Worth Knowing, Probably Not Quite Threadworthy, 11/14

[SVPete]

City Targets Pastors With Criminal Citations for Feeding Needy in Public Park

https://townhall.com/columnists/jordan-sekulow/2025/11/13/city-targets-pastors-with-criminal-citations-for-feeding-needy-in-public-park-n2666444

For more than four years, three local churches in Colorado peacefully gathered every Tuesday and Thursday at a public park to do what Scripture commands: worship, pray, study Scripture, and share meals in Christian fellowship. They exercised their constitutionally protected right to freely practice their faith in a traditional public forum – a right that has been guaranteed to Americans since our nation’s founding.

Then the City of Northglenn decided their religious exercise was a problem, going so far as criminally citing the pastors for exercising their constitutionally protected rights to religion, speech, and assembly.
...
Since July 2020, pastors and members from local churches, including Brent Denney and David McCamish, who are members of Brave Church, and Pastor Dustin Mackintosh from Next Step Christian Church, have led weekly ministry gatherings at E.B. Rains, Jr. Memorial Park. These weren’t rowdy events or disruptive protests. They were peaceful religious gatherings centered on worship, prayer, Bible study, fellowship, and Christian charity, including providing food to the homeless.

For four years, there were no complaints, no incidents, and no problems. The churches used the park’s pavilions on a first-come, first-served basis, just like any other group. The ministry operated without any objection from city officials.

Then, in the summer of 2024, everything changed. The chief of police informed the pastors he had been “tasked with shutting down” their weekly gatherings. City officials called a private meeting with representatives from the churches and made the city’s position clear: They liked what the churches were doing, but they couldn’t do it in Northglenn. The city’s objection wasn’t to the size of the gatherings or any actual disruption. Their objection was to who the churches were serving and why they were doing it – because of their religious conviction to follow Christ’s command to serve “the least of these.”
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Rather than respect these churches’ First Amendment rights, the City of Northglenn enacted Resolution CR-54 in June 2025, specifically designed to shut down religious gatherings. The new ordinance prohibits groups of five or more from using park pavilions and outdoor spaces on a recurring basis.

The article has a picture of one of the distribution events. The City of Northglenn enforces this reg selectively, not interfering, for example, with a weekly yoga group. The author of this article, Jordan Sekulow, is the Executive Director of the American Center for Law and Justice, which is defending these churches.

Unsurprisingly, except to DU-folk, the two churches named are what Duncanpup/TEB calls "wicked bible toting ****ers".

[enslaved1]

We created a searchable database with all 20,000 files from Epstein’s Estate

The US House Oversight Committee on Wednesday announced a massive document dump from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate, including thousands of emails discussing a wide range of topics, including women, blackmail, and spending the holidays with Donald Trump.

The 20,000 documents come in the form of poorly organized folders with unhelpful labels, screenshots of emails, and heavily redacted spreadsheets. Some of the files are devoid of context, such as a video in the NATIVES folder of a dog playing with plushies of Trump and Hillary Clinton, while others are broken up in confusing ways, like email chains split into several PDFs.

To make this massive data dump more accessible, COURIER has compiled the 20,000 documents from Epstein’s estate into an easily searchable repository via Google Pinpoint. Use the search tool here.

the search tool

This should keep the DUmp busy for a while. 

[SVPete]

Democrats Forced to Delete Another False Claim About Trump and Epstein

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/11/14/democrats-forced-to-delete-another-false-claim-about-trump-and-epstein-n4945989

The Democrats just gave us a masterclass in how to embarrass yourself on social media. For two days, left-wing influencers and elected Democrats pumped out a claim that President Trump spent Thanksgiving 2017 with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The allegation came from a Nov. 23, 2017, email where Epstein mentioned that "david fizel, hanson, trump" would be at his Thanksgiving gathering. That single email was all the evidence the left needed to run with a story, posting with confidence and conviction that the smoking gun had been found! Trump spent his first Thanksgiving as president with Epstein, and somehow, no one knew about it. It’s absurd on his face, and it took seconds to disprove. Yet, that didn’t stop the Democratic Party from claiming on X that “Documents show Donald Trump spent Thanksgiving with Jeffrey Epstein in 2017. At the time, Trump was already president, and Epstein was already a convicted sex offender.”
...
Naturally, X users promptly called them out, pointing out that Trump spent Thanksgiving at Mar-a-Lago, and CNN also reported that Trump visited the nearby Coast Guard Station Lake Worth Inlet that day, where he and First Lady Melania Trump served food to troops. The New York Times covered his video teleconference with military personnel stationed globally. All in all, it was a pretty busy, well-documented day for a sitting president.

Too good to factcheck now, egg on face later.

[SVPete]

Oil gains more than 2% as Russian port suspends oil exports after Ukrainian attack

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/14/oil-climbs-as-russian-port-suspends-oil-exports-after-ukrainian-attack.html

Oil prices climbed more than 2% on Friday, boosted by supply fears after the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk halted oil exports following a Ukrainian drone attack that hit an oil depot in the major Russian energy hub.
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Friday’s attack damaged a ship in port, apartment blocks and an oil depot in Novorossiisk, injuring three of the vessel’s crew, Russian officials said.

The port paused oil exports and oil pipeline monopoly Transneft suspended crude supplies to the outlet, two industry sources told Reuters.

As GoogTuber "Suchomimus" calls it, Ukraine's branch of "Just Stop Oil" has done serious damage to Russia's oil infrastructure - refineries, oil storage, and oil transport.

[SVPete]

Unwanted guests arrive

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/11/unwanted-guests-arrive.php

A chartered-plane full of uninvited Gazan refugees arrived in South Africa recently. This is an event that really happened.

As far as I can piece together, Israeli authorities allowed 153 Gaza residents to enter Isreal, travel to a nearby airport, board a chartered jetliner and fly to Johannesburg, via Nairobi.

There they sat on the tarmac for 10 hours until local South African authorities could figure out what to do. From BBC News,

South Africa has maintained strong support for the Palestinian cause throughout the war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza.

And now South Africa gets the opportunity to prove up their support with real action.
...
Well, they’re yours now. No takebacks. A local charity agreed to look after them as a condition of disembarking.

The war in Gaza is the first humanitarian crisis that I can recall where not a single country on earth has agreed to accept a single refugee from the area.

Why is that?

Israel-Hating South Africa got an opportunity to put its money where its mouth is, and responded, "We have to think about it."