RESEARCH: ISLAM NOW WORLD’S MOST COMMON OFFICIAL STATE RELIGION

Infowars News
October 6, 2017


Research conducted by the Pew Research Center found Islam is the most common official state religion among the nearly 43 countries that have a religious faith, with many Islamic nations making affiliation with the faith mandatory.
After analyzing data from 2015, Pew Research Center found 43 countries have an official state religion, 40 countries have a “preferred faith,” 10 countries are openly hostile to all faiths, and the remaining 106 have no official or preferred religion.
Of the 43 countries with an official state religion, 27 countries name some form of Islam as their state religion. 13 countries name Christianity as their official state religion, while two cite Buddhism and only one (Israel) cites Judaism.
Christianity is the most frequent “preferred religion” with nearly 28 countries expressing preference for some denomination of the faith. Another three countries prefer Islam, while four name Buddhism and the remainder cite multiple faiths.
It is noteworthy that the only nations that force religious membership on its citizens – Comoros, Maldives, Mauritania, and Saudi Arabia – are countries that cite Islam as their official state religion.
Many Islamic countries, including Jordan, subsidizes certain mosque activities and manages Islamic institutions, while other religious organizations must register with the government to own land or perform religious rites.
Ten countries declare no state religion, and are openly hostile to all religious activities. Some, including China, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam, are Communist nations that oppose organized religion as such activities threaten central governmental power.
While China nominally claims its citizens have “freedom of religious belief,” the Communist government only allows five government-sponsored “patriotic religious organizations” to hold religious services. In addition, practitioners of Falun Gong are brutally repressed by the Communist government, with many subjected to torture, execution and organ harvesting.
The remaining six nations, including Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, are all former Communist bloc nations that retain the Soviet Union’s hostility to organized religion, despite the population of each nation being overwhelmingly Muslim.
“Most governments around the globe, however, are generally neutral toward religion. More than 100 countries and territories included in the study have no official or preferred religion as of 2015,” the report said. “These include countries like the United States that may give benefits or privileges to religious groups, but generally do so without systematically favoring a specific group over others.”

How Trump compares with Obama so far on jobs

CNN Money
October 6, 2017


President Donald Trump loves to talk about creating jobs, and now has more than a million jobs to point to.

With July's jobs report, employers have added a total of 1,074,000 jobs during Trump's first six full months in office.
That essentially matches the 1,084,000 jobs created during President Barack Obama's last six months in office. Both round to 1.1 million, and the 10,000 difference is well within the margin of error of the Labor Department estimate.
Of course, Trump's six-month record is far better than Obama's first six months, when 3.4 million jobs were lost. That's because Obama was sworn in during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, when the economy was hemorrhaging jobs.

Las Vegas gunman targeted aviation fuel tanks during shooting spree, report says

Fox News
October 5, 2017




Stephen Paddock, the gunman who killed 58 people and injured more than 500 during Sunday’s massacre on the Las Vegas Strip, reportedly also took aim at nearby aviation fuel tanks during the rampage.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal, citing an unnamed source, reported late Wednesday that two holes were found in one of the two jet fuel tanks near the site of the Route 91 Harvest concert. One of the bullets penetrated a tank, but did not cause an explosion, the report said.
The report said FBI agents inspected the tanks and considered the bullet’s trajectory from where Paddock opened fire on 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.
FoxNews.com could not immediately confirm the report. The paper reported that both the company that operates the tanks and the FBI did not comment for its report.
Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said it's difficult to believe Paddock acted alone in the attack on the audience of an outdoor concert.
Lombardo said that items confiscated from Paddock included 1,600 rounds of ammunition and several containers of an explosive commonly used in target shooting that totaled 50 pounds. But it wasn't clear what, if anything, Paddock planned to do with the explosives, the sheriff said.
On Sept. 28, the 64-year-old high-stakes gambler and real estate investor checked into Mandalay Bay and specifically requested an upper-floor room with a view of the Route 91 Harvest music festival, according to a person who has seen hotel records turned over to investigators.
Paddock wasn't able to move into the room until Saturday, said the source, who was not authorized to speak publicly and disclosed the information on condition of anonymity.
Mike Boyd, an aviation consultant, in the meantime, told the Review-Journal that “a machine gun is not going to blow up a tank of fuel.”
“Jet fuel itself sitting there in a big wet pile is very hard to ignite. You have to be a very amateur terrorist to think anything like that.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

More than 40,000 troops in Russian war games, US general says

Yahoo News
October 2, 2017


Brussels (AFP) - A senior US general said Monday that he believed controversial Russian military exercises last month involved "more than 40,000" troops, vastly more than Moscow acknowledged, but the event did not involve a simulated nuclear strike.

General Ben Hodges, commander of US ground forces in Europe, said Russia split up the Zapad-2017 (West-2017) drills into smaller events to flout international agreements on reporting military exercises.

The Russian defence ministry said the joint drills with Belarus on NATO's eastern flank involved just 12,700 troops and were "strictly defensive" in nature, but the show of strength caused consternation in Poland and the Baltic states, which only broke free of the Kremlin's grip some 25 years ago.

"My guess is that there probably were over 40,000 service members in this whole-of-government exercise," Hodges told reporters.

He said Moscow broke up the exercises into smaller drills to skirt international protocols allowing foreign observers to inspect events involving more than 13,000 troops. NATO was invited to send observers to so-called visitors' days.

"But in fact from a professional military standpoint these were all connected," Hodges said.
In the run-up to Zapad, NATO complained about Russian secrecy surrounding the event, warning that Moscow could be hugely underreporting the scale of the exercises. Estonia, Lithuania and Germany all said they thought about 100,000 troops would take part.

‘BURIED BY ISLAM’Ukip’s new leader says the weight of immigration and the rise of Islam is ‘burying British culture’

SSTN
October 1, 2017

THE weight of immigration and the rise of Islam is leading to British culture being “buried”, according to Ukip’s new leader.
Henry Bolton said there is a concern amongst people that their way of life is being “pushed aside”, and vowed to “address it” as he spoke to The Sun a day after his shock election.
 Newly elected UKIP leader Henry Bolton said the population are concerned that Islam is pushing out Brit culture
GETTY - CONTRIBUTOR
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Newly elected UKIP leader Henry Bolton said the population are concerned that Islam is pushing out Brit culture
The 54-year-old ex-Army officer had said he wanted to move the party away from focusing on Islam after their manifesto earlier this year contained an "integration agenda" which was almost entirely about Muslims.
And the issue had been brought back to the fore when the controversial anti-Islam campaigner Anne-Marie Waters was the favourite to win the leadership election.
Mr Bolton, who pushed her into second place yesterday, signalled a softening stance on the issue when he spoke to the media, saying he had a “broad platform” and wanted to “move away from the focus on Islam”.
But he swung the focus right back to the religion this morning, when asked if he stood by his comments during the campaign that he was proud of “fighting Islam”.
He said: “There is a concern amongst the population writ large that there is an undermining through general immigration and the weight of numbers that we've got - and Islam as well - that our culture is being buried by this, being sort of pushed aside.
"That is a concern that we need to recognise is out there, there is a perception that is out there and we need to address it.”