The Least Attended Church Gathering; Facebook isn’t the social network anymore...more

U.S. high school seniors slip in math and show no improvement in reading The nation’s high school seniors have shown no improvement in reading achievement and their math performance has slipped since 2013, according to the results of a test administered by the federal government last year.

The results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, also show a longer-term stagnation in 12th-grade performance in U.S. public and private schools: Scores on the 2015 reading test have dropped five points since 1992, the earliest year with comparable scores, and are unchanged in math during the past decade.

“These numbers are not going the way we want,” said William J. Bushaw, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, an independent panel established by Congress to oversee NAEP policy. “We have to redouble our efforts to prepare our students.”...

New Evidence: Baby Body Parts are Big Business
...During the panel’s first hearing, Rep. Diane Black, R-Tenn., called one fetal tissue procurement business “the Amazon.com for human parts.”

The panel saved several screen grabs from recently shuttered websites that allowed customers to add baby organs such as brains, hearts, lungs, and livers to virtual shopping carts. Customers could select how many samples of each they wanted and from what gestational periods. Prices were highest for babies at 14-19 weeks gestation...

German nuclear plant suffers cyber attack designed to give hackers remote access ...Malware was also found on 18 removable data drives, mainly USB sticks, in office computers maintained separately from the plant's operating systems. RWE said it had increased cyber-security measures as a result.

W32.Ramnit is designed to steal files from infected computers and targets Microsoft Windows software, according to the security firm Symantec.

First discovered in 2010, it is distributed through data sticks, among other methods, and is intended to give an attacker remote control over a system when it is connected to the Internet....

Sweden Is Warned of Possible ISIS Attack Plot Targeting Stockholm The Iraqi government has warned Sweden that the terror group ISIS may be targeting that country's capital of Stockholm, a senior Iraqi security official told NBC News Tuesday.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Iraq found intelligence "about an ISIS plan to target the Swedish capital Stockholm," involving seven or eight Iraqi citizens who were former members of al-Qaeda in Iraq...

Facebook isn’t the social network anymore ...Posting photos of your baby or your vacation, status updates that convey your mood or what’s on your mind, flirtatious messages to a secret crush—these are interpersonal interactions, the kind you’d typically share with people close to you, or at least people you have reason to believe are well-disposed toward you. But as Facebook has grown, and the average user’s friend list along with it, it has escaped the notice of almost no one that what you share on Facebook you might as well be sharing with the world. There are ways to limit the audience for a given post via your privacy settings, but those can be confusing and tedious to apply. It doesn’t help that Facebook’s own software monitors everything you do on the site in order to build up a profile of you that it can then use to help businesses serve you ads tailored to your precise demographic. When you consider all of that, the only thing surprising about the alleged decline in original sharing is that it took this long...

The Insurance Companies' Latest Target: Specialty Drugs  Read the headlines these days and you’d think the health insurance companies are going broke. It’s true most insurers offering Obamacare are losing money on it. UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest insurer, announced it will all but exit Obamacare next year because of those loses. But insurance companies have not fallen on hard times. Anything but.

Obamacare may be a bust, but the overall portfolios for most insurers, all those products offered outside the Obamacare exchanges, have earned staggering profits under Obamacare...

Hypocrites, assemble! Marvel to open new theme park in Dubai   What a bunch of hypocrites. Marvel licensed its name for a theme park in less-than-gay-friendly Dubai [The death penalty applies for homosexuality] that opens in August...

Flashback — It was just last month that Marvel threatened to boycott Georgia over the allegedly anti-gay Free Exercise Protection Act, which Governor Nathan Deal vetoed...

The Least Attended Church Gathering
...God has ordered things in His church in such a way that prayer is one of the foremost means by which He gives His people spiritual power and vitality for the advancement of His Kingdom through the preaching of the Gospel and the carrying out of deeds of love and mercy. So why does the church in the Western world fail so miserably at coming to the throne of grace in order to receive the grace and mercy needed on a daily and weekly basis (Heb. 4:16)?...


Norton Hall Band