Rev. Graham: ‘As I Read the News, I Can’t Help But Wonder if We're in Last Hours’

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Photo Credit: APRev. Franklin Graham, head of the international Christian aid group Samaritan’s Purse and son of world-renowned preacher Billy Graham, said that given all the “bad news” about the killing of Christians by Muslims in some countries, and attacks on Christians by the media and the government even in America, he cannot “help but wonder if we are in the last hours before our Lord Jesus Christ returns.”

“As I read the news, I can’t help but wonder if we are in the last hours before our Lord Jesus Christ returns to rescue His church and God pours out His wrath on the world for the rejection of His Son,” said Rev. Graham in a post on the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) website.

“I don’t know if we have hours, days, months, or years—but as Christians, God calls us to take the truth of the Gospel to the ends of the earth,” said Graham. “Our job is to warn sinners of the consequences of sin and show them that God is loving and gracious, willing to forgive if we come to Him in repentance and faith.”

The BGEA was founded in 1950 by Rev. Billy Graham, and Franklin Graham is vice chairman and CEO of the evangelical organization.

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U.S. Releases Anti-ISIS Video: ‘Welcome to the Islamic State Land’

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By Q13 Fox News Staff.

The graphic mock ISIS recruitment video starts with a simple phrase: Run. Do not walk to ISIS land.

Then a body is thrown off a cliff.

Later a mosque is blown up, followed by a photo of a body with a severed head.

Complete with crucifixions, Muslims being whipped, shot in the head at point-blank range and thrown into ditches, the grisly video is the latest State Department effort to push back against ISIS recruiting efforts by highlighting the group’s barbaric nature.

The video, which uses the group’s own propaganda footage posted online, illustrates ISIS actions by advertising so-called “useful skills” ISIS sympathizers can learn if they join the group: blowing up mosques with Muslims inside, crucifying and executing Muslims and plundering public resources.

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Fiery Social Media Campaign Takes Off That is Sure To ‘Burn’ the ISIS Terrorist State

By Justen Charters.

In response to the extreme brutality of the Islamic State, a group of Lebanese teens has created a social media campaign called the #BurnISISFlagChallenge.

The challenge started with a YouTube video of one of the teens boldly displaying a piece of paper with the ISIS flag on it and then setting it aflame.

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Health Insurance Rates to Dramatically Increase in 2015

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Photo Credit: REUTERSNew Yorkers will have to dig a little deeper into their wallets for health insurance in 2015, state officials announced Thursday.

Rates for individual insurance plans – including those offered on New York’s Obamacare exchange – will rise on average 5.7% in the coming year, the state’s Department of the Financial Services reported. The increases, however, are only about half the amount sought by those insurers in their initial rate requests submitted this summer.

“We closely scrutinized the proposed rate increases insurers requested and reduced them significantly where appropriate,” said Financial Services Superintendent Benjamin Lawsky. “While we have made substantial progress in reforming our health care market and holding down costs, there is much more work ahead. We will continue to engage with consumer groups, insurers, providers, and other stakeholders as we move forward with that effort.”

Lawsky said the new rates are sill, on average, about 50% lower than those charged before New York rolled out its Obamacare health exchange last year. The state held the line on increases despite a projected 8% increase in overall health care costs.

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EPA Fakes Regulatory Cost-Benefit Calculations

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Photo Credit: NewscomWhen pressed about the staggering increases in regulatory burden under his administration, President Obama says not to worry because the benefits exceed the costs. But a new and revealing set of charts from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce highlights the shameless deception used to calculate the bulk of these purported benefits.

In Charting Federal Costs and Benefits, Chamber researchers analyzed the benefits calculations of the Environmental Protection Agency, which is responsible for the largest portion of the most costly regulations in recent years. What they found obliterates the president’s claims that sky-high regulatory costs are justified.

Specifically, the researchers reviewed the 45 rules for which the agency calculated benefits between 2000 and 2013. (The fact that the EPA failed to calculate benefits for any of the other 7,570 rules imposed by the agency in that period is another serious problem.) Although the regulations were crafted to address a variety of emissions, including carbon dioxide, lead, mercury and sulfur dioxide, a whopping 97 percent of the benefits actually were derived from the reduction of a single element—fine particulate matter—that was incidental to the pollutant targeted by the regulation.

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‘Horrific, Hellish and Awful’: Ohio Man Treats Ebola in Africa, Helps Save U.S. Aid Workers

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Photo Credit: Newscom By Josh Siegel.

Dr. Kent Brantly, the American doctor infected with Ebola while working in West Africa, only saw Tim Mosher’s eyes.

As part of his mission in Liberia with the nonprofit aid group Samaritan’s Purse, Mosher treated Brantly, a colleague whom he had never formally met but whose life he was now helping save.

With six or so other aid workers, Mosher stayed at Brantly’s bedside and intravenously delivered him ZMapp, an experimental medicine that had never before been tested on humans.

“I thought he might die that night,” recalled Mosher, who was wearing a full-body suit, face mask, two pairs of gloves and goggles—only his eyes visible—to avoid contracting the illness that struck Brantly, a doctor with Samaritan’s Purse.

After spending 21 days in quarantine upon returning from Africa, Mosher spoke with The Daily Signal about his unplanned contact with Brantly, who ultimately survived Ebola after finishing his treatment in the United States.

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Photo Credit: Fox News Could the blood of Ebola survivors help patients?

By Associated Press.

As West Africa struggles to contain the biggest ever outbreak of Ebola, some experts say an unusual but simple treatment might help: the blood of survivors.

The evidence is mixed for using infection-fighting antibodies from survivors’ blood for Ebola, but without any licensed drugs or vaccines for the deadly disease, some say it’s worth a shot.

“This is something that’s fairly simple to do,” said Dr. Peter Piot, director of London’s School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the co-discoverer of the Ebola virus.

Using blood of survivors is one of the experimental Ebola treatments under discussion at a two-day meeting that began Thursday in Geneva. The more than 200 experts assembled by the World Health Organization are looking at issues of safety and effectiveness and considering which treatments should be prioritized for testing during the current outbreak.

There are about a half dozen medicines and vaccines in development. None has been rigorously tested in humans but early testing of one vaccine began this week in the United States.

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Spying Cell Towers May be Spread Across US

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Kacper PempelThere are at least 19 bogus cellphone towers operating across the United States that could be used to spy upon, and even hijack, passing mobile phones.

So says Les Goldsmith, head of ESD America, a company that imports and sells tightly secured mobile phones that can detect “baseband” hacking attempts. Goldsmith calls fake cell towers “interceptors.”

“Interceptor use in the U.S. is much higher than people had anticipated,” Goldsmith told Popular Science in a piece posted online last week. “One of our customers took a road trip from Florida to North Carolina, and he found eight different interceptors on that trip.”

The better to spy on you with

Cellphones communicate with cellular-service towers using the baseband processor, a chip that controls some or all of the radio signals sent to and from the device. Baseband processors run their own operating systems and are made by a handful of companies that zealously protect their trade secrets; not even phone makers know exactly how the baseband processors work.

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Record 92,269,000 Not in Labor Force; Participation Rate Matches 36-Year Low

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Photo Credit: AP / Mike GrollA record 92,269,000 Americans 16 and older did not participate in the labor force in August, as the labor force participation rate matched a 36-year low of 62.8 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The labor force participation rate has been as low as 62.8 percent in six of the last twelve months, but prior to last October had not fallen that low since 1978.

BLS employment statistics are based on the civilian noninstitutional population, which consists of all people 16 or older who were not in the military or an institution such as a prison, mental hospital or nursing home.

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Al Qaeda Wasn’t ‘on the Run’

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Photo Credit: Weekly Standard In the early morning hours of May 2, 2011, an elite team of 25 American military and intelligence professionals landed inside the walls of a compound just outside the Pakistani city of Abbottabad. CIA analysts had painstakingly tracked a courier to the compound and spent months monitoring the activity inside the walls. They’d concluded, with varying levels of confidence, that the expansive white building at the center of the lot was the hideout of Osama bin Laden.

They were correct. And minutes after the team landed, the search for bin Laden ended with a shot to his head.

The primary objective of Operation Neptune Spear was to capture or kill the leader of al Qaeda. But a handful of those on the ground that night were part of a “Sensitive Site Exploitation” team that had a secondary mission: to gather as much intelligence from the compound as they could.

With bin Laden dead and the building secure, they got to work. Moving quickly—as locals began to gather outside the compound and before the Pakistani military, which had not been notified of the raid in advance, could scramble its response—they shoved armload after armload of bin Laden’s belongings into large canvas bags. The entire operation took less than 40 minutes.

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IRS: Five More Employees Lost Emails In Computer Crashes

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerThe Internal Revenue Service (IRS) lost emails from five more employees due to computer crashes, likely bringing the total number of computer crash victims tied to the IRS targeting scandal to more than 20.

The IRS added five more employees to its computer crash list Friday, the Associated Press reported. The new computer crash victims are linked to congressional investigations into the IRS scandal and include two more Cincinnati-based tax exempt agents who worked under Lois Lerner.

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WATCH: Is the White House’s Benghazi Narrative Falling Apart?

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As the fallout from Benghazi intensifies, Washington officials are continuing to hide information and are intentionally deceiving the public…

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