May 2018 has been extraordinary for its high volume of establishment press corrections and erroneous tweet deletions. One particular correction at the New York Times stands out from the rest of that crowded field. In that correction, published on May 16 (for the May 17 print edition), the Times admitted that reporter Gardiner Harris committed four significant errors in an attack piece posing as a hard-news story about Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank. Dubowitz was a strong opponent of former President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear “deal” in 2015, but then tried and failed to salvage portions of it before President Donald Trump’s announced the United States would withdraw from it earlier this month.

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From Lublin, Poland:

May 11, 2018 / 10:36 am

The Archdiocese of Lublin has launched a campaign urging Catholics to take to social media in defense of the unborn, using selfies as a way to voice gratitude for one’s life and the right to be born.

“When we take a selfie we show ourselves, but in this case, we give a sign that we are committed to defending life and the family,” Archbishop Stanislaw Budzik of Lublin said in a May 10 statement coinciding with the launch of the campaign.

“We want to show gratitude to God for the gift of life, to our parents for letting us come to this beautiful world and to all those who defend life, who speak with joy and gratitude about life,” he said, adding that “it is worth devoting all our strength” to defending life and family.

The campaign, titled “Selfie for Life,” was launched by the Lublin archdiocese ahead of Poland’s national March for Life and Family June 10, and is intended to rally a worldwide defense of life and marriage. Marches will take place in 160 cities throughout Poland.

Participants are asked to take a selfie either alone or with a group, and post it to their social media accounts with the hashtag “#DziekujeZeZyje”, roughly translating as “Thankful for my life.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.

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From New York City:

May 9, 2018 / 03:08 pm

A surprise performance by the Sistine Chapel Choir at the Met Gala this week left attendees in awe and helped convey the joy and beauty of the Church, said one of the organizers of the performance.

The choir’s performance had not been announced in advance, coming as a surprise to those present at the May 7 Met Gala, which takes place annually on the first Monday of May and serves as a fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

This year the Met exhibition, which opens May 10 and runs through October 2018, carries the theme “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” and features around 40 items on loan from the Vatican.

The items, many of which come from the Sistine Chapel Sacristy’s Office for Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff, range in time period from the mid-1700s up to the pontificate of Saint John Paul II.

Given the special nature of the Vatican items, they will be set up in a separate display from the other pieces, which include religious art from the Met collection itself and around 150 designer fashion pieces intended to pay homage to Catholicism and which draw inspiration from Catholic iconography, liturgy and other aspects of the faith tradition.

John Hale, one of the leading organizers of the choir’s surprise performance at the gala, told CNA that the evening “was really a wow-moment.”

Hale sits on the board of directors for the Vatican’s Patrons of the Arts, which consists of different chapters, most of which are in the United States, who fund restoration projects for the priceless treasures housed in the Vatican Museums.

At one point after the performance, Hale said Anna Wintour, Met board member and editor-in-chief of the fashion magazine Vogue, told him guests were unusually silent, commenting that “this is the quietest I’ve ever seen for this gala.”

Wintour, Hale said, told him attendees “were absolutely enthralled” by the performance. That sentiment, he added, “summed it up beautifully.”

“I spoke with a number of the attendees and mixed with them right after the performance and it was perfect silence, there was very good applause and reaction…so many folks were just really moved.”

Commonly referred to as “the pope’s choir,” the Sistine Chapel Choir consists of 20 professional singers from around the world, as well as a treble section composed of 35 boys aged 9-13, called the Pueri Cantores.

With a 1,500-year history, the Sistine Chapel Choir is believed to be the oldest active choir in the world. …

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The press has dishonestly smeared President Donald Trump since he described criminal illegal immigrants who are members of MS-13 and other gangs as “animals” at Wednesday’s White House California Sanctuary State Roundtable. But on Thursday, the Associated Press deleted and replaced a tweet which falsely claimed that Trump’s remark referred to all illegal immigrants. Even though both the deletion and replacement tweets are laden with predictable excuse-making and weasel words, AP’s deletion effectively burns everyone else in the press and on the left who has been or still is making this false claim.

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From Valparaiso, Chile:

May 13, 2018 / 03:52 pm

As infants, Monica and Cristian Moya were hovering on the verge of death. But after their mother consecrated them to the Virgin Mary, they recovered from a severe case of pneumonia.

Today, Cristian Moya is a priest. Sister Monica Moya made her final vows with the Congregation of the Daughters of Saint Mary of Providence – founded by Saint Luis Guanella – last year.

In an interview with ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish language sister agency, Sister Monica recalled that their mother told them the story of their consecration to Mary just a few years ago.

The twins were born January 15, 1974 in San Antonio Province in the Valparaiso Region of Chile.

They were struck with a severe case of pneumonia when they were about three months old. In critical condition at the hospital, doctors informed their parents “that a blood transfusion was the last thing they would do for us,” the sister said.

Their mother – who had lost her first child at the age of one due to a heart condition – decided to consecrate the twins to the Virgin Mary, under her title of Nuestra Señora Purísima of Lo Vasquez (Our Lady Most Pure), a very well-known and beloved Marian title in Chile.

“My mom says that the only thing that came to her mind was to offer us to the Virgin and leave us in her hands. After that our recovery occurred,” Sister Monica said.

“Maybe you can look at this as a simple coincidence, but now one of her children is a priest and the other a nun,” she reflected.

Also notable, she added, is that Cristian “did his priestly formation in the seminary that is next to the Shrine of Nuestra Señora Purísima de Lo Vásquez,” the same church where their mother had gone to beg for the recovery of her children. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump held a California Sanctuary State Roundtable at the White House’s Cabinet Room. During a discussion with Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims, Trump referred to MS-13 gang members as “animals.” Though there is no conceivable way his remarks could be misinterpreted, a significant percentage of an establishment press which apparently just can’t help itself, with the New York Times leading the way, has decided that Trump was referring to all illegal immigrants.

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In its April 2018 Month Treasury Statement, the federal government reported that it ran an all-time single-month record $214 billion surplus, primarily because it took in $510 billion in receipts, also a record. Josh Boak at the Associated Press ignored the collections record, presented a different and far smaller out-of-context collections figure, and falsely claimed that the increase in fiscal 2018′s seven-month budget deficit compared to last year is due to the Republican Congress’s tax cuts — even though they were passed in December, and even though federal spending has skyrocketed.

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From Ottawa, Canada:

May 11, 2018 / 04:31 pm

An estimated 15,000 people attended the Canadian March for Life on Thursday in Ottawa.

James Hughes, national president of the Campaign Life Coalition, said marchers were upbeat, and the clergy powerfully represented the faith.

“Mother Teresa on Parliament Hill back in the late ‘80s … turned to me and said ‘the interesting thing about the prolife movement is that it is ordinary people doing extraordinary things for God’,” Hughes recounted.

Pro-choice activists blocked the original route for this year’s march. Organizers were prepared, Hughes said, and had prepared alternate routes in advance. They also beefed up security.

… The Canadian March for Life began 21 years ago, when Hughes was encouraged to start it by Nellie Gray, the founder for the annual pro-life march in Washington D.C.

Go here for the full the story.

From the Federal Reserve on Tuesday:

Industrial production rose 0.7 percent in April for its third consecutive monthly increase. At 107.3 percent of its 2012 average, total industrial production in April was 3.5 percent higher than it was a year earlier.

The currently posted February, March and April increases are 0.4 percent, 0.7 percent, and 0.7 percent, respectively. That 1.8 percent result in three months would annualize to 7.4 percent if sustained.

At the end of the Obama era, industrial production was treading water. In the January 2017 report, “The overall 12-month change … (was) a goose egg.”

Tuesday, the Associated Press produced a dispatch exemplifying why the public so deeply distrusts and despises the establishment press. Tasked with covering President Donald Trump’s lunch with Republican senators, reporters Lisa Mascaro and Anne Flaherty decided that relaying what happened and what was discussed was relatively unimportant. Instead, in a transparent attempt to fuel controversies not germane to the event and to perpetuate the meme of a Trump presidency mired in controversy, they made their story primarily about what didn’t happen and what wasn’t discussed.

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