign of terrorism: authorities

By Andreas Burger

HEIDELBERG, Germany (Reuters) – A man died and two other people were injured after a 35-year-old German man drove into a crowd standing near a bakery in the southwestern town of Heidelberg on Saturday, but the authorities said there were no indications that it was a terrorist attack.

The 73-year-old man who died in hospital from his injuries was also German. The two other people injured, a 32-year-old Austrian man and a 29-year-old woman from Bosnia and Herzegovina, also received hospital treatment but were then discharged, police and prosecutors said in a statement.

“Based on investigations so far, there are no signs of a terrorist motive,” they said.

According to the statement, the suspect was seen getting out of the car with a knife and was later tracked down to an old swimming pool. He was taken to a hospital in Heidelberg having been shot by police while being arrested, leaving him seriously injured.

He has since been operated on but nothing further is known about the current state of his health, the police and prosecutors said.

Regional newspaper Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung said the suspect was not fit to be questioned.

Police spokesman Heiko Kranz said experts were gathering evidence such as DNA traces and fingerprints and examining the contents of the car, adding that the suspect would be interviewed if he was fit to be questioned.

Investigations by the public prosecutors’ office in Heidelberg and the town’s criminal police were continuing, police said.

The Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung newspaper said the suspect had stopped at a red traffic light and when it turned green put his foot down before hitting the group of people at high speed and smashing into a pillar.

The German authorities are on high alert after a failed Tunisian asylum-seeker drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin on Dec. 19, killing 12 people.

(Reporting by Michelle Martin, Andreas Kenner and Andreas Burger; Writing by Michelle Martin; Editing by Greg Mahlich)

California faces more rain, snow as deadly storm moves south

People with umbrellas walk along street in Los Angeles

(Reuters) – California was bracing on Saturday for another wave of torrential rain as well as heavy snow as a massive storm triggered flooding, mudslides and power outages and killed two people, officials said.

The National Weather Service warned that rain totals could reach 10 inches (25 cm) in parts of southern California and 2 feet (60 cm) of snow in higher areas to the east as the storm continues to roll through the region.

The severe storm has brought California its heaviest rainfall in six years and comes after months of wet weather that has dramatically eased a years-long drought in the key agricultural state.

The rain and melting snowpack also are threatening to undermine a spillway at one of the largest dams in the country. Some 188,000 residents were evacuated from the area earlier this week.

Utility crews were working to restore electricity to more than 78,000 customers affected by power outages throughout the Los Angeles area.

Early on Saturday, an evacuation order remained in effect for 180 homes in Duarte, a city about 20 miles (32 km) east of Los Angeles, because of fears of mudslides.

One man died after he was electrocuted by a downed wire, the Los Angeles Fire Department said, adding that it had responded to 150 reports of downed wires on Friday. Another person was found dead in a submerged vehicle in Victorville, about 100 miles east of Los Angeles, fire officials said on Twitter.

A woman was injured when the car she was in fell into a 20-foot sinkhole in Studio City on Friday night. A second car fell into the sinkhole after the woman was rescued, an ABC affiliate reported.

Local television news also showed video footage of a San Bernardino County fire truck tumbling over the side of a freeway as the road gave out.

“All firefighters confirmed safe. The lane under the fire engine has failed, and the engine has gone over the side,” the San Bernardino County Fire Department said on Twitter.

Amtrak railroad service was suspended for trains between the cities of Oxnard and San Luis Obispo in the central and southern areas of the state due to extreme weather conditions, according to the transportation service’s website.

In higher areas of eastern California and western Nevada, snowfall and wind gusts of up to 50 mph (80 kph) were in the forecast until Saturday night, the National Weather Service said.

“This will make travel hazardous or impossible,” the service said in an advisory.

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Milwaukee Editing by Ed Osmond and Paul Simao)

Baghdad car bomb kills 51 as Islamic State escalates insurgency

People and Iraq forces gather around car bombing sight

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – A car packed with explosives blew up on Thursday in southern Baghdad, killing at least 51 people and wounding 55, security and medical sources said, in the deadliest such attack in Iraq this year.

Islamic State, which is on the defensive after losing control of eastern Mosul to a U.S.-backed Iraqi military offensive, claimed responsibility for the bombing in an online statement.

As it cedes territory captured in a 2014 offensive across northern and western Iraq, the ultra-hardline group has stepped up insurgent strikes on government areas, particularly in the capital Baghdad.

Security sources said the vehicle which blew up on Thursday was parked in a crowded street full of garages and used car dealers, in Hayy al-Shurta, a Shi’ite district in the southwest of the city.

The death toll could climb further as many of the wounded are in critical condition, a doctor said.

The bombing is the second to hit car markets this week, suggesting the group has found it easier to leave vehicles laden with explosives in places where hundreds of other vehicles are parked.

A suicide bomber detonated a pick-up truck on Wednesday in Sadr City, a poor Shi’ite suburb in the east of the capital, killing at least 15 people. That explosion took place in a street full of used car dealers.

U.S.-backed Iraqi forces have dislodged Islamic State from most of the cities it captured in 2014 and 2015. The militants also control parts of Syria.

Iraqi government forces last month captured eastern Mosul and are now preparing an offensive on the western side that remains under the militants’ control. The city is divided in two halves by the Tigris river.

(Reporting by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by Dominic Evans and Alison Williams)

Chicago police push for community assistance after deaths of three children

Chicago Police Department coordinator trying to bring community together

By Timothy Mclaughlin

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Glen Brooks, a Chicago Police Department area coordinator, stood in front of a sometimes hostile crowd for the third time this week, calling on the community to help curb the city’s gun violence.

“There is an evil out here, if we do not organize and become powerful it will continue to spread,” he said Thursday night, speaking in the parking lot of an auto parts store on the city’s West Side.

“It will continue to take our young men and turn them into something no parent could ever imagine.”

In the wake of three fatal shootings of young children — aged 2, 11 and 12 — in recent days, the department held a series of interventions aimed at convincing those in violent neighborhoods to become more involved.

The police also want to overcome years of mistrust that has led to hostility with the city’s minority communities, which see the police as having used excessive force against its members for years.

Discriminatory policing practices in Chicago’s minority neighborhoods have “eroded CPD’s ability to effectively prevent crime,” a January report from the Department of Justice said. The rate of solved murders in Chicago regularly lags the national average.

Neighborhoods on the city’s South and West Sides, where the three children were shot this week, are impoverished and plagued by unemployment.

Last year, Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city, had a surge in violence that sent murders to 762, the highest since 1996.

The children who died this week were three of the 74 people murdered so far this year, a decrease from 82 in the same period last year, according to police. The number of shootings has ticked up to 330 from 324 in the same period last year.

Police, and community activists, point to the arrest of Antwan Jones, 19, who turned himself in and was charged with first-degree murder in the killing of Takiya Holmes, 11, as an example of how quickly cases can be closed if people are willing to work with law enforcement.

“We need the community to help us,” Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said after Jones’ arrest. “In this case, they stepped up.”

Police were assisted by community activist Andrew Holmes, who worked with other groups and spoke to Jones’ mother in an effort to convince him to turn himself in.

“They are not our enemy,” Holmes said of the police in an interview with Reuters.

(Reporting by Timothy Mclaughlin in Chicago; Editing by Dan Grebler)

Multiple suicide bombing targets Nigerian refugees, Boko Haram blamed

people walk at the site of a bombing attack

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters) – Seven suspected Boko Haram militants blew themselves on the outskirts of a northeast Nigerian city on Friday, a local aid agency said, in an attack witnesses said targeted refugees preparing to return to their home villages.

The bombing took place outside Maiduguri, the population center at the heart of a government campaign to eradicate the Islamist group, whose more than seven-year insurgency has killed 15,000 people and forced some two million from their homes.

The Borno State Emergency Management Agency said eight members of a local militia, the civilian Joint Task Force, were wounded in the attack, which underscored Boko Haram’s ability to continue to operate despite the government’s insistence it has crushed the group.

Witnesses told Reuters the attackers detonated their bombs

near a large refugee camp, outside which crowds of displaced people were gathering around trucks to form convoys before trying to return home.

In December, President Muhammadu Buhari said the capture of a key camp marked the “final crushing” of Boko Haram in its last enclave in Sambisa forest, once the group’s stronghold.

But since then the group, which split into two factions last year, has stepped up its attacks.

One Boko Haram faction is led by Abubakar Shekau from the Sambisa forest and the other, allied to jihadist group Islamic State, and led by Abu Musab al-Barnawi, based in the Lake Chad region.

(Reporting by Ahmed Kingimi, Adewale Kolawole and Ola Lanre in Maiduguri; Writing by Paul Carsten; editing by John Stonestreet)

Plane strike hits Yemen mourners, killing 9 women, 1 child: residents

Yemen rubble after air strike that killed women and child

SANAA (Reuters) – Warplanes of the Saudi-led coalition struck a house north of Yemen’s capital where a crowd of mourners was gathered, residents said on Thursday, killing nine women and a child and injuring dozens.

The Saudi-led coalition said it was investigating reports of civilian casualties in the area.

The air strike hit the house of a local tribal leader in Ashira, a village north of Sanaa, on Wednesday night, a resident told Reuters. Mourners had gathered there to offer condolences after a woman died.

“People heard the sound of planes and started running from the house but then the bombs hit the house directly. The roof collapsed. Blood was everywhere,” a second resident of Ashira, who gave his name as Hamid Ali, told a Reuters cameraman.

Pictures published by local media showed tribesmen searching through the rubble of a destroyed house said to belong to Mohammed al-Nakaya, a tribal leader allied with Yemen’s Houthi movement.

One showed a man kneeling in the dust cradling the body of an elderly woman.

It was not immediately possible to verify the authenticity of the pictures.

“We are aware of media reports that Houthi rebels are claiming that Yemeni civilians were killed in an air raid overnight near Sanaa,” the coalition said in statement.

“There has been fighting between Yemeni armed forces and rebels in this area in recent days. We are investigating the reports.”

In October the alliance of mainly Gulf Arab states was heavily criticized after launching an air strike on a funeral gathering in Sanaa that killed 140 people, according to one U.N. estimate.

The death toll from that strike was one of the highest in any single incident since the alliance began military operations in March 2015 to try to restore the administration of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who the Houthis ousted.

The White House said at the time it might consider cutting its support to the Saudi-led campaign which has been providing air support for Hadi’s forces in a civil war that has killed more than 10,000 people and displaced millions.

The alliance, which says it does not target civilians, blamed the October funeral attack on incorrect information it said it received from the Yemeni military that armed Houthi leaders were in the area.

(Reporting by Mohammed Ghobari; Writing by Tom Finn and Sami Aboudi,; Editing by Toby Chopra and John Stonestreet)

Two dead in Pakistan as suicide bomber targets judges

Volunteers search for remains in vehicle that was truck in bomb attack

By Mehreen Zahra-Malik

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – A suicide bomber attacked a van carrying judges in the Pakistani city of Peshawar on Wednesday, killing the driver and a passerby, police said, the second attack of the day in a new surge in militant violence.

Security has improved in Pakistan over the past few years but a spate of attacks in recent days, and a threat by a hardline militant faction to unleash a new campaign against the government, has raised fears of bloodshed.

“A suicide bomber on a motor bike rammed into an official van in which some judges were traveling,” senior superintendent of Peshawar police, Sajjad Khan, told media.

He said three female judges and one male judge had been taken to a nearby hospital while the driver of the van and a passerby had been killed.

The attack took place in a wealthy neighborhood of the northwestern city, where Taliban gunmen attacked a military-run school in December 2014 and killed 134 children and 19 adults.

Former cricket star Imran Khan, Pakistan’s main opposition leader, was due to visit the nearby hospital. Media reported that he was unharmed.

Khan’s party rules Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of which Peshawar is capital.

In a separate attack on Wednesday, a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a government office in the northwestern Mohmand Agency, killing five people.

There was no immediate claim for the Peshawar attack but the Jamaat-ur-Ahrar, a faction of the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility for the Mohmand blast.

The same group claimed an attack in the city of Lahore on Monday in which 13 people, five of them policemen, were killed.

The group said the Lahore attack was the beginning of a new campaign against the government, security forces, the judiciary and secular political parties.

Separately on Monday, a bomb squad commander was killed along with another policeman while they were trying to defuse a bomb in the southwestern city of Quetta.

The spate of attacks has underlined the threat militants pose to the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif despite an army offensive launched in 2014 to push them out of their northwestern strongholds.

Pakistan had announced a 20-point National Action Plan after the Peshawar school massacre in 2014, the main thrusts of which included expanding counter-terrorism raids, secret military courts and the resumption of hangings.

(Additional reporting by Jibran Ahmad in Peshawar; Writing by Mehreen Zahra-Malik; Editing by Robert Birsel)

Turkey arrests Frenchman suspected of helping plan New Year nightclub attack

memorial for those killed in Turkey nigh club attack

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkish authorities have arrested a Frenchman suspected of helping plan a New Year’s Day shooting in an Istanbul nightclub which killed 39 people, the state-run Anadolu news agency said on Tuesday.

The man, a 22-year-old French citizen of Turkish descent, was caught in Istanbul, Anadolu said. A police official said he had been detained weeks ago and formally charged last week. His detention had not previously been made public.

Islamic State claimed the nightclub attack and said it was revenge for Turkish intervention in Syria. A court on Saturday remanded in custody Uzbek national Abdulgadir Masharipov, who is accused of carrying out the shooting.

The private Dogan news agency said the French suspect had lived in France since 2009, but it was not clear when he came to Turkey.

He was caught carrying the rental contract of the Istanbul house where Masharipov was staying when he was captured on Jan. 16, Dogan said. It said authorities had been seeking the Frenchman over alleged links to Islamic State.

NATO member Turkey is part of the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State and launched an incursion into Syria in August to drive the jihadist group and Kurdish militia fighters away from its borders.

Islamic State has been blamed for at least half a dozen attacks on civilian targets in Turkey over the past 18 months, including a triple suicide bombing and gun attack on Istanbul’s main airport last June, which killed 42 people.

Authorities on Tuesday prepared an indictment for the airport attack, demanding for the 45 suspects to be sentenced to jail time between 2,132 years and 3,342 years, Anadolu said.

(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk; Writing by Tuvan Gumrukcu; Editing by Daren Butler, Nick Tattersall and Alison Williams)

Sign up for Jim Bakker Show