1884 A Forewarning Of The Sixth Seal (Revelation 6:12)

The Coney Island earthquake of 1884

Seismograph of New York Earthquake 1884

January 20, 2010

New York City isn’t immune to earthquakes; a couple of small tremors measuring about 2.5 on the Richter scale even struck back in 2001 and 2002.
But on August 10, 1884, a more powerful earthquake hit. Estimated from 4.9 to 5.5 in magnitude, the tremor made houses shake, chimneys fall, and residents wonder what the heck was going on, according to a New York Times article two days later.
The quake was subsequently thought to have been centered off Far Rockaway or Coney Island.
It wasn’t the first moderate quake, and it won’t be the last. In a 2008 Columbia University study, seismologists reported that the city is crisscrossed with several fault lines, one along 125th Street. 
With that in mind, New Yorkers should expect a 5.0 or higher earthquake centered here every 100 years, the seismologists say.
Translation: We’re about 30 years overdue. Lucky for us the city adopted earthquake-resistant building codes in 1995.

Iran Will Soon Restart Their Nuclear Program (Daniel 8:4)

Iranian president threatens to restart nuclear program
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran’s president issued a direct threat to the West on Tuesday, claiming his country is capable of restarting its nuclear program within hours — and quickly bringing it to even more advanced levels than in 2015, when Iran signed the nuclear deal with world powers.
Hassan Rouhani’s remarks to lawmakers follow the Iranian parliament’s move earlier this week to increase spending on the country’s ballistic missile program and the foreign operations of its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard.
The bill — and Rouhani’s comments — are seen as a direct response to the new U.S. legislation earlier this month that imposed mandatory penalties on people involved in Iran’s ballistic missile program and anyone who does business with them. The U.S. legislation also applies terrorism sanctions to the Revolutionary Guard and enforces an existing arms embargo.
If Washington continues with “threats and sanctions” against Iran, Rouhani said in parliament on Tuesday, Tehran could easily restart the nuclear program.
“In an hour and a day, Iran could return to a more advanced (nuclear) level than at the beginning of the negotiations” that preceded the 2015 deal, Rouhani said.
He did not elaborate.
The landmark agreement between Iran and world powers two years ago capped Iran’s uranium enrichment levels in return for the lifting of international sanctions.
It was not immediately clear what Rouhani was referring to — and whether he meant Iran could restart centrifuges enriching uranium to higher and more dangerous levels.
He also offered no evidence Iran’s capability to rapidly restart higher enrichment, though Iran still has its stock of centrifuges. Those devices now churn out uranium to low levels that can range from use as reactor fuel and for medical and research purposes, but could produce the much higher levels needed for a nuclear weapon.
Iran long has insisted its atomic program is for peaceful purposes despite Western fears of it being used to make weapons.
However in December, Rouhani ordered up plans on building nuclear-powered ships, something that appears to be allowed under the nuclear deal.
Rouhani’s remarks were likely an attempt to appease hard-liners at home who have demanded a tougher stand against the United States. But they are also expected to ratchet up tensions further with the Trump administration.
Iran has said the new U.S. sanctions amount to a “hostile” breach of the 2015 nuclear deal.
“The U.S. has shown that it is neither a good partner nor a trustable negotiator,” Rouhani added. “Those who are trying to go back to the language of threats and sanctions are prisoners of their past hallucinations. They deprive themselves of the advantages of peace.”
But Rouhani also tempered his own threat, adding that Iran seeks to remain loyal to its commitments under the nuclear deal, which opened a “path of cooperation and confidence-building” with the world.
“The deal was a model of the victory of peace and diplomacy over war and unilateralism,” said Rouhani. “It was Iran’s preference, but it was not and will not remain Iran’s only option.”
Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Antichrist Meets with the Sunnis (Revelation 13)

UAE pushes for better ties with cleric Sadr amid efforts to contain Iran
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – The United Arab Emirates signaled its desire to strengthen ties with Iraq during weekend talks with influential Iraqi Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr as part of efforts by Sunni nations of the Middle East to halt Iran’s growing regional influence.
Sadr met Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahayan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy commander of the UAE armed forces on Sunday in Abu Dhabi, according to a senior aide of the cleric.
Sadr also discussed ways of improving understanding between the Sunni and Shi’ite branches of Islam, at a meeting on Monday with a prominent Sunni cleric in Abu Dhabi.
The UAE is among Sunni nations which feel threatened by Iran’s increased power in the region, often projected through allied Shi’ite groups in Iraq and Lebanon.
“The two sides emphasized the importance to act in true Islamic spirit and reject violence and extremist thought,” Sadr’s office in Baghdad said in a statement on his website on Monday, reporting on his meeting with Emirati cleric Ahmed al-Kubaisi.
Closer ties with Sadr, who commands a large following among the urban poor of Baghdad and southern Iraq, would help Sunni states loosen Tehran’s grip over Iraq’s Shi’ite community and contain its influence.
The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain severed relations with Qatar on June 5, accusing the major gas-exporting Gulf state of financing terrorism, meddling in the affairs of Arab countries and cozying up to their arch-rival Iran.
Sadr is one of few Iraqi Shi’ite leaders to keep some distance from Iran. In April, he became the first Iraqi Shi’ite leader to call on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down, marking his difference with Iran and Iranian-backed Iraqi militias backing the Syrian government.
“Experience has taught us to always call for what brings Arabs and Muslims together, and to reject the advocates of division,” the Abu Dhabi crown prince told Sadr, according to report on the Emirati state-run news agency WAM.
The Iraqi cleric’s trip to Abu Dhabi comes two weeks after a visit to Saudi Arabia, where he met crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman..
Sadr’s office said his meeting with Mohammed bin Salman at the end of July resulted in an agreement to study possible investments in Shi’ite regions of southern Iraq.
The Saudis will consider the possibility of opening a consulate in Iraq’s holy Shi’ite city of Najaf, it said.
Sadr also announced a Saudi decision to donate $10 million to help Iraqis displaced by the war on Islamic State in Iraq, to be paid to the Iraqi government.
Baghdad and Riyadh had announced in June they would set up a coordination council to upgrade ties, as part of an attempt to heal troubled relations between the Arab neighbors.
Saudi Arabia reopened its embassy in Baghdad in 2015 following a 25-year break, and Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir made a rare visit to Baghdad in February.
Additional reporting by Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad; Editing by Richard Balmforth

The Iran Korea Connection (Daniel 8:4)

The other player in the North Korea crisis: Iran

BY Bridget Johnson

Pay no attention to that mullah behind the curtain, the North Korean regime implicitly orders the world as they keep ramping up missile tests, increasing the volume of bellicose rhetoric and crafting their four-missile plan for attacking Guam.

Sure, Iran and North Korea — along with another of their toxic allies, Russia — were partners as targets of the nearly unanimous sanctions that recently sailed through Congress. But they’re partners in so many ways — other than both holding U.S. hostages — from the weapons trade to circumvention of sanctions that every action coming out of Pyongyang needs to be weighed in broader context of the Iran relationship, and even as a test run of Iran’s ultimate ambitions for its own weapons capability.Iran is almost living vicariously through North Korea’s horn-locking with the Trump administration, engaging in weapons-grade trolling with state media loving the story and underscoring that Pyongyang is simply moving to protect the DPRK from unbridled U.S. aggression — the same convenient argument that Tehran makes to justify its own provocative actions.And there are early indications that Iran plans to act like Kim Jong Un’s war room — in the campaign sense, at a minimum — during Pyongyang’s testing of UN and Washington fortitude. A day before Kim’s Guam threat, the semi-official Fars News Agency ran a retrospective on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in which they defended most nuclear countries including North Korea: “So much is said every day about nuclear weapons and threats from nuclear-armed states, but that one historic fact remains among all the blather,” went the piece. “For all the talk, only America has dropped the bomb.” Iran is paying close attention to the untested dynamics of a new world order in which the Patton-admiring President of the United States vacillates in a love-disappointment relationship with China, has nary a bad word to say about the Kremlin, comes to loggerheads with NATO allies and may or may not call quits on the Iran nuclear deal.
While North Korea tests the system by wagging its rogue nuclear power, Iran wants to know how the globe reacts. And this observation isn’t happening in a vacuum, as Iran, North Korea and the rest of their friends take notes on how their axis can hoodwink our allies.
Because theirs is a long-term relationship, they also have the motivation to move closer to each other in not only fighting the Great Satan but in worrisome financial and military bonds.
On Aug. 3, the No. 2-ranking official in North Korea, president of the Supreme People’s Assembly Kim Yong Nam, arrived in Tehran for a 10-day visit, longer than many honeymoons and suspected to be chock-full of meetings on how the two can widen cooperation in a range of fields and battle sanctions hand-in-hand.
Pyongyang just opened an embassy in Tehran to, as the state-run Korean Central News Agency declared, “boost exchanges, contacts and cooperation between the two countries for world peace and security and international justice.”
They’ve already had a share-and-share-alike relationship when it comes to missile technology, with Iran’s Shahab-3 intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of striking Israel almost mirroring the North Korean No Dong 1 — and Pyongyang, in the line of nefarious hand-me-downs, likely borrowed their engine technology from Russia.
Iran was an investor in the No Dong before it even went to the testing ground. This long-running “you do the research, we provide the cash” marriage is basically tailored for a post-P5+1 deal world: Iran rakes in the dough from lifted sanctions, continues their ballistic missile program that wasn’t included in the deal, and has extra cash from above board or under the table to send North Korea’s way for continued nuclear development and testing that will be shared with Tehran in the end.
To avert a potentially devastating conflict, the State Department is dangling the offer of conditional talks with North Korea. And Iran would be an invisible yet powerfully influential presence in the negotiating room.
Johnson is a senior fellow with the news and public policy group Haym Salomon Center and D.C. bureau chief for PJ Media.