The Vatican isn’t a campaign stop and Rep. Salazar shouldn’t have treated it as one | Opinion

Mary Anna Mancuso

Wed, August 19, 2026 at 3:08 PM EDT

As a Catholic, I'm offended. As a Floridian, I'm exhausted. It seems there are no lengths to which U.S. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, a Miami Republican, won't go to promote her immigration bill.

Even the pope isn't off limits. Last week, after meeting with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican, she quickly took to social media to say she was grateful to "place the DIGNITY Act in the Holy Father's hands." The video posted to her social media channels, shot in front of the Vatican, was in poor taste. What I saw was a South Florida congresswoman using the Vatican as a backdrop to push her legislation.

You don't have to be Catholic to understand why it's offensive. It looks like Salazar used her meeting with the pope to create the impression of support for her legislation. That should bother anyone, religious or not.

The meeting itself wasn't a problem. There's nothing wrong with an elected official discussing immigration with the pope. Immigration is both a moral and political issue that affects millions, and people of faith often bring their convictions into public life.

Leo has spoken directly on immigration. On June 25, 2026, the pope wrote a letter to America marking the 250th anniversary of the United States: "To receive [immigrants] with compassion and generosity is not only an act of charity, but also a recognition of the dignity that belongs to every human person," he wrote.

Many politicians have visited the Vatican and afterward have posted photos of their time with the pope. I don't think that's wrong. The difference is that Salazar used the opportunity to spotlight her legislation. The pope hasn't endorsed her bill; she shouldn't be trying to make it look that way.

But in politics, optics matter. And that was the point. Salazar, in what appeared to be a staged moment, created an impression the facts don't support.

Salazar's office told me it was "entirely appropriate to discuss immigration and the bipartisan work she is leading" during the visit. The statement from her office said Salazar spoke with the pope "about immigration and the dignity of migrants, issues that are central to the Catholic Church and that Pope Leo himself has made a priority, and shared with him the bipartisan solution she has been working on for years."

Republican Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar (R-FL) spoke with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican on Aug. 13, 2026

What is Happening in China?!

What is Happening in China?!

China Uncensored

Aug 19, 2026 

Devastating storms, collapsing dams, flooding, corruption, and disastrous infrastructure are exposing the consequences of China’s Communist system. And with concerns surrounding the Three Gorges Dam, the stakes could get even higher.

Mamdani FREAKS OUT After His Family's MANSIONS On Three Continents Get EXPOSED

 

The Unholy Alliance You Weren’t Supposed to Notice

Kelsey Reinhardt on August 12, 2026

Something unusual happened on October 8, 2023.

The morning after Hamas slaughtered 1,200 people in southern Israel, after women were raped, children were burned, and families were dragged into tunnels, demonstrators took to the streets and college campuses across the US, not in mourning, but in celebration.

Progressive activists marched alongside Islamist organizers. Transgender flags flew next to keffiyehs. Students at elite universities declared a sadistic massacre to be the opening act of a revolution.

It was, as one observer noted, Bolshevik demagoguery at its finest. The raped and murdered were recast as oppressors. The rapists and murderers became the oppressed.

What you were witnessing has a name.

Scholars and analysts call it “the red-green alliance”: a working coalition between the radical secular left and Islamist political movements. It is not a formal organization. It has no single headquarters. But it is real, it is growing, and its ambitions are not modest.

To understand it, you have to understand what holds it together: because on the surface, it makes no sense at all.

The radical left champions women’s autonomy, sexual liberation, and secular governance. Islamist political theology holds to the authority of Sharia, traditional gender roles, and the supremacy of religious law. These are not minor differences. They are irreconcilable visions of human life and social order.

And yet they march together. They fundraise together. They are reshaping Democratic primaries together.

What binds them is not a shared vision of the future. It is a shared enemy: the Judeo-Christian foundations of Western civilization, our natural law tradition, our ordered liberty and our understanding of the human person as made in the image of God and therefore possessed of an inherent dignity that no state can confer or revoke.

Both movements, in their activist forms, are united by what they oppose. And that opposition has proven sufficient to make them allies.

China Earthquake LIVE: 5.6-Magnitude Quake Hits Qinghai..

 China Earthquake LIVE: 5.6-Magnitude Quake Hits Qinghai | Breaking Updates | TSG

The Sunday Guardian

A 5.6-magnitude earthquake has struck Qinghai in northwest China, triggering strong tremors across the region. The seismic event has put residents on alert as authorities assess the situation and monitor for possible aftershocks. Watch this LIVE coverage for the latest earthquake updates, ground visuals, official information and developments from Qinghai as more details emerge.

At the start of 2019, fewer than 2,000 active satellites circled Earth...

At the start of 2019, fewer than 2,000 active satellites circled Earth. By June 2026 there were 15,711 — and nearly two out of every three belonged to a single constellation: SpaceX's Starlink.

A June 2026 traffic index counted nearly eight times as many working satellites as existed at the start of 2019, with Starlink making up 65.97 percent.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Starlink 6-78 mission launches from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on Nov. 20, 2025. Credit: U.S. Space Force photo by Gwendolyn Kurzen, public domain.

By Deep Field · Edited by Lachlan Brown

Published August 17, 2026 · How we edit


Look Up’s quarterly space index, released on 2 June 2026, counted 15,711 active satellites in Earth orbit. It assigned 10,365 of them to SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. That is 65.97 percent, making “nearly two out of every three” the arithmetic of this particular catalog.

The same index put the active population below 2,000 at the start of 2019. The total had therefore grown almost eightfold in a little more than seven years. That interval is unusually revealing because the first full batch of 60 Starlink satellites launched in May 2019.

These are dated operational counts, not permanent facts. “Active” is judged from tracking and operational evidence, and different catalogs can reach different totals. The June numbers should be read as a coherent snapshot from one provider, not a universally standardized census.

The 15,711 figure came from a commercial traffic index

Look Up is a French space-situational-awareness company operating tracking radars and a data platform called SYNAPSE. Its second-quarter 2026 index, produced with the French magazine Le Point, reported 15,711 active satellites as of the start of June. The previous edition three months earlier had counted 14,389.

That is an increase of 1,322 active spacecraft in roughly one quarter. The index attributed 3,320 new active Starlinks to the preceding year, while also recording growth in Chinese fleets. It listed China at 1,286 active satellites, including the developing Qian Fan and GuoWang systems, and Eutelsat OneWeb at 651.

The denominator matters. The report was counting working satellites, not every human-made object overhead. It separately said that more than 33,000 cataloged objects were being tracked, including active payloads, rocket bodies and debris. A piece of fragmentation debris does not become a satellite in the 15,711 total simply because it circles Earth.

Watch President Trump's Reaction to AI Teddy Roosevelt

 New York Post

Jul 1, 2026

Watch President Trump's interaction with the AI of President Theodore Roosevelt at the Theodore Roosevelt Library in North Dakota.

The Chief Cornerstone

Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God;

And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone;

In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord:

In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.

Ephesians 2:19-22.

UAPs, The Occult, And The Spiritual Realm

Protest in Dearborn, Michigan Near Henry Ford Centennial Library

Anti-Islam protesters expected at Dearborn City Council meeting

 

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What if America Went Completely Dark?

The power grid relies on thousands of aging, hand-built transformers. If enough fail, the blackout could last years.
Photo illustration by Justin Metz

By Christopher Cox

Christopher Cox traveled to California and Nevada and interviewed more than two dozen experts in grid technologies and grid reliability.

Aug. 18, 2026Updated 9:20 a.m. ET

The snipers had been shooting for nearly 10 minutes before someone called 911. A man driving down the highway told the police he thought he heard fireworks as he passed Pacific Gas and Electric’s Metcalf electrical substation, 15 miles southeast of San Jose. An engineer at a nearby power plant said he thought it was gunfire. Maybe more calls would have come in, but the communication link between the substation and PG&E, along with several phone and internet cables, had been severed. It was April 16, 2013.

The shooters — two, maybe more — took up positions 30 to 40 yards outside the substation fence, in the dry scrubland near Coyote Creek. At 1:31 a.m., after a security camera recorded what looked like a signal from a flashlight, they began firing high-powered rifles into the facility. Sparks flew into the air whenever the bullets grazed the chain-link fence, but most of the shots hit their apparent targets: a row of truck-size power transformers, which step down high-voltage electricity to lower voltages so it can be sent to local homes and businesses. Because this was Silicon Valley, those customers included some of the largest tech companies in the world.

After some 120 shots, 17 of Metcalf’s transformers had been disabled. The attackers knew to aim for the units’ cooling systems, oil-filled fins similar to those on a radiator, which draw heat away from the electrified core. That allowed the oil, 52,000 gallons of it, to drain out slowly so that the transformers wouldn’t fail right away, which would have triggered an alarm. The gunmen could take their time.

At 1:50 a.m., there was another flicker from a flashlight, and the shooting stopped. One minute later, the police arrived at the substation, but by then, the shooters were gone. The police looked around and, finding nothing suspicious, left as well. It wasn’t until a utility worker arrived at 3:15 a.m. that the extent of the damage was clear.

All these are the beginning of sorrows.

AI Image Generator (Canva)

And Jesus went out, and departed from the temple: and his disciples came to him for to shew him the buildings of the temple.

And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.

And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?

And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive you.

For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.

And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.

For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.

All these are the beginning of sorrows.

Mattew 24:1-8.

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Cuban foreign agent running for Congress claims conflicting residencies

Story by Hudson Crozier, Washington Examiner

Cuban foreign agent running for Congress claims conflicting residencies

A registered foreign agent for Cuba is running for Congress in Rhode Island despite attesting that he lives in both the Ocean State and Florida, documents reviewed by the Washington Examiner show.

GOP House candidate Victor Mellor wrote Englewood, Florida, as his residence in a June filing with the Department of Justice and a Warwick, Rhode Island, address as his "business address" — despite campaigning for Rhode Island's 2nd Congressional District. He also obtained a July marriage license in Florida that seemingly contradicted the DOJ filing by labeling Warwick as his "residence." The city's public property records further complicate the picture, listing a different couple as owners of the property at the Warwick address.

The records raise questions about Mellor's Rhode Island roots as he competes with GOP-endorsed primary opponent Stephen Skoly for incumbent Rep. Seth Magaziner's (D-RI) seat. Mellor has the support of former Donald Trump advisers Rudy Giuliani and Michael Flynn. He also counts Trump allies Roger Stone and Joseph Flynn, Michael Flynn's brother, as campaign staffers.

Mellor's campaign did not respond to the Washington Examiner's request for comment. A campaign spokesperson told the Providence Journal that the Florida "address discrepancy" in the DOJ filing "stems from a clerical error made by the law firm Vic has used in the past." Mellor is a Rhode Island native who "continues to reside in Warwick," the spokesperson told the paper.

However, Mellor and his female partner's names do not appear in search results in Warwick's property database. Instead, Sarasota County, Florida's property appraiser lists the couple as owners of a parcel at the same Englewood address Mellor reported as his residence to the DOJ. Sarasota County last updated the listing on Sunday.

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Preparedness vs Faith: What the Bible Really Says

What Is Claude AI? How Anthropic's AI Assistant Compares to ChatGPT 🤖

 

Anthropic Destroyed 2 Million Books 😳

Anthropic Destroyed 2 Million Books 😳

Julia McCoy

Aug 13, 2026  Future of AI: AGI and Superintelligence

FREE GUIDE: 📘 The Content Creator's AI Blueprint  – https://FirstMovers.ai/blueprint/

Anthropic bought millions of physical books, sliced the spines off with a hydraulic machine, scanned the pages, and threw the originals away — to train Claude.

Court documents revealed an internal effort called *Project Panama*, and a $1.5 billion copyright settlement is now paying authors about $3,000 per book. A judge ruled the destruction fair use.

Bishop Robert Barron & Bill O'Reilly on Religion and Mass Migration

Bill O'Reilly

Premiered Aug 15, 2026

Bishop Robert Barron, founder of Word on Fire, discusses the issues surrounding mass migration.

Tithing pt 4: Dirty, Rotten, Independent, Atoms - Pastor Bill HugheS

 

The Common Good: The Coming Threat to Religious Liberty - Pastor Michael Avaylon

 

 

The Common Good: The Coming Threat to Religious Liberty - Pastor Michael Avaylon

Countryside Sabbath Fellowship

Aug 12, 2026 

What happens when the “common good” begins to override religious liberty and obedience to God?

In this powerful present truth message, we examine the trial of Jesus, the dangers of church and state uniting, and the growing pressure to compromise Biblical truth for the sake of unity. Will God’s people stand faithful when the final crisis comes?

The Apostle Peter in Rome

Jesus’ chief disciple examined
Nicola Denzey Lewis June 28, 2026 

In this blog post, Brown University Religious Studies professor Nicola Denzey Lewis answers frequently asked questions about the apostle Peter. Denzey Lewis appears in the CNN series Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery, which aims to investigate artifacts that shed light on the world in which Jesus lived.—Ed.

What traditions connect the apostle Peter to Rome?

The Repentant St. Peter by El Greco. Photo: The Phillips Collection.

Jesus’ chief disciple, Peter (also called Simon Peter or Cephas), has been associated with Rome for nearly 2,000 years. The earliest testimony to the apostle Peter’s presence in Rome is a letter from a Christian deacon named Gaius. Writing probably toward the end of the second century C.E.—so, around 170 or 180 C.E.—Gaius tells about the wondrous things in Rome, including something called a tropaion (see below for more) where Peter established a church—in fact, the Church, the Roman Catholic church at the site where St. Peter’s Basilica is today. But there are other traditions besides Peter’s tropaion.

One early Christian text, the Apocryphal Acts of Peter, recounts many things that Peter did in the city. At one point in Acts of Peter, Peter is taunted by a flamboyant heretic, Simon Magus. Simon challenges Peter to a flying contest around the Roman Forum, but Peter’s prayers make Simon crash to the ground, proving that Simon’s powers are not as great as his own.

At the end of this text, Peter, not wishing to be martyred for his faith, flees from Roman authorities on the Via Appia leading out of the city. Rather unexpectedly, Peter meets Jesus, who is traveling in the opposite direction. He asks Jesus, “Where are you going?” Jesus tells Peter that he is going to Rome “to be crucified again.” Peter realizes, from this, that he cannot flee from his fate.

“Where are you going?” in Latin is “Quo Vadis?” and there’s a medieval church in Rome called the Church of Quo Vadis at the spot where Peter met Jesus. To prove that his vision was real, you can still see there a bit of marble pavement which the faithful say miraculously preserve Jesus’ footprints.

Why an Egyptian Obelisk Stands in the Center of St. Peter’s Square

 

Matthew McConaughey drops new hint about politics after meeting Pope Leo XIV Story by Eren Waris

Story by Eren Waris

Matthew McConaughey drops new hint about politics after meeting Pope Leo XIV

Matthew McConaughey drops new hint about politics after meeting Pope Leo XIV

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK: Actor Matthew McConaughey said he could see himself “adding to or working on” a constitution built around common ground among religions.

McConaughey, who calls himself an aggressively centrist Christian, has previously been asked about running for office, including governor of his home state.

The comments came in a USA TODAY interview, published on Saturday, August 15, after his meeting with Pope Leo XIV in Vatican City.

Actors Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey speak onstage at Nokia Theatre LA Live on August 25, 2014 in Los Angeles, California (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

Matthew McConaughey says religion could inform politics

McConaughey said he sees common ground among religions as something that could inform a political system.

“There’s still a constitution out there to be written that all religions could agree on,” he told USA TODAY. “There's so much commonality.”

He said he was interested in the possibility of “adding to or working on” such a constitution, calling it “a great thing to share.”

Pope Leo XIV waves as he leaves after his weekly general audience in St Peter's Square at The Vatican, Wednesday, June 3, 2026 (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

McConaughey also drew a line between religious teachings and the separation of church and state.

“Even though I agree with the separation of church and state, the values of those should bleed down into the values of any political system,” he said.