MLB Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera Reveals Why He Supports Israel

In a recent interview, Hall of Fame New York Yankees pitcher Mariano Rivera took time to explain why he is a big supporter of Israel.

Speaking to the Washington Examiner about his support of Israel, Rivera noted that his love of that country is rooted in his Christian religion.

“As a Christian, I do believe that the Lord gave us the Bible,” he told the newspaper. “The Bible speaks about Israel. Everything — from New Testament, Old Testament — it’s all about Israel and the relationship his people have. So as a Christian, I understand that the chosen people of God is Israel — Jewish Israel. The country was made by him. All the other countries were made by men. This country was built by him for his people.”

He added that support of Israel is part of being a Christian. “They are the people of God,” Rivera said. “They are the chosen people, so I’m not going to be against God.”

The Yankees legend added that he had visited Israel several times and those visits only made his support stronger.

“Every time that I go to Israel, it blows my mind,” Rivera said. “I wanted to see more, I wanted to understand more. I wanted to learn more. The Bible comes to life when you’re there.”

The player was also fully aware that support of Israel brings criticism from the left.

“I’m OK with that,” Rivera told the paper. “I know what I stand for: That won’t change. So, to me, criticism is more motivation to keep going forward — to push forward — for what I believe, for what I stand for. And again, that will make me even stronger.”

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.

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Malaysia Warns Breweries Not to Sell Alcohol-Free Beer as It ‘Confuses Muslims’

The Malaysian government warned the country’s breweries on Sunday not to sell or produce alcohol-free beer on the grounds that it “confuses Muslims” about whether they can drink it.

Speaking to reporters outside a mosque in his home constituency of Parit Bunda, Dr. Mujahid Yuso, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department for Religious Affairs, urged beer manufacturers to stop producing the product as some Muslims may wrongly believe they are allowed to consume it.
“Using the name alcohol-free beer is confusing as the process of producing the drink including distillation is carried out in the system used to produce alcohol products,” he said. “We know the alcohol-free drink is produced by a beer manufacturer but it would cause confusion as some Muslims thought they could consume the drink.”

Yuso’s comments were specifically aimed at a viral campaign by the Dutch manufacturer Heineken with the tagline “Now You Can.” The company later clarified that their product was non-halal and only for non-Muslims.

“All Heineken 0.0 products are only available at the non-halal zone of supermarkets and convenience stores, with clear signage indicating that the product is strictly for non-Muslims, aged 21 and above only,” said the company’s Malaysian branch. “In addition, for stores without designated non-halal areas, we are placing clear signages to inform consumers that Heineken 0.0 is strictly for non-Muslims, aged 21 and above.”

The company also said that their alcohol-free product named “Heineken 0.0” was intended to allow people to enjoy a beer-like beverage at social occasions without experiencing the effects of alcohol.

“The ‘Now You Can’ tagline attached to Heineken 0.0 refers to the various new occasions that the drink can allow non-Muslim consumers to enjoy a beer, including lunch, work meetings, or driving,” they added.
Launched in 2017, Heineken 0.0. is said to have a similar taste to normal Heineken but without alcohol. However, the drink still has a negligible amount of alcohol at 0.03 percent, compared with five percent to the classic beverage. Each 330ml bottle also has 69 calories, while the traditional product has 150 calories.

The presence of alcohol, albeit negligible, means the product is forbidden under Islamic Law. As of 2017, Muslims comprise the majority (61.3 percent) of the country’s population, with minority religions being Buddhism (19.8 percent), Christianity (9.2 percent), and Hinduism (6.3 percent).

In recent years, Malaysians have seen the country’s theocratic authorities crack down on a range of civil liberties, including the introduction of blasphemy laws and the censorship of various artistic content.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) notes in their 2018 report that Malaysia’s human rights situation “improved significantly in 2018 after the election of a new government that ran on a manifesto promising make the country’s rights record “respected by the world.’”

“Since the landmark election last May, Malaysia has been a bright spot for progress on human rights in Southeast Asia,” said Phil Robertson, HRW’s deputy Asia director. “But it will only remain that way if the government stops backtracking and follows through on its promises for human rights reforms.”

Follow Ben Kew on Facebook, Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart.com

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Report: Facebook Embeds Tracking Codes in Photos to Collect More of Your Data

An Australian cyber researcher alleges that social media giant Facebook embeds tracking codes in monitor who sees and shares your photos.

Forbes reports that Australian cyber researcher Edin Jusupovic recently claimed on Twitter that Facebook is embedding “hidden codes” in photos that users upload to the site to track how many people see and share the photos.

“Facebook is embedding tracking data inside photos you download,” Jusupovic stated on Twitter adding that he had “noticed a structural abnormality when looking at a hex dump of an image file from an unknown origin only to discover it contained what I now understand is an IPTC special instruction.”

Jusupovic stated that this was a “shocking level of tracking,” adding that “the take from this is that they can potentially track photos outside of their own platform with a disturbing level of precision about who originally uploaded the photo (and much more).”

The  “IPTC special instructions” that Jusupovic describes are essentially digital watermarks embedded in image metadata by Facebook, which the company can then access again at a later date. These methods have been used for some time and have many applications such as tracking the ownership of images, resolving copyright infringements, enhancing user services, and improving targeted advertising.

One analyst noted that these tags have been added to images since 2016 and “contains an IPTC block with an ‘Original Transmission Reference’ field that contains some kind of text-encoded sequence. This coding method lets Facebook ‘know it has seen the image before when it gets uploaded again.’” One user on Reddit explained it simply stating: “It is yet another way to learn associations between people. Person 1 uploaded a bunch of the same photos Person 2 uploaded, let’s show them both all the same advertisements!”

Members of Congress have been focusing more closely on the actions of social media sites for some time now, Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) wrote to the FTC in May urging the commission to probe Facebook “to compel sweeping changes to end the Facebook’s pattern of misuse and abuse of personal data.”

Social media hearings before Congress are taking place tomorrow, “Online Platforms and Market Power, Part 2: Innovation and Entrepreneurship,” will take place tomorrow on July 16 at 2:00 p.m. EST while another hearing titled “Google and Censorship through Search Engines,” will take place tomorrow at 2:30 p.m. EST.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com

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Oh, great. Now people are “microdosing” hormones to be “nonbinary”

We’ve known for several years now that patients diagnosed with gender dysphoria have been receiving hormone therapy to force their bodies to look and behave more like the gender they “identify” as. But now, as reported at NBC News this week, doctors are going one step further. People who don’t identify as either gender are taking opposite gender hormones in smaller doses (“microdosing”) to shift their appearance only part way, making them appear more androgynous. These patients – assuming that word even applies here – are commonly referred to as “nonbinary” individuals.

Marisa Rivas never felt comfortable living as a woman, but doesn’t identify as a man either.

Last year, Rivas, 30, a college admissions coordinator in Los Angeles, had a mastectomy. This year, Rivas started using gender-neutral “they” and “them” pronouns.

Then, at the end of June, Rivas went to the Los Angeles LGBT Center in West Hollywood to talk to a doctor about going on “low-dose” testosterone, known colloquially as “microdosing.” Rivas hopes to achieve a sharper jawline and a more androgynous physique without overtly masculine features like facial hair. The goal is an appearance that is not clearly male or female.

“I still want to be somewhere in the middle,” Rivas said.

This is yet another sign that the medical profession in the United States (and other countries as well) has drunk deeply of the Koolaid and begun abandoning established medical practices in favor of appearing sufficiently woke. Perhaps this all started with the advent of cosmetic surgery, but this goes much deeper. The underlying principle in all of medicine is supposed to be, primum non nocere… first do no harm.

In the case of the patient being featured in that NBC News report, precisely what ailment is she suffering from. (She prefers “they” but that’s just bad English. Sorry, not sorry.) She admits she doesn’t “identify” as a man, but doesn’t want to be a woman either. So she’s not suffering from gender dysphoria. So what is she being treated for and why did a doctor decide to start dosing her up with testosterone?

The bigger question to ask is whether or not such hormone treatments are safe and if any risks involved are justified by the “condition” the physician is working to address. There is plenty of research material available about the long term risks and benefits associated with traditional hormone replacement therapy. And most studies, such as this one from the Mayo Clinic, acknowledge that the long-term risks are real, but can be justified provided the patient is regularly monitored. And that’s just for treatments replacing hormones that were supposed to be naturally showing up in your body.

When it comes to cross-sex hormone therapy (CSHT) for transgender patients, every study I’ve looked at thus far, such as this one, admits that “less is known about the long-term use of cross-sex HT.”

The same body of research simply isn’t available for long-term treatments of this type, where the hormones being injected were never supposed to appear at those levels naturally. One thing they have been able to determine is that long-term CSHT has been shown to increase risks of adverse cardiovascular events. And yet we have doctors prescribing this therapy for people who simply “don’t want to look like either gender.” Even worse, some doctors are pumping these hormonal cocktails into children.

How much of this madness are we supposed to sit by and watch? This is dubious medical science being deployed in the name of social justice rather than sound practices.

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Will the desecration of the American flag at ICE facility turn the tide of the border battle?

The overwhelming majority of Americans, including most swing voters, want Republicans to simply enforce our immigration laws and prioritize the needs of Americans over the desires of illegal aliens. Why won’t they?

Republicans will likely miss the powerful symbolism of illegal alien protesters ripping down the American flag at an ICE facility in Aurora, Colorado, and raising the Mexican flag. For those of us who are veterans of the fight for sovereignty, this act conjured up memories of the 2006 fight over amnesty that conservatives successfully turned into a law to protect sovereignty, a law yet to be enforced by our government.

In 2006, the Left, along with Sen. John McCain and President George W. Bush, tried to repeat the 1986 amnesty for illegal aliens already here. As always, the American people were dead set against it, but they just weren’t activated, because all of the political money and activism is on the other side. That all changed when illegal aliens started publicly attacking our flag, according to Michelle Malkin, who was the leading conservative voice fighting amnesty at the time.

“In the spring of 2006, the illegal alien amnesty mob finally pushed Americans over the edge,” said Malkin in an interview with CR.

“Ethnic grievance-mongers raised the Mexican flag over the American flag flying upside down at Montebello High School in southern California. The flag wars quickly spread to Florida, Texas, Arizona, and my now-adopted home state of Colorado. At the time, I wrote: ‘I predict this stunt will be the nail in the coffin of any guest-worker/amnesty plan on the table in Washington.’ I was right. Thanks to these unbridled displays of anti-American hatred, citizens rose fiercely to the defense of our borders and our laws — and the Bush amnesty plan crashed in flames.”

Malkin noted that “P.R. strategists for the sovereignty saboteurs have tried to clean up their act and dress up their endless amnesty campaigns in red, white, and blue” ever since they made that blunder. “They temporarily put down their foreign flags, stopped wearing their commie Che Guevara T-shirts, and cloaked their radical Reconquista aspirations in the less divisive rhetoric of ‘reform,’ ‘opportunity,’ and DREAMers. But they just can’t help themselves. They can never hide their true colors — and the Mexican flag-raising in Aurora this past weekend proved it. Once again, I predict doom for the border-erasers. They’ve crossed a line that Americans have not, cannot, and will not tolerate.”

What did conservatives get for their efforts in 2006? A mandate for at least 850 miles of double-layer fencing and a requirement that DHS achieve full operational control to prevent all illegal immigration and cartel activity at any land or maritime border within 18 months of passage. It’s just that the law was never implemented.

Moreover, President Bush actually started enforcing interior immigration laws and deporting illegal aliens with 287(g) and the Secure Communities program, where deportations were ramped up, an effort that bore fruit even well into the first term of Obama’s precedency, when we were averaging over 400,000 deportations a year. MS-13 was almost eradicated from the country as a result of this successful push by we the people.

The lesson of the flag is that America can survive a conventional invasion that is eventually repelled. At the “dawn’s early light” of September 14, 1814, despite a 25-hour bombardment of Fort McHenry, Baltimore, by the British navy, “our flag was still there.” There was no Union Jack flying over the fort, despite the superior British firepower. But when our government subverts our sovereignty laws and brings in millions of illegal aliens who then become the most powerful constituency in the country – with the ability to single-handedly command the legislative agenda of the House of Representatives for the month of July – our flag was easily removed from an ICE detention facility and the Mexican flag was raised for several hours.

An invading army is not counted in the census. An invading army does not steal birthright citizenship for their children. An invading army doesn’t sue us in court and change our language, at least not right away.

In that sense, those who recoil when we refer to the border situation as “an invasion” are correct. This is worse than an invasion. It is subtler, yet more enduring and transformational in the long run.

This very point, missed by the political elites, including many so-called conservative political elites, is understood even by many run-of-the-mill Democrat voters. According to a Harvard-Harris poll, by a margin of 2-1, independent and moderate voters want illegal aliens, even those with questionable asylum claims, “immediately turned back” at the border. That view is held even by 44 percent of self-described Hillary Clinton voters.

While Democrats are holding one hearing after another on how they can shield and encourage more illegal immigration at the border, Republicans are missing in action, not holding hearings in the Senate on all the harms illegal aliens are causing Americans. Most Republicans are clamoring to show that they care more about the treatment of the invaders than the constituents they represent because they think the Twitter bubble is representative of American voters’ sentiments on the issue. They are simply wrong.

According to Axios, a recent focus group of 12 swing voters in the swing state of Michigan demonstrated this point. “Immigration came up many times when these swing voters were asked to discuss their top issue heading into the presidential election,” reports Axios. “Their responses sounded a lot like the ‘America First’ message President Trump has been championing.”

This focus group was composed of the quintessential swing voters – people who voted for both Romney (2012) and Hillary (2016) or both Obama (2012) and Trump (2016). What did they find? “Eight of these participants, including one Romney-Clinton voter, agreed with this statement: “When we give migrants food, clothing, toiletries, and shelter, all we’re doing is encouraging more of them to come to the U.S., and we don’t want that.”

In other words, most moderate voters are to the right of even the messaging of the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress.

Among conservative elites in D.C., going after unqualified birthright citizenship for people who break into the country is considered a no-fly zone. For the average American, on the other hand, it is a no-brainer. “We shouldn’t give away our birthright like candy,” said Shawn M. “Meaning that all they have to do is cross the border illegally, pop out a kid, and they’re a U.S. citizen. Two illegals do not a citizen make,” she added.

Indeed, the American people stood defiant against a naval attack by a superpower 200 years ago. They stood for the flag. They certainly won’t be cowed by an invasion of illegal immigration and social transformation without representation. The only question is whether the elites of the bipartisan oligarch in Washington will catch up to the mainstream of American thought.



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AOC’s Chief of Staff Admits ‘Green New Deal’ Was All About Socialism, Not Climate Change

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, seems to enjoy being the center of attention. While still in the midst of a feud between House leadership and a band of radical freshmen progressives, Chakrabarti said that the controversial Green New Deal was about breaking America’s capitalistic economy and replacing it with a new system,…

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Nets Warn ‘Threat’ of Routine Immigration Law Enforcement ‘Not Over’

On Monday, all three network morning shows admitted immigration arrests over the weekend appeared to be nothing more than “routine enforcement actions,” however, that did not stop the broadcasts from continuing to fearmonger on the issue and warn that the “threat” of Immigration and Customs Enforcement doing its job was “still not over.”   

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Moonbat Author Stephen King: Trump “Scarier” Than Characters In My Novels…

Via Rolling Stone: Author Stephen King knows a thing or two about horrifying, terrifying, chilling, and even creepy subject matter. So, for him to say that something or someone is scarier than his work should make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. In a new video from NowThis News the prolific […]

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Famed Anti-Trump Surgeon Wrecked For Tweet About Men Getting Pregnant

Infamously anti-Trump surgeon Eugene Gu claimed in a tweet posted Friday that it is “a scientific and medical fact that men can get pregnant and also have abortions.”

“It’s a scientific and medical fact that men can get pregnant and also have abortions,” he wrote. “Trans men and non-binary individuals are human beings who deserve to be acknowledged by society. They choose their own identity — not me, not you, not any doctor, and certainly not any politician.”

The tweet was met with mockery and blowback.

“In a world where medical science bows down and worships the gods and goddesses of political ideology, doctors say things like this …,” pro-life activist Obianuju Ekeocha captioned the outrageous tweet.

Conservative writer Mark Hemingway mocked Gu with a list of doctors he “would solicit for medical advice before” Mr. Gu.

“The following is a list of doctors I would solicit for medical advice before consulting Eugene Gu, MD,” he wrote. “1. Dr. Rosen Rosen, 2. Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, 3. Dr. Mabuse, 4. Dr. Hugo Z. Hackenbush, 5. Dr. Zaius.”

The Federalist’s Inez Stepman joined in: “Dr. Pepper.”

“Don’t forget Hugh Laurie,” added Daily Wire contributor Harry Khachatrian.

Another Twitter user accused Gu of attempting to erase women.

“I’m all for trans rights, have been out there on the protest lines. But this sounds like another way men are erasing women,” the account posted.

Gu is comfortably in the company of many high-ranking Democrats when he speaks of men allegedly getting pregnant and needing abortions. Last month, Julian Castro, who served as the secretary of Housing and Urban Development under former President Barack Obama, said biological men must have abortion “rights.”

“Let’s also not forget someone in the trans community, a trans female, is poor, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have the right to exercise that right to choose,” stated Mr. Castro.

Gu’s claim to fame is kneeling to apparently protest America’s pervasive racist, a nod to anthem-kneeling former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. The persistent Trump-basher even sued the president after Trump blocked him on Twitter; Trump was eventually forced to unblock Gu’s account.

As reported by the Tennessean last year, Dr. Gu was canned three years into a five-year surgical residency at Vanderbilt. Though Gu complained that his contract was not renewed because of his political activism, Vanderbilt said he was let go due to his “work performance and professionalism,” the outlet noted.

“The take-home message here is that there is an unwritten rule for surgical residents and that is rule is, always make your program look good and always make your hospital look good, and often that means stay silent,” Gu said, according to the Tennessean. “But as an Asian-American physician, unlike a white doctor, I don’t always have the same luxury to stay silent.”

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