Dreaming of a White-Hot Christmas
Christmas day brought unseasonably warm heat across much of the South, with highs in the 80s in parts of Texas. Houston hit 81°F, and Dallas tied its second-warmest Christmas on record at 80°F.
🇳🇬 U.S. strikes ISIS in Nigeria: Amid reports of escalated attacks in Nigeria against Christians in the predominately Islamic north part of the country, the U.S. military launched a Christmas Day strike against ISIS targets using more than a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles.
🇨🇦 British Columbia’s Supreme Court rules against land owners: British Property owners in British Columbia are scrambling for options after a court said indigenous groups have a right to reclaim ownership of land taken from them in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
🗳️ Georgia voting certification controversy: President Biden won Georgia by fewer than 12,000 votes in the 2020 election. But in a December 9 hearing before the Georgia State Election Board (SEB), Fulton County officials admitted to counting roughly 315,000 early votes in the 2020 election without proper certification, “counting hundreds of thousands of votes even though polling workers failed to sign off on the vote tabulation ‘tapes’ critical to the certification process.”
✈️ Trump administration's deportation system: The administration has increased its offer to $3,000 to illegal immigrants to self-deport through the end of the year.
A number of churches this year created immigrant-themed nativity scenes, depicting Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus as modern-day refugees or migrants, often in detention-like settings with barbed wire or cages, to protest immigration policies. The biggest problem with styling Mary and Joseph as illegal immigrants is that they were actually obeying the law, registering for a Roman census. Only because they obeyed the law were they able to fulfill prophecy by going to Bethlehem.
On the map below, each dot represents the movement of someone arrested or deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement this year.
After being arrested, detainees are moved to detention centers, then to a deportation hub. Deportations from the interior of the United States now outnumber apprehensions at the border for the first time since at least 2014.
