19 September was the 32nd anniversary of a hiuge earthquake in Mexico which resulted in thousands of deaths and many large buildings destroyed. This week’s quake demolished old buildings and less solidly-constructed new buildings. The cure for earthquake devastation is well known: fix the old buildings and improve construction methods for new ones. A complex and expensive decision, but necessary as Mexico City is notoriously vulnerable to earthquakes due to very soft and wet ground underneath. This amplifies the shaking, making the ground like jelly and prone to liquefaction. There have been 34 earthquakes bigger than magnitude 7 within 300 miles of Mexico City since 1900. There is clearly more work to do. Rodolfo Soriano Nuñez, a sociologist and independent public policy analyst, said that government new building codes are not working. ‘We see new buildings have collapsed while older ones have survived.’

Dominica’s prime minister said, ‘We have lost all that money can buy’ after Hurricane Maria made landfall there on 19 September. Two days later rescue teams were struggling to reach the first victims stranded without power, running water or communications. Sadly, Maria moved along a similar track to Irma, the hurricane that devastated areas two weeks earlier. The military and police on the British Virgin Islands switched from focusing on recovery and cleanup after Irma to preparation for Maria, and started securing safe shelters for residents. Fortunately they were spared the full force. On 21 September, on its way to the Dominican Republic, Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico - the strongest hurricane there since 1928, when 300 people died. Over the coming weeks we can pray for the major relief efforts that will get under way to re-establish communication, restore electricity, and deliver medical aid, food, water, mattresses, clothes and other basic necessities.

Puerto Rico has been in a painful recession since 2006; previous governments dug it deeper into debt by borrowing to pay operating expenses, year after year. For the last two years, officials have been seeking assistance from Washington, testifying before stern congressional committees and even before the supreme court. In May, with creditors at its heels and its coffers depleted, it sought what is essentially bankruptcy relief in federal court, the first time in history that an American state or territory has taken this extraordinary measure, because of a $123 billion debt. Government workers are foregoing pension money; public health and infrastructure projects are not happening because of the crushing weight of debt. Now, Hurricane Maria has ripped through Puerto Rico, causing potentially thirty billion dollars in damage and threatening to exacerbate the population exodus that has helped push the island into bankruptcy. See

Rich Penkoski, a conservative Christian parent in West Virginia, voiced concern after Jackie Coffin, a middle school teacher, showed her class of 13-year-olds a suicide-prevention music video that featured hip hop music, two male high school students in bed together, and a sex toy. Penkoski told the Christian Post that this was not the suicide-prevention video approved by the school, while Coffin instructed students not to tell their parents that she had played it during class. Penkoski works as a leader of Warriors for Christ (WFC), who have launched a new Christian social media alternative to Facebook called SocialCross.org. So far nearly ten thousand users have joined the new platform. WFC also made headlines and received much backlash when they announced, ‘Anyone posting an LGBT rainbow flag emoji to the Facebook page will be banned by the page's administrators’.