RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/06/chinas_food_supply_imperiled_.html

China’s food supply is being imperiled as new reports warn that up to 50 percent of China’s 440 million pigs are now at risk from African Swine Fever infection.

The South China Morning Post reported that Chairman Chan Kin Yip of the Federation of Hong Kong Agricultural Associations claimed that Chinese mainland pig farmers told him African Swine Fever has spread to 30 percent of mainland pigs, while another Hong Kong pig farmer based in China told Yip the exposure rate is as high as 50 percent.

With $23.8 billion of agricultural imports from the U.S. in 2017, retaliatory tariffs directly aimed at President Trump’s rural voter base was expected to be China’s hammer to bludgeon the U.S. into abandoning its Trade War. Accounting for 17 percent of U.S. agricultural exports, Chinese customers were number one in soybeans; number two in pork and hay; number three in dairy and poultry; number four in beef, and number five in wheat. 

First detected in August 2018, the raging pandemic of highly communicable African Swine Fever has spread to every mainland province and Hong Kong. The virus causes blackened lesions, diarrhea, abortion, respiratory illness, and then death in 7 to 10 days.

With production declines of -35 percent and prices spiking +40 percent, the disease is wreaking havoc on the China’s $128 billion a year pork industry. Although Beijing has encouraged the provinces to provide financial support to large-scale pig farms, the loss of sales and cost to cull up to 220 million infected pigs is a huge burden on the people.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/06/islams_war_on_the_christian_cross.html

A Muslim migrant in Rome recently stabbed a Christian man in the throat for wearing a crucifix around his neck.  The assailant, a 37-year-old Moroccan, is accused of attempted homicide; “religious hate” is cited as an “aggravating factor” in the crime.

This is hardly the first “religious hate” crime to occur in the context of the cross in Italy.  Among others,

A Muslim boy of African origin picked on, insulted, and eventually beat a 12-year-old girl during school because she too was wearing a crucifix. 
A Muslim migrant invaded an old church in Venice and attacked its large, 300-year-old cross, breaking off one of its arms, while shouting, “All that is in a church is false!”
After a crucifix was destroyed in close proximity to a populated mosque, Cinisello Balsamo’s mayor said concerning the identity of the culprit(s): “Before we put a show of unity with Muslims, let’s have them begin by respecting our civilization and our culture.”

What is it about the crucifix that makes some Muslims react violently?  Islamic hostility to the cross is an unwavering phenomenon — one that crosses continents and centuries; one that is very much indicative of Islam’s innate hostility to Christianity.

For starters, not only is the cross the quintessential symbol of Christianity — for all denominations, including most forms of otherwise iconoclastic Protestantism — but it symbolizes the fundamental disagreement between Christians and Muslims.   As Professor Sidney Griffith explains, “The cross and the icons publicly declared those very points of Christian faith which the Koran, in the Muslim view, explicitly denied: that Christ was the Son of God and that he died on the cross.”  Accordingly, “the Christian practice of venerating the cross… often aroused the disdain of Muslims,” so that from the start of the Muslim conquests of Christian lands there was an ongoing “campaign to erase the public symbols of Christianity, especially the previously ubiquitous sign of the cross.”

This “campaign” traces back to the Muslim prophet Muhammad. He reportedly “had such a repugnance to the form of the cross that he broke everything brought into his house with its figure upon it,” wrote one historian (Sword and Scimitar, p. 10).  Muhammad also claimed that at the end times Jesus (the Muslim ‘Isa) himself would make it a point to “break the cross.”