Nicholas Pellegrino, a 29-year-old San Francisco Catholic high school teacher and track coach, is recovering after his throat was slashed in a train robbery while traveling near Milan, Italy — a survival he and his surgeons call “miraculous.”

As the Chronicle reports, Pellegrino, who teaches religion and coaches track at Archbishop Riordan High School, was traveling through San Giuliano Milanese on July 15 while visiting friends and family in Italy. As SFGate reports, shortly after boarding a train bound for Florence, Pellegrino noticed four men in a nearby row who appeared to be watching him.

“I would look up, and they would look away, but then they’d continue to look back and eye me out,” he told Staten Island Advance, his hometown newspaper. The men then suddenly rushed him, and he was stabbed in the neck in the chaos. They ran off with his luggage and personal belongings, including a crucifix he was wearing.

“I had no doubt in my mind — if I didn’t get help soon, I was going to die,” he told the Chronicle. Bleeding heavily, Pellegrino staggered to the platform at the next stop, pressed his shirt against the wound, and screamed for help.

As Daily Mail reports, paramedics arrived about 15 minutes later and rushed him to a hospital in San Donato Milanese, where doctors determined his jugular artery had been grazed. He lost more than a liter of blood. “Even the surgeons are saying it was a miracle,” he told the Chronicle.

Italian authorities arrested four suspects — men from Tunisia and Morocco — hours later at a train station about an hour away. Police told Pellegrino they believed the same group had attacked a cabdriver the night before and another train passenger earlier that day.

Pellegrino spent four days in the hospital before being discharged. In addition to his injuries, he lost his laptop, passport, and luggage.

Word of the assault quickly spread to colleagues and students. Nate Simon, assistant principal at Riordan, called Pellegrino “an integral part” of the school. “Our thoughts and prayers are with him as he deals with this terrifying incident,” he said.

A GoFundMe campaign* started by former students has raised over $43,000 to help cover medical expenses and replace stolen items. “I would never have expected that outpouring of money and support,” Pellegrino said. “It shows the impact you have being an educator is more than people might think.”

Pellegrino, who is deeply religious, said the attack has only deepened his faith. “I’m convinced the hand of God worked a miracle to ensure I did not lose my life that day.”

*Content warning: The main photo on the GoFundMe page is a bit graphic, as it shows Pellegrino being treated at the scene.

Image via LinkedIn

A 52-year-old, 28-foot cross that was lit up for Easter and Christmas at Albany Hill Park has been removed by the City of Albany because it promotes one religion over others, and to boot, its electrical writing may pose a fire risk.

If you’ve ever been to Albany Hill Park, some 25 miles northeast of San Francisco, you may have noticed that a 28-foot Christian cross (seen below) sits atop one of its hills. The cross was put there by the local chapter of the Lions Club in 1971, and was lit up every Easter and the week prior to Christmas. To detractors, the cross on city-owned property is a pretty obvious violation of the separation of church and state, and there have been lawsuits over it for years.

According to the Bay Area News Group, critics say the cross “symbolizes a preference of one religion over others, offends some members of the city’s diverse communities, is reminiscent of KKK cross-burnings in the East Bay hills in the 1920s, and is an eyesore.”

The News Group reports that the cross was just quietly removed from the park, and has been placed in storage while its fate is determined. The Lions Club is up in arms, though the land is no longer private, which it was when the cross was erected. And a federal judge had already ordered it removed in 2018, which city officials have now finally done.

“For the small local group of people that really want to see the cross stay, when you’ve had such privilege for so long, losing it feels like being oppressed,” Albany Mayor Aaron Tiedemann told the News Group. “That’s going to be an adjustment for folks, but I think we will all get used to it, and I think it’s a real benefit.”

Additionally, the thing constitutes a fire risk with all the electrical lines around trees. PG&E  had cut the power in 2017, but then restored it again, with the Lions Club complaining that removing the power lines was “part of a harassment campaign.”

And the Lions Club is still complaining. “I think they just gave the city of Albany a black eye,” Albany Lions Club president Kevin Pope told the News Group. “There’s a lot of people who love it being up there — a lot of people go up there and pray and have church services. It’s sacred ground to us, and taking it down shows their intolerance toward Christian values.”

The controversy recalls SF’s Mount Davidson cross, which went up in wooden form in the 1920s, was replaced with a permanent concrete version in 1934, and made a cameo in the 1971 film Dirty Harry. That cross too was ruled unconstitutional, but the city sidestepped that ruling in 1997 by selling the small patch of land it sits on to the Armenian American Organizations of Northern California.  

The trial on whether the Albany Hill cross will be returned, or if the Lions Club will be forced to accept some settlement from the city, is scheduled to begin July 17.

Related: San Francisco Is Only The Fourth Most Godless Place In The Country, Study Finds [SFist]

Image: Eve E via Yelp

The pastor of a Baptist church in Tempe, Arizona has created a Biblical word salad of a sermon, with accompanying YouTube "documentary," about how dirty and drug-ridden San Francisco is and how this represents a nationally important sin against God.

The video, which is a hodgepodge of clips from newscasts, biblical verse citations, and clips of Pastor Steven Anderson himself sermonizing, is titled "San Fran Sicko." Around the 55-minute mark in the video, Anderson evokes the Loma Prieta earthquake, and makes the tired connection between it, San Francisco's liberal and pro-homosexual politics, and God's wrath.

"They didn't just throw out morality," Anderson preaches. "They threw out sanitation!" He then cuts to a cellphone video shot in January 2019 in which an apparently mentally ill man brought a dead raccoon and plopped it on a table in a San Francisco McDonald's.

"I'm sick of this politically correct garbage that won't call out the homelessness for what it is: laziness," Anderson says around minute 15:30.

The whole video appears predicated on a quote from Zephaniah, itself a minor-profit Old Testament book that isn't often quoted: "Woe to her that is filthy and polluted, to the oppressing city!"

Inexplicably, around the 1:03:00 mark, the documentary transitions into some random footage of people on drugs from various news sources from all over the country, including Los Angeles and Fort Lauderdale.

Anderson is from Sacramento, and as the bio page on his Faithful Word Baptist Church explains, he met his wife of 18 years in Germany while on some sort of mission, "led her to the Lord," and now they have 10 children — the latest having just been born last month, per the wife's blog.

"Faithful Word Baptist Church is a totally independent Baptist church, and Pastor Anderson was sent out by an independent Baptist church in Northern California to start it the old-fashioned way by knocking doors and winning souls to Christ," the copy reads.

So, yes, Anderson appears to be obsessed with his home state of California, and has gotten really good at YouTube searches and incorporating YouTube scaries into his sermonizing. The hashtags on the latest video are #SanFran #SanFrancisco and #Sodom.

As he concludes at the end of the video, which has footage of the end of some sort of class he was leading with a white board, Anderson says, "We do have a few minutes for questions about salvation or about the End Times."

I have a question: Why have 10 kids if we're that close to the End Times?

When the specter of eviction began to loom over the 1971-founded St. John Coltrane Church this past February, Archbishop Franzo King told SFist that his congregation was concerned but far from defeated.

"This is what this church is all about," King said. "We don't bow, we don't cow, we ain't going along to get along." In April, the Church learned it would indeed be evicted, though it was granted a 60-day reprieve at that time. Seeking to relocate but remain in the historic Fillmore District, King told the Examiner that “With God, all things are possible...But we don’t know if something is available [in the Fillmore].”

Now there's good word from Hoodline: Saint Cyprian’s Episcopal Church at Turk and Lyon, in many ways a kindred spirit of the Coltrane Church, has agreed to temporarily share its space.

“We started off as a neighborhood church when the Western Addition was predominantly black," St. Cyprian's father Thomas C. Jackson told Hoodline. "We’re trying to be a bridge between what used to be and what is becoming so that everyone can live together," Jackson added to the neighborhood blog. “St. John Coltrane transcends things like race and class and economic barriers — the music does that.”

The two religious institutions will hold their own separate services on Sundays at 2097 Turk: Saint Cyprian's at 10:10 a.m., and Saint Coltrane's at noon. This Christmas, they plan to work together on a jazz-oriented holiday service and celebration.

Related: Video: The Church Of Coltrane's (Possibly) Last Service In The Fillmore

Last December, video showed a woman in Alameda County harassing a group of praying Muslims, screaming that they were "murderers." Rasheed Albeshari, who posted footage of the attack, wrote at the time, "I never thought this would ever happen to me here." While Muslims represent just one percent of the population of the US overall, here in the Bay Area, there were at least 250,000 Muslims in 2010, one of the largest concentrated populations in the country.

The timing of the harassment was not coincidental, proposes a Georgetown University study titled “When Islamophobia Turns Violent: The 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections." According to that study's findings, "As [Donald Trump] called for shutting down mosques in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks and the mass shootings in San Bernardino, California in December 2015, anti-Muslim attacks initially tripled with nearly half of those attacks directed against mosques."

But anti-Muslim rhetoric could backfire, the New York Times writes in a story reported from Oakland. A national group called the US Council of Muslim Organizations has announced their intention to register one million Muslim voters. "When your existence in society is in danger, you try to mobilize your community," the council's secretary general Oussama Jammal told the Times. “You have to be part of the entire society.” Here in California, that means registering Muslims in time not just for the November election, but the June 7 primary as well.

“So many family and community members are really, really scared,” Jehan Hakim tells the paper. In addition to serving as California president of the American Association of Yemeni Students and Professionals, she organizes voter registration drives at Oakland.

Hakim also participates in a local campaign called “Meet a Muslim,” which the Chronicle profiled in February. “I thought, how do I reach out to ordinary people on the street... who want to meet a Muslim face-to-face and be able to ask any question without being judged or intimidated?” Moina Shaiq, a 56-year-old mother of four in Fremont, told the Chronicle. “I have heard this time and time again, where people say that they have never met a Muslim.”

Well, if you haven't met a Muslim, the chances that you'll run into one at the polls next week is only getting higher.

Related: Bay Area Muslims Suprisingly Resistant To Fascist Proposals

We're streaming our service now! Join us for worship and a message from Ps @BrianCHouston at https://t.co/UD41BxjvCU pic.twitter.com/UcORbvSaUC

— Hillsong Church (@hillsong) February 6, 2016

Now that the allegedly dystopian vision of San Francisco is all but complete, all we need is a Pentecostal megachurch to really cement the deal. Enter the Hillsong Church. The massive song-and-dance church is headquartered in Australia, with boutique congregations in France, England, South Africa, and Brazil. Now they could be coming for you, you heathens.

The basics: Hillsong Church was founded in Sydney, New South Wales in 1983 and is giant, theatrical, and influential in Pentecostal/Charismatic church circles. Best known for the music they produce, Hillsong-penned tunes are sung in other churches of varying denominations around the world. Being a Pentecostal church, yes, they do believe in such traditions as speaking in tongues and Gifts of the Spirit, but they're also comparatively progressive to their contemporaries. For example, they're have women in leadership positions and proudly count heaps of hipsters and young folks as part of their congregations. They also hold spectacular concerts every week. (The photo above looks like a revival of Starlight Express, which we mean in the most wonderful way possible.) Hillsong is also a champion of the pastor-turned-celebrity, with Carl Lentz being a notable example.

The church has also fallen to controversy. Pastor Frank Houston, father of Hillsong co-founder Brian Houston, confessed to sexually abusing children. Their stance on LGBT rights is curious. And, irresistibly, the church was accused of helping stack Australian Idol votes by encouraging members to vote for Christian contestants.

Now they want to come to San Francisco, a fresh territory busting at the seams with new money and young minds. The idea to set up shop in the city came to Hillsong Pastor Ben Houston while he was in West Hollywood "dreaming and strategizing" about where else in the West he could go. "San Francisco is an amazing city! And the surrounding areas of Oakland, San Jose and beyond all combine to create a city of millions of people filled with so much potential," says Houston."The Bay Area is similar to LA in that you see the full breadth and diversity of humanity."

But not everyone is having it. Christian Nate J. Lee tells Gospel Ministries why.

"There is a war going on here that can't be seen or understood through the eyes of a naive, idealistic pastor. So when Ben Houston shows up in his overly-produced video saying, 'San Francisco is a city where we see great potential,' it's painfully clear that he has no idea of the context onto which his words fall," stated Lee.

"Guess who else saw 'great potential' in this city? The real estate agents, developers, and city officials who have destroyed neighborhoods, broken up families, and displaced poor people of color for their own idealized, dystopian visions for San Francisco."

Ouch.

But the realization of Hillsong SF remains a pipe dream for the megachurch. At least for now.

"As excited as I am about all that is ahead, I know that there is nothing that is going to be easy about this venture," says Hillsong pastor Ben Houston. "[San Francisco] is up there with the most expensive cities in the world. I sense that there could be a lot of spiritual opposition to The Church."

It's time for a bunch of self-proclaimed "rationalists" — a group of mostly technologists in their 20s — to start acting like it and stop paying the Berkeley-based Center For Applied Rationality. I say this because CFAR's $3,900 4-day seminars and their attendees are the subject of a New York Times magazine article this week that will leave you slapping your forehead in front of an imagined group of conference-goers.

Lest you think this to be a kooky-Berkeley one-off spiritual center, allow me to note that these charlatan-sounding types have been hired by Facebook and the Thiel Fellowship and that $3,900 is not cheap, especially given the living conditions offered.

[The] workshops... are run like a college-dorm cram session. Participants stay on-site for the entire time (typically four days and nights), often in bargain-basement conditions. In San Leandro, the organizers packed 48 people (36 participants, plus six staff members and six volunteers) into a single house, using twin mattresses scattered on the floor as extra beds. In the kitchen, I asked Matt O’Brien, a 30-year-old product manager who develops brain-training software for Lumosity, whether he minded the close quarters. He looked briefly puzzled, then explained that he already lives with 20 housemates in a shared house in San Francisco. Looking around the chaotic kitchen, he shrugged and said, ‘‘It’s not really all that different.’’

Yes, in a total coincidence, that would be Lumosity the games app that must now fork over $2 million to the FTC for "unfounded" claims of cognitive health benefits. Others at the seminar included Asher, a self-described "singing, freestyle rapping, former international Quidditch All-American turned software engineer.’’ A third was a gentleman who ended conversations with a bit of charm, saying ‘‘I will allow you to disengage,’’

The fun starts with a CoZE, or comfort-zone expansion, exercise. An organizer and CFAR founder who says ‘We’re trying to invent parkour for the mind," as if to shout "THIS IS A FAD," first encourages attendees to, indeed, step outside their comfort zones. Naturally, one puts his hand in a pan of curry and another takes off his shirt and affixes a sign to himself that reads "touch me." We're off!

‘‘A lot of people think that rationality means acting like Spock and ignoring things like intuition and emotion,’’ [co-founder Julia Galef] said ‘‘But we’ve found that that approach doesn’t actually work.’’ Instead, she said, the aim was to bring the emotional, instinctive parts of the brain (dubbed ‘‘System One’’ by Kahneman) into harmony with the more intellectual, goal-setting parts of the brain (‘‘System Two’’).

An elaboration on that:

‘‘The prefrontal cortex is like a monkey riding an elephant,’’ she told the group. ‘‘System One is the elephant. And you’re not going to steer an elephant by telling it where it should go... When you realize that people are complex systems — that we operate in complicated ways, but also sort of follow rules — you start to think about how you might tweak some of those variables.’’

CFAR appears to be a mashup of bits of cognitive science and contemporary self-help with a dash of religion, all served up like a heavily opiated cocktail to anyone who can afford it, and who might otherwise consider themselves too smart for self-help — and who maybe spent too many of their college days writing code.

The program seems based on several typically religious assumptions as old as time itself: that humans are bad and need to be fixed, that we'll soon be destroyed en masse (wait until you hear how!), and that immortality is attainable (also weird!).

How to live forever and save the planet in the process? That's not clear, but it starts with CFAR. Says one attendee, as if quoting an episode of Silicon Valley, "Self-help is just the gateway. The real goal is: Save the world."

The Master in all of this is artificial-intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) that provided the original funding for CFAR. The groups share their Berkeley office.

"Yudkowsky is a controversial figure," the magazine puts it gently, "Mostly self-taught — he left school after eighth grade — he has written openly about polyamory and blogged at length about the threat of a civilization-ending A.I." And even if you think poly is legit, Yudkowsky also subscribes fully to cryonics, i.e. preserving bodies so as to resurrect them at a later time.

Oh and, ‘‘I wouldn’t be surprised if tomorrow was the Final Dawn, the last sunrise before the earth and sun are reshaped into computing elements’’ is an actual quote. "I think my efforts could spell the difference between life and death for most of humanity."

I say, while it's nice these "rationalists" are trying to improve themselves, there are far more rational ways to do it — and this all sounds about as science-driven as Scientology. Go to group therapy. Go to church, even. The story here isn't people being maybe scammed. It's that a group of otherwise very smart, sort of sad people who say they're thinking for themselves are being maybe scammed. But, again: tale as old time.

So save your money for the Esalen Institute in Big Sur — at least that place is cool.

Related: All About The Real Big Sur Retreat From The Mad Men FinaleBrain Drain: Game App Lumosity Will Pay $2 Million For 'Unfounded' Cognitive Benefit Claims

Mercy Medical Center in Redding, California, which is part of the SF-based, mostly Catholic Dignity Health network, has come under fire from the ACLU of Northern California after refusing to perform tubal ligations (also known as tying one's tubes) on two women who asked for them. The procedure, deemed one of the safest and most effective procedures for a woman to undergo immediately following her last intended childbirth, is considered a medically necessary procedure by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Mercy Hospital considers it "sterilization," which along with abortion and contraception are things that it does not provide on religious and ethical grounds, as a Catholic hospital.

As the Chronicle reports, the hospital relented in the face of possible legal action earlier this year in the case of Rachel Miller, who was set to give birth in September and whose doctor had recommended tubal ligation. Citing that there was not another childbirth facility with 70 miles, Miller and the ACLU argued for the necessity of the procedure, and the hospital finally reversed itself saying they had "new information" from Miller's doctor that would allow them to perform the surgery.

The only exception, they say, is for "the cure or alleviation of a present and serious pathology," which ACLU attorney Elizabeth Gill says is too vague.

Under California law, it is permissible for private hospitals that receive public funds to refuse to perform abortions, but it does not allow them to refuse other reproductive care, including sterilization.

ACLU attorneys for two more women who have been denied the procedure — one of whom suffered severe pre-eclampsia after she last gave birth by emergency C-section 18 months ago, and who wants her tubes tied following her next birth, due in March — along with the firm Covington & Burling and Physicians for Reproductive Health, issued a letter to the hospital on December 2 stating, "California law ... does not permit hospitals open to the general public and supported by public funds to deny patients medically indicated pregnancy-related care."

Says Gill, "There is a clear conflict between the best interests of patients and the directives of the Catholic hospital system. Religious institutions that provide services to the general public should not be allowed to hold religion as an excuse to discriminate or deny important health care."

Unless the hospital responds and reverses itself again in the case of these two women, a lawsuit will be filed soon.

Tech pundits don't exalt Mark Zuckerberg as the boy-god they once did, but one San Francisco follower of all things Zuckerbergian is looking for a few fellow disciples to help him create a new startup religion based on the CEO of Facebook.

Naturally, the call for clergy in the Church of Zuckerberg (not it's real name) came from that decidedly old school font of Internet weirdness Craiglist. The manifesto reads something like Paul's First Letter To The San Mateans, sprinkled liberally with video game references and The Matrix fan fiction:

The exact nature of Mark Zuckerberg in this religion is that he is the Avatar of Jehova, the creator of our universe. In this religion our universe is a simulated matrix world almost like a computer game and humans are all like computer game characters compared to God. The Biblical Jehova is the creator of this simulatrix and while the actual Jehova is a white guy with a big beard just like Michaelangelo painted him, he controls Mark Zuckerberg as his "Avatar" or "character" in our world like you might control a video game character in a video game you were playing.

Zuckerberg is the main god of this new religion, but there are many other sub-deities, such as: "the Goddess of Skill and Strategy" Sheryl Sandberg and Ashley Arenson, "who is this girl that Mark Zuckerberg had a crush on in high school." In this new Facebook-era mythology, Mary Magdalene gets conflated with Venus and just some girl you knew from high school.

The goal is to create a whole mythology, "similar to that of Ancient Greek mythology and Japanese anime" with stories that are classically epic in scale, but with the pace of a comic book. In this religion, Hogwarts stands in for Zuckerberg's prep school, where Jesus and the Muslim Imam Mahdi and the future CEO of Facebook all go to school together. Also, the lead singer of Arcade Fire is the Fifth Buddha.

Anyhow, the purpose of this religion (unlike most others) is not to make money, the anonymous Craigslist prophet explains. "Really though I'm just doing this for fun because I don't even know if something like this is possible to do on a big level or if it could be popular, so it's just something I am interested in doing and looking for people who would like to take part without worrying about whether it goes anywhere or not."

This week in studies: a new survey from the American Bible Society has found that San Francisco is not, in fact, the godless hellhole it is made out to be. Instead, the titles of modern day Sodom and Gomorrah go, respectively, to those East Coast portals to hell known as Providence, Rhode Island and Boston, Massachusetts. San Francisco did come in third fourth though, so we've got that going for us.

The ABS study set out to find the most "Bible-mind" cities in the United States. According to the study's methodology, which we don't really have a lot of faith in, "Bible Minded" people are those who have read the bible (outside of church, that is) in the past week and believe it to be an accurate account of ancient human history. By those measures, Providence (a town founded as a refuge for persecuted religious dissenters) and Boston (a town full of Catholics who prefer to take their Eucharists at sports bars) are the least bible-minded folks in the country.

Interestingly, the study found that as population density goes up, "Bible friendliness" declines. Or, if you prefer to look at it another way: the Bible is big with rural types. New York City was actually only 89th most godless city, just two notches above Salt Lake City, where the local addendum to the bible was apparently not recognized.

[Time]
[ABS]

Way, way over in Butte, Montana, Pastor/49er zealot Tim Christensen of Gold Hill Lutheran Church cut things short with God on Sunday in order to watch SF beat Carolina. "Would you all like to be forgiven for your sins?" asks Christensen. "Ok, that's great. You are ... There's bread and wine up at the table. Feel free to help yourself."

Before leaving his flock, he kisses his biceps (comme Kaepernick) and then rips open his holy attire Superman-style to reveal a glorious 49ers shirt beneath.

Praise Harbaugh.

[via Uproxx, Deadspin]

Have you seen the new Jesus Saves guy? Well, here he is. We like him. A lot. He's got a fresh take on Jesus signage too. Cool font. (Photo by Troy Holden.)

A funny little news item appeared over the weekend connecting the fact the San Francisco Marriott had signed on as a sponsor of this year's Folsom Street Fair, and the company is still managed by the Marriott family, who are Mormon, and probably not that into bondage. While Marriott itself may not have donated to the Prop 8 campaign, the Mormon Church certainly did, and it's kind of wacky that Marriott would be giving money to such a pervy street fest!

But, as the Chronicle points out, the fair and its vendors have become noticeably tamer in recent years, perhaps in part due to the pressures of big corporate sponsors like American Airlines and Kimpton Hotels. Sure, you still see plenty of erect penises on the street, but not in the vendors' booths anymore, and the crowd is now a mixed bag that includes some families and East Bay tourists and the like.

The hotel is just looking out for its bottom line, of course; and given the massive number of gay and fetish tourists who come to town for the fair each year, they can't afford to discriminate. Still, fascinating...

[Chron]

Back in 2010, Hani Khan, an 18-year-old Muslim, claimed Abercrombie & Fitch fired her for wearing a head scarf at work. Well, today a judge agreed with her. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said that the confusing (and arguably bland) outfitter violated anti-discrimination laws when they canned her for sporting the religious scarf at their San Mateo Hollister store.

Judge Rogers said, "Abercrombie only offers unsubstantiated opinion testimony of its own employees to support its claim of undue hardship." While company spokesman Bruce MacKenzie argued, "Abercrombie & Fitch does not discriminate based on religion and we grant religious accommodations when reasonable."

The company said Khan's head scarf clashed with their "policy governing the look of its employees," which is part of its marketing strategy. And what an unfortunate strategy it is. Earlier this year, a former manager took Abercrombie & Fitch to task for firing employees who were deemed too fat. The company also settled in a 2004 lawsuit claiming they discriminate against against black, Asian, and Latino job applicants. (They also frown upon wearing too black. Which is downright bizarre.) The retailer is notorious for an aesthetic philosophy that centers around white, young, sporty people.

Regarding a much-needed punitive beat down, Associated Press goes on to report, "A trial on the company's liability is scheduled for later this month. The judge said the jury is free to award punitive damages if it chooses."

[AP]
[Mercury News]