USA - Boston’s all-girls Winsor School, where tuition is almost $54,000 per year, recently adopted a diversity/equity/inclusion — plan which will move away from references to gender. According to Legal Insurrection, the school’s “Lift Every Voice” plan states that “although Winsor remains in its mission a school for ‘young women to pursue their aspirations and contribute to the world,’ the school recognizes the importance of inclusive language.” This means transitioning from terms such as “she, her, hers’’ and “your daughter,” to “they, them, theirs” and “student.” Faculty are “discouraged” from calling groups of students “ladies” or “girls,” and should address individual students by their preferred pronouns. To show “sensitivity” to different “family structures,” the school also will change “parent/guardian interview” to “adult family member interview.”

VATICAN - Pope Francis celebrated his 85th birthday on Friday, a milestone made even more remarkable given the coronavirus pandemic, his summertime intestinal surgery and the weight of history: His predecessor retired at this age and the last pope to have lived any longer was Leo XIII over a century ago.

PHILIPPINES - At least 12 people have died in the strongest typhoon to hit the Philippines this year, the disaster agency said Friday, after the storm swept across the archipelago uprooting trees, toppling power poles and flooding villages. More than 300,000 people fled their homes and beachfront resorts as Typhoon Rai pummelled the southern and central regions of the country, knocking out communications in some areas and tearing roofs off buildings. Rai was a super typhoon when it slammed into Siargao Island on Thursday, packing maximum sustained winds of 195 kilometres an hour (120 miles). On Friday, wind speeds eased to 150 kilometres an hour, the state weather forecaster said. “Siargao island is heavily damaged,” Ricardo Jalad, executive director of the national disaster agency, told a briefing.

UK - A UK government commissioner has asked for parents to talk to their nine-year-old children about porn before they find themselves exposed to the material online. The suggestion that parents need to talk to their children about porn when they are at a very young age comes as the UK tries to grapple with how young people are accessing sexual material online.

USA - There was a time when churches were places for worship and fellowship. They would often be the venues from which community outreach and charitable works were accomplished. They even acted as safe havens for the downtrodden. That was then. This is now… Lutheran Church Hosts Drag Queen Prayer Time For Children... This is a truly disturbing event. A Lutheran Church in Logan Square in the Chicago area hosted a drag queen prayer time for kids during their Sunday service this past week. I’m not exaggerating in any way. A drag queen took the pulpit, spoke to the congregation, then left the pulpit and invited children to sit at his feet as he read a book about joy. A sick adaptation of the drag queen story hours libraries have been hosting the last few years. This is just the latest in a long string of ludicrous ideas becoming saddening realities.

SCOTLAND - From now on in Scotland, if a person with male genitalia (aka a man) rapes someone, Scottish Police will categorize the culprit as a “female” if he self-identifies as a trans “woman.” In order to remain politically correct and satisfy the demands of the Cult of LGBTQ, Police Scotland say that even if a rapist has not legally changed his gender to trans “female,” any rapes he commits will be considered as having been perpetrated by a woman. Responding to this, MacAskill, the Alba party MP for East Lothian and SNP defector who worked as a lawyer for 20 years and a justice secretary for almost eight is simply shocked that this is being allowed to happen. “I’ve seen some legal absurdities, but this tops it all and is dangerous,” he said. “It’s physically impossible and is about dogma overriding common sense. Women prisoners are being harmed by this and vital crime statistics rendered useless.” What this means, of course, is that men can now freely rape any women they want while placing the blame squarely on women by simply self-identifying as such.

ARGENTINA - “Argentina is limiting exports of corn and wheat in a push to tackle domestic food inflation. It’s a resolution that the food industry considers necessary to provide predictability. And to safeguard what Argentines need for their own consumption,” Agriculture Minister Julian Dominguez said in a statement this week, as cited by Bloomberg. Argentina is a key global supplier of beef as well as the world's top exporter of processed soy, the second-largest exporter of corn, and a major wheat producer. This means that any change to the volume of its agriculture exports may affect global markets and food supply chains, which have already suffered amid the Covid-19 pandemic, resulting in food prices rising globally.

SA - In addition to the over 2 dozen Air Force personnel who were kicked out, 103 US Marines were discharged on Thursday and over 28,000 more across all 5 military branches are currently on the chopping block for not adhering to Biden’s vaccine mandate. The rest of the dissenters will be gone by January when all of the deadlines officially pass. China, and the rest of the world for that matter, are laughing at us.

USA - If the United States pulls back, the world will become more dangerous. Other democracies must start preparing. Eighty years ago Japan bombed Pearl Harbour. It was a grave error, bringing the world’s mightiest country into the war and dooming the Japanese empire to oblivion. A clear-sighted Japanese admiral supposedly lamented: “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” Today Japan is peaceable, rich and innovative. It was the Japanese who rebuilt their country, but their task was made easier by the superpower that defeated them. Not only was America midwife to a liberal, capitalist democracy in Japan; it also created a world order in which Japan was free to trade and grow. This order was not perfect, and did not apply everywhere. But it was better than anything that had come before.

USA - Tucker leads the conversation by noting that CPI rose by nearly 7% year over year in November, the highest inflation in decades. While that’s bad enough, Schiff responded by noting that CPI probably isn’t even the right measure of inflation, with the true inflation number being far, far higher. In his words: “When they compare our inflation rates to the inflation of the 1970s, we’re not using the same CPI that we used then. If we were using the same CPI we used in 1982, the rate would be closer to 15%, which means it’s the worst year in inflation in US history.”

USA - The United States secretly tested chemical and biological weapons on American soil during the 1960s, newly declassified Pentagon reports show. The tests included releasing deadly nerve agents in Alaska and spraying bacteria over Hawaii, according to the documents obtained Tuesday. The United States also tested nerve agents in Canada and Britain in conjunction with those two countries, and biological and chemical weapons in at least two other states, Maryland and Florida. The summaries of more than two dozen tests show that biological and chemical tests were much more widespread than the military has acknowledged previously. Rapid Tan I, II, and III, a series of tests in 1967 and 1968 in England and Canada. The tests used sarin and VX, as well as the nerve agents tabun and soman, at the British chemical weapons facility in Porton Down, England. Tests at the Suffield Defence Research Establishment in Ralston, Canada, included tabun and soman, the records show.

USA - A blinding dust storm with powerful winds of 90mph tore through half of Kansas, knocked over semi trucks in Colorado and fanned wildfires in the Oklahoma panhandle, just days after dozens of powerful tornadoes left a trail of death and destruction in five states. The extreme winds, amid some record-high temperature, affected 100 million people in states throughout the Midwest and Great Plains with the National Weather Service calling it a 'historical weather day.' 'The Central US has never seen a December storm like this,' tweeted Bill Karins, a meteorologist for MSNBC, saying it was 'multi-hazard, life threatening weather today.' Winds of 70 to more than 100 miles per hour have already torn through the area, ripping off roofs, overturning 18-wheelers and leaving at least 380,000 people without power as of 8.30pm Wednesday throughout Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri. At least five deaths have been attributed to the storm, with three killed in two separate car accidents in Kansas, one person crushed by a tree in Minnesota and a truck driver who died when high winds rolled over his vehicle in Iowa.

USA - A full Russian invasion of Ukraine would spread global conflict and could be the trigger for World War Three, a Ukrainian government minister warned today. Yuliia Laputina, the minister for veterans affairs, said that her country was prepared to defend itself should Moscow launch another attack on Ukraine. But she warned that the consequences of an invasion ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin would be far-reaching, and would not be contained in her country. 'If Russia will invade you know, you should also take care about the Balkans. What Russians are doing now in Serbia - they try to provoke a situation in the Balkans,' she told Sky News in an interview on Thursday. 'But we also take into account [the beginning of] World War Three.' Her comments came as EU leaders were set to warn Russia that hostile action against Ukraine would come at a 'high price' in a message expected to be agreed during a European Council summit in Brussels on Thursday. Meanwhile, Russia said on Thursday it was ready to send a government negotiator 'at any moment' to start talks with the United States on the security guarantees it is seeking in order to defuse the crisis over Ukraine.

USA - What Americans believe when it comes to matters of faith has been shifting for decades, and the latest National Public Opinion Reference Survey conducted by Pew Research Center seems to indicate that the pace of change is accelerating. Today, the percentage of Americans that identify as Christians is the lowest that it has ever been before, and the percentage of Americans that identify as “nones” is at a new all-time record high.

VATICAN - Pope Francis claimed the EU "risks dying" as he thrusted the bloc's future under the spotlight in a throwback speech. ...He has hit out at the EU and the direction it has found itself moving in. In 2017, his strongest words came when he suggested that the bloc "risks dying" without a new vision. The Pope was speaking in Rome at an EU summit to highlight the 60th anniversary of the bloc’s foundation. In an address to European leaders, he claimed the EU faced a "vacuum of values" and was losing its "sense of direction". He said: "When a body loses its sense of direction and is no longer able to look ahead, it experiences a regression and, in the long run, risks dying." It was not the only time the Pope would criticise Brussels. This month, he slammed controversial efforts by the European Commission to make official communications more inclusive, comparing recently withdrawn guidelines on using terms like "Christmas" and "Christian" to the actions of historic dictatorships. He said: "In history many, many dictatorships have tried to do this kind of thing. Think of Napoleon … think of the Nazi dictatorship, the communist one."