When the school is the bully; Bacon shortage; Heartbleed bug...more

Violence spreads in Ukraine along with fervency in prayer
...As many as 200 believers have been gathering every morning in Kharkiv's Freedom Square, just feet away from a towering statue of Lenin, to pray for their country, Burnett reported. The nondenominational group includes Baptists, Pentecostals and Orthodox, the state church that is typically unfriendly toward evangelicals.

"It's really amazing," Burnett said. "Young and old, fathers bringing their children, rain or snow — everybody is on their knees."

A volunteer group from America has scheduled a trip to Ukraine in May to work with Burnett. They are veteran volunteers who have been to Ukraine 11 times. Despite the current situation, they have no plans to change their agenda, believing that God is going to do things in Ukraine that He has never done before.

Both Burnett and Long are seeing evidence to support that belief.

"People are more open than they've been in years and years and years," Burnett said.

Burnett and Long said it has been encouraging to see the way Ukrainian churches have responded to the crisis. They are praying and fasting, opening their doors at all hours and welcoming people to come and pray...

'Heartbleed' bug in web technology seen as major threat to user data 
A newly discovered bug in widely used Web encryption technology has made data on many of the world's major websites vulnerable to theft by hackers in what experts say is one of the most serious security flaws uncovered in recent years.

The finding of the so-called "Heartbleed" vulnerability, by researchers with Google Inc (GOOG.O) and a small security firm Codenomicon, prompted the U.S. government's Department of Homeland Security to advise businesses on Tuesday to review their servers to see if they were using vulnerable versions a type of software known as OpenSSL.

It said updates are already available to address the vulnerability in OpenSSL, which could enable remote attackers to access sensitive data including passwords and secret keys that can decode traffic as it travels across the Internet...

Ministering to mudslide survivors takes many forms
People of faith, ministers and chaplains have responded to the deadly March 22 mudslide, trying to help shocked survivors pick up and go on.

Brace yourself: The bacon shortage is coming
...A virus never before seen in the U.S. has killed millions of baby pigs in less than a year, and with little known about how it spreads or how to stop it, it’s threatening pork production and pushing up prices by 10 percent or more.

Scientists think porcine epidemic diarrhea, which does not infect humans or other animals, came from China, but they don’t know how it got into the country or spread to 27 states since last May. The federal government is looking into how such viruses might spread, while the pork industry, wary of future outbreaks, has committed $1.7 million to research the disease....

It’s Time to Start Suing Schools and Officials — Personally — for Abusing Students
The Washington Times reports that a New Jersey school in the Vernon Schools system suspended a 13-year-old boy last Thursday. His “crime” — twirling a pencil in his fingers.

Another kid behind him yelled “He’s making gun motions, send him to juvie!” According to AWR Hawkins, that kid had been bullying Ethan Chaplin, the kid who was twirling the pencil.

And the idiots in charge of the school took the bullying to an entire new level.

The school suspended him. It ordered him to undergo both a psychological and a physiological examination. The boy’s father says his seventh-grader son was stripped and had to give blood samples and urine samples for drug testing. He passed out during the examination. Four hours after that, a social worker spoke with the boy for all of five minutes and cleared him of doing anything wrong.

When he went back to school, the principal reportedly followed him around all day.

That boy was abused by his own school. The authorities over him terrorized him. They bullied him. All just for twirling a pencil in his hand...

Scot McKnight Turns Anglican