The Jim Bakker Show

Heroin use at 20-year high in U.S. drug ‘epidemic’, U.N. says

By Shadia Nasralla

VIENNA (Reuters) – A heroin “epidemic” is gripping the United States, where cheap supply has helped push the number of users to a 20-year high, increasing drug-related deaths, the United Nations said on Thursday.

According to the U.N.’s World Drug Report 2016, the number of heroin users in the United States reached around one million in 2014, almost three times as many as in 2003. Heroin-related deaths there have increased five-fold since 2000.

“There is really a huge epidemic (of) heroin in the U.S.,” said Angela Me, the chief researcher for the report which was released on Thursday.

“It is the highest definitely in the last 20 years,” Me said, adding that the trend was continuing.

The rise could be linked to U.S. legislation introduced in recent years which makes it harder to abuse prescription opioids such as oxicodone, a powerful painkiller that can have similar effects to heroin, Me said.

The law meant the texture of the pills was changed to make it more difficult to crush them and inject them into the blood stream, Me said.

“This has caused a partial shift from the misuse of these prescription opioids to heroin.”

Another reason for the increase in the use of heroin, which in the United States mainly comes from Mexico and Colombia, is greater supply that has depressed prices in recent years, Me said.

The United States has also seen a spike in deaths related to fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times more so than morphine, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Fentanyl has been named as the drug that killed pop singer Prince this year.

At least 207,000 deaths globally were drug-related in 2014, with heroin use and overdose-related deaths increasing sharply also over the last two years, according to the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

“Heroin continues to be the drug that kills the most people and this resurgence must be addressed urgently,” Yury Fedotov, the executive director of the UNODC, said.

U.S. President Barack Obama earlier this year asked Congress for $1.1 billion in new funding over two years to expand treatment for users of heroin and prescription painkillers.

(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

We Are At War (Day 1)

Rick Wiles discusses the modern war on Christianity and the true church with Pastor Jim and Lori Bakker. Day 1.

Continue reading →

U.N. council to meet on North Korea’s missile launches

North Korean leader watching missile test

By Michelle Nichols

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – The United Nations Security Council will meet on Wednesday to discuss North Korea’s latest ballistic missile launches, at the request of the United States and Japan, diplomats said.

French U.N. Ambassador Francois Delattre, president of the 15-member council for June, said the missile launches were an “unacceptable violation” of a U.N. ban. A senior U.N. official will brief the council, diplomats said.

“We want a quick and firm reaction of the Security Council on this,” said Delattre. “We hope that … we’ll have a press statement on this.”

North Korea launched what appeared to be an intermediate-range missile on Wednesday to a high altitude in the direction of Japan before it plunged into the sea, military officials said, a technological advance for the isolated state.

The launch came about two hours after a similar test failed, South Korea’s military said, and covered 400 km (250 miles), more than halfway towards the southwest coast of Japan’s main island of Honshu.

The tests are the latest in a string of demonstrations of military might that began in January with North Korea’s fourth nuclear test and included the launch of a long-range rocket in February.

North Korea has been under U.N. sanctions since 2006. In March, the Security Council imposed harsh new sanctions on the country.

(Writing by Louis Charbonneau; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

Chinese economic cyber-espionage plummets in U.S.: experts

By Joseph Menn and Jim Finkle

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – The Chinese government appears to be abiding by its September pledge to stop supporting the hacking of American trade secrets to help companies there compete, private U.S. security executives and government advisors said on Monday.

FireEye Inc, the U.S. network security company best known for fighting sophisticated Chinese hacking, said in a report released late Monday that breaches attributed to China-based groups had plunged by 90 percent in the past two years. The most dramatic drop came during last summer’s run-up to the bilateral agreement, it added.

FireEye’s Mandiant unit in 2013 famously blamed a specific unit of China’s Peoples Liberation Army for a major campaign of economic espionage.

Kevin Mandia, the Mandiant founder who took over last week as FireEye chief executive, said in an interview that several factors seemed to be behind the shift. He cited embarrassment from Mandiant’s 2013 report and the following year’s indictment of five PLA officers from the same unit Mandiant uncovered.

Prosecutors said the victims included U.S. Steel, Alcoa Inc and Westinghouse Electric. Mandia also cited the threat just before the agreement that the United States could impose sanctions on Chinese officials and companies.

“They all contributed to a positive result,” Mandia said.

A senior Obama administration official said the government was not yet ready to proclaim that China was fully complying with the agreement but said the new report would factor into its monitoring. “We are still doing an assessment,” said the official, speaking on condition he not be named.

The official added that a just-concluded second round of talks with China on the finer points of the agreement had gone well. He noted that China had sent senior leaders even after the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security pulled out because of the Orlando shootings.

China’s Foreign Ministry, the only government department to regularly answer questions from foreign reporters on the hacking issue, said China aimed to maintain dialogue on preventing and combating cyber-spying.

“We’ve expressed our principled position on many occasions,” ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a daily news briefing on Tuesday. “We oppose and crack down on commercial cyber-espionage activities in all forms.”

FireEye said that Chinese intrusions into some U.S. firms have continued, with at least two hacked in 2016. But while the hackers installed “back doors” to enable future spying, FireEye said it had seen no evidence that data was stolen.

Both hacked companies had government contracts, said FireEye analyst Laura Galante, noting that it was plausible that the intrusions were stepping stones toward gathering information on government or military people or projects, which remain fair game under the September accord.

FireEye and other security companies said that as the Chinese government-backed hackers dropped wholesale theft of U.S. intellectual property, they increased spying on political and military targets in other countries and regions, including Russia, the Middle East, Japan and South Korea.

Another security firm, CrowdStrike, has observed more Chinese state-supported hackers spying outside of the United States over the past year, company Vice President Adam Meyers said in an interview.

Targets include Russian and Ukrainian military targets, Indian political groups and the Mongolian mining industry, Meyers said.

FireEye and CrowdStrike said they were confident that the attacks are being carried out either directly by the Chinese government or on its behalf by hired contractors.

Since late last year there has been a flurry of new espionage activity against Russian government agencies and technology firms, as well as other targets in India, Japan and South Korea, said Kurt Baumgartner, a researcher with Russian security software maker Kaspersky Lab.

He said those groups use tools and infrastructure that depend on Chinese-language characters.

One of those groups, known as Mirage or APT 15, appears to have ended a spree of attacks on the U.S. energy sector and is now focusing on government and diplomatic targets in Russia and former Soviet republics, Baumgartner said.

(Reporting by Joseph Menn in San Francisco and Jim Finkle in Boston; Additional reporting by; Megha Rajagopalan in Beijing; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Richard Chang)

Supreme Court rejects challenge to state assault weapon bans

By Lawrence Hurley

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday left in place gun control laws in New York and Connecticut that ban military-style assault weapons like the one used in last week’s massacre at an Orlando nightclub, rejecting a legal challenge by gun rights advocates.

The court’s action underlined its reluctance to insert itself into the simmering national debate on gun control. The Supreme Court issued important rulings in gun cases in 2008 and 2010 but has not taken up a major firearms case since.

The justices declined to hear an appeal of an October ruling by the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld laws prohibiting semiautomatic weapons and large capacity magazines in the two northeastern states.

“Sensible gun safety legislation works. The Supreme Court’s action today in declining to hear this appeal affirms that the reforms enacted in Connecticut following the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School were reasonable, sensible and lawful,” Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen, a Democrat, said.

The New York and Connecticut laws, among the strictest in the nation, were enacted after a gunman with a semiautomatic rifle killed 20 young children and six educators in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

The gunman in the June 12 attack at an Orlando gay nightclub that killed 49 people, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, used a semiautomatic rifle that would have been banned under the New York and Connecticut laws.

“The overwhelming majority of responsible gun owners want reasonable and effective gun control legislation,” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said. “They know that there is no place for weapons of war on the streets of America. New York’s assault weapons ban keeps New Yorkers safer – period.”

Schneiderman, a Democrat, urged other states to enact similar laws.

The legal challenge mounted by gun rights groups and individual firearms owners asserted that the New York and Connecticut laws violated the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment guarantee of the right to bear arms. The court denied the appeal with no comment or recorded vote.

The challengers to the Connecticut law said it banned “some of the most popular firearms in America,” guns they said are owned by millions of Americans for the lawful purposes of self-defense, hunting and recreational shooting. The state said these kinds of guns are used in “the most heinous forms of gun violence.”

In December, the court declined to hear a challenge to a Illinois town’s assault weapons ban. But the justices in March threw out a Massachusetts court ruling that stun guns are not covered by the Second Amendment and sent the case back to the state’s top court for further proceedings.

The United States has among the most permissive gun rights in the world. Because the U.S. Congress long has been a graveyard for gun control legislation, some states and localities have enacted their own measures.

In total, seven states and the District of Columbia ban semiautomatic rifles. A national law barring assault weapons expired in 2004. Congressional Republicans and some Democrats, backed by the influential National Rifle Association gun rights lobby, foiled efforts to restore it.

In the aftermath of the Orlando massacre, the Senate was taking up gun legislation on Monday, although the four measures were not expected to win passage.

There is a longstanding legal debate over the scope of Second Amendment rights.

In the 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller case, the Supreme Court held for the first time that the Second Amendment guaranteed an individual’s right to bear arms, but the ruling applied only to firearms kept in the home for self-defense. That ruling did not involve a state law, applying only to federal regulations.

Two years later, in the case McDonald v. City of Chicago, the court held that the Heller ruling covered individual gun rights in states.

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham)

U.S. navy chief hopes carriers deter East Asia destabilization

By David Brunnstrom and Matt Spetalnick

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Navy chief said on Monday he hoped the deployment of two aircraft carriers on a training mission in East Asia would deter any attempts to destabilize the region, where military tensions have risen amid China’s growing assertiveness.

The U.S. carriers John C. Stennis and Ronald Reagan began joint operations in seas east of the Philippines at the weekend in a show of strength ahead of an international court ruling expected soon on China’s expansive territorial claims in the contested South China Sea.

Admiral John Richardson, the chief of U.S. Naval Operations, told a Washington think tank it was not often the United States had two carrier strike groups in the same waters and it was a sign of U.S. commitment to regional security.

He referred to a similar deployment of a second U.S. carrier in the Mediterranean Sea last week, at a time when U.S. officials are raising alarm over Russia’s maritime expansion.

“Both here and in the Mediterranean, it’s a signal to everyone in the region that we’re committed, we’re going to be there for our allies, to reassure them and for anyone who wants to destabilize that region,” he told the Center for a New American Security.

“And we hope that there’s a deterrent message there as well.”

Richardson said China’s large-scale land reclamation in the South China Sea and militarization of artificial islands extended its potential ability to deny access to a region with precision missiles and radar, something that “demands a response.”

“Our response would be to inject a lot of friction into that system. Every step of that way, we would look to make that much more difficult,” Richardson said.

The U.S. Pacific Command said the Stennis and the Ronald Reagan started their dual operations on Saturday, including air defense drills, sea surveillance, defensive air combat training and long-range strikes.

A PACOM statement quoted Rear Admiral John D. Alexander, commander of the Ronald Reagan carrier group, as saying it was an opportunity to practice techniques needed “to prevail in modern naval operations.”

“The U.S. Navy has flown, sailed and operated throughout the Western Pacific in accordance with international law for decades, and will continue to do so,” he said, referring to a series of freedom-of-navigation operations carried out by U.S. naval ships in the region in recent month to challenge China’s claims.

PACOM said the United States last conducted a dual carrier operation in the Western Pacific in 2014. Two carriers operated in the South China Sea and East China Sea in 2012.

(Reporting by David Brunnstrom and Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Andrew Hay)

U.S. to reveal details of Orlando nightclub gunman’s 911 calls

(Reuters) – U.S. authorities were due on Monday to release partial transcripts of 911 calls made during last week’s mass shooting by a gunman who slaughtered 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, before being killed by police.

Omar Mateen, 29, is said to have paused during a three-hour siege to telephone emergency dispatchers three times and to post internet messages from inside the Pulse nightclub professing his support for Islamist militant groups.

The FBI was due to hold a news conference near the club at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) to provide an update on the investigation and to release the partial transcripts of the 911 calls.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch said they would include the “substance of his conversations” recorded as Mateen carried out the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, but not any pledge of loyalty he is alleged to have made to the Islamic State militant group.

Authorities have said preliminary evidence indicates Mateen, who worked as a security guard, was a mentally disturbed individual who acted alone and without direction from outside networks.

Lynch, who is due to visit Orlando on Tuesday, told CNN on Sunday that investigators have been focused on building a full profile of Mateen, a New York-born U.S. citizen and Florida resident of Afghan descent, who has been described by U.S. officials as “self-radicalized” in his extremist sympathies.

The Pulse massacre, which also left 53 people wounded, led to a week of national mourning and soul-searching over access to firearms and the vulnerability to hate crimes of people in the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.

While in Orlando, Lynch will meet with investigators, as well as survivors and loved ones of the victims.

The massacre has triggered an effort to break a long-standing stalemate in Congress over gun control.

The Senate was set to vote on Monday on four competing measures – two from Democrats and two from Republicans – to expand background checks on gun buyers and curb gun sales for people on terrorism watch lists.

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for the Nov. 8 presidential election, has said he shares the goal of keeping guns out of the hands of people on watch lists.

Trump said on Monday he was referring to security staff, not patrons, when he said that if more people had been armed in the nightclub, fewer would have died.

(Reporting by David Lawder in Washington and Roselle Chen in Orlando; Writing by Daniel Wallis; Editing by Bill Trott)

Supreme Court agrees to hear immigrant detention dispute

By Lawrence Hurley

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether immigrants detained for more than six months by the U.S. government while deportation proceedings take place are eligible for a hearing in which they can argue for their release.

The decision by the justices to hear a case focusing on the rights of people flagged for deportation comes during a presidential election campaign in which immigration has been a hot topic.

The court agreed to hear an Obama administration appeal of an October 2015 ruling by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld a lower-court injunction requiring a hearing after six months of detention.

The long-running class action litigation brought by the American Civil Liberties Union includes some immigrants who were held at the border when seeking illegal entry into the United States and others, including legal permanent residents, who have been convicted of crimes.

If the immigrants were granted a bond hearing, the government would have to show they are flight risks or a danger to the community in order for the detention to continue.

The Justice Department said in court papers that the appeals court decision was “fundamentally wrong” because it dramatically expanded the number of people eligible for hearings and set a high bar for the government to argue that a detainee should not be released.

The ACLU responded in its court papers that the government had exaggerated the impact of the court injunction, which has been in place since 2012 and applies only to immigrants in the Los Angeles area.

Since it has been in effect, there has been “no evidence of adverse effects on immigration enforcement,” the ACLU lawyers said.

The court will hear oral arguments and decide the case during its next term, which starts in October and ends in June 2017.

In one of the biggest cases of its current term, the Supreme Court is due to decide by the end of the month whether to reinstate President Barack Obama’s 2014 executive action to shield millions of immigrants in the country illegally from deportation. The plan was blocked by lower courts.

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham)

U.S. says it will stay in Black Sea despite Russian warning

By Steve Scherer

ABOARD THE USS MASON (Reuters) – The United States will maintain its presence in the Black Sea despite a Russian warning that a U.S. destroyer patrolling there undermined regional security, the U.S. Navy Secretary said.

The USS Porter entered the Black Sea this month, drawing heavy criticism from Moscow. Turkey and Romania are expected to push for a bigger NATO presence in the Black Sea at the NATO summit in Warsaw next month.

Aboard the USS Mason, another U.S. destroyer, in the Mediterranean on Thursday, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus told Reuters that it was the U.S. Navy’s job to deter aggression and keep sea lanes open.

“We’re going to be there,” Mabus said of the Black Sea. “We’re going to deter. That’s the main reason we’re there — to deter potential aggression.”

Mabus spoke days after Russia criticized NATO discussions about a creating a permanent force in the Black Sea.

“If a decision is made to create a permanent force, of course, it would be destabilizing, because this is not a NATO sea,” Russian news agencies quoted senior Foreign Ministry official Andrei Kelin as saying.

Russia, which annexed Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014, has its own Black Sea Fleet based at Sevastopol.

The NATO summit takes place as relations between Russia and the alliance are severely strained over Moscow’s role in the Ukraine crisis and in Syria. While Russia says it poses no threat to alliance, NATO is considering what to do to counter what it sees as growing Russian aggression.

Mabus said the United States follows the rules of the Montreux Convention, which states that countries without a Black Sea coastline cannot keep their warships there for more than 21 days. NATO members Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria are all Black Sea Basin countries.

Bulgaria appeared to buckle to Russian pressure on Thursday. Prime Minister Boiko Borisov said he would not join a proposed NATO fleet in the Black Sea because it should be a place for holidays and tourists, not war.

Also increasing tensions with Moscow is the U.S. Navy’s deployment of two aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean ahead the NATO summit as Washington seeks to balance an increase in Russian military activities in the Mediterranean.

“We’ve been in the Mediterranean continuously for 70 years now, since World War Two,” Mabus said. “We’ve been keeping the sea lanes open…It’s what we do.”

(Reporting by Steve Scherer; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

Guess who’s shopping at dollar stores? Well-to-do millennials

By Sruthi Ramakrishnan and Siddharth Cavale

(Reuters) – Victoria Marin, a 35-year old author and educator, used to spend hundreds of dollars at large party-goods retailers on supplies that ended up in the trash can.

But a visit to the neighborhood Dollar General store, mainly to stock up on cheaper paper napkins and plastic cups, completely changed the way she shopped.

She realized the store was more like a small supermarket, where she could buy groceries, Christmas decorations and even apparel at much cheaper prices than at a Walmart or a Shop Rite.

Marin, whose gross annual family income is about $150,000, said she would initially feel awkward about shopping at dollar stores.

That perception, however, changed in the past few years for thousands of shoppers like her as a shaky economy added a good dose of prudence to household budgets.

“As years passed and my family grew, I realized I could buy the same items at a dollar store for a fraction of the price,” said Marin, whose family of six lives in upstate New York.

Marin is among a growing band of affluent millennials who prefer spending less on everyday stuff and splurging on big-ticket items like cars and homes.

They do not need to shop at dollar stores, which sell products mostly priced between $1 and $10, but are increasingly choosing to do so, a move that is reshaping the fortunes of many retailers.

There is no fixed definition for millennials, but experts usually define the term as referring to those born between 1980 and 2000.

Dollar General Corp, the second-largest dollar store chain after Dollar Tree, called out this demographic as a key contributor to its revenue in its post-earnings call last month.

Of the millennials who shopped at Dollar General, Dollar Tree and Dollar Tree-owned Family Dollar stores, in the year ended April, about 29 percent earned over $100,000 a year and accounted for about a quarter of sales at these stores, according to market researcher NPD’s Checkout Tracking, which tracks consumer receipts.

Dollar stores have worked hard to shed the image that they cater to lower-income groups and have invested in retaining customers who traded down from big retail stores after the recession.

Stocking a wider variety of consumables, beauty products and over-the-counter drugs, the interiors of dollar stores now look very much like a Walmart or Target store.

“I get a lot of toiletries (at Dollar Tree), and those aren’t always name brands,” said Eric Brantner, a 33-year-old freelance copywriter who lives in Houston and makes roughly $100,000 a year.

“For instance, the cotton swabs aren’t Q-Tips, but they work just as well and are less than half the price.”

Also, the number of dollar stores has grown rapidly in the last few years, often making them the nearest store in cities as well as small towns.

Dollar General operates more than 12,700 stores in the United States, while Dollar Tree operates about 14,000 stores in the United States and Canada.

Nielsen data shows that the number of heads of households under the age of 35 years who shop at dollar stores and earn more than $100,000 a year rose 7.1 percent between 2012 and 2015, versus a 3.6 percent increase at all retail stores.

Dollar General and Dollar Tree both reported profits above analysts’ expectations for the latest quarter, in contrast with weak profits at department stores such as Macy’s Inc and Target.

Dollar General said millennials contributed about 24 percent to its first-quarter revenue. This included mid and lower-income millennials as well.

Dollar General and Dollar Tree declined to comment beyond what they have said publicly.

(Reporting by Sruthi Ramakrishnan and Siddharth Cavale in Bengaluru; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh and Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)

Sign up for Jim Bakker Show