California will have its first test of plans to keep the lights on this summer…

With record-setting heat and air conditioning demand expected in Southern California, the state’s power grid operator issued a so-called “flex alert,” urging consumers to conserve energy to help prevent rotating power outages – which could occur regardless. MORE

Fresh wildfires erupted on Monday near Los Angeles and chased people from their suburban homes as an intense heatwave stretching from the West Coast to New Mexico blistered the region.

Towering columns of smoke rose from the San Gabriel Mountains as two fires a few miles apart devoured brush on steep slopes above foothill suburbs, sending a dark pall into the sky above the Los Angeles skyline.

Police in the city of Azusa and parts of Duarte ordered hundreds of homes evacuated. Others were under voluntary evacuations.MORE

Unless you accept the Mark of the Beast your going to be boycotted.

The leaders of the world’s Orthodox Christian churches have gathered on the Greek island of Crete for a landmark meeting, despite a boycott by the Russian church — the most populous in a religion of some 300 million people — and three other churches. MORE

Today is the longest day of the year, the summer solstice, and for the first time in decades, you can end it with a view of the full moon.

Technically, the summer solstice isn’t the entire day, but the moment when the Earth’s northern axis of rotation is most tilted toward the sun — this year, that happens at 6:34 p.m. ET on June 20.

And technically, the moon was fullest at 7:02 a.m. ET, putting the two events on the same day. MORE

Most people have no idea what goes on in the “gay straight alliance” (GSA) clubs in high schools (and now middle schools!) across America. Parents are told that these are simply “support” groups for youth. But in fact, it’s worse than anyone realizes.

As we’ve often warned people, these clubs bring kids into contact with radical homosexual and transgender activists. They encourage kids to feel comfortable engaging in homosexual and transgender activity. They provide the kids with sexually-oriented literature and paraphernalia, and a heavy dose of destructive LGBT ideology. MORE

PHOENIX, AZ –A Phoenix-bound flight was forced to return to Houston Sunday evening because of weather conditions in the Valley of the Sun. Passengers who were on the plane said the flight crew told them the record-breaking heat is to blame.

United flight 6186 — operated by Mesa Airlines — departed from Bush Intercontinental Airport at 2:30pm and was minutes away from landing at Sky Harbor Airport when the flight crew notified passengers it would be turning back around because of the weather. MORE

Perform – the options are endless – a violin with a guitar, a piano/flute duet, or a piano in a jazz trio. Performance builds an even higher level of self-confidence and musical skills.

GENEVA –  To cheers and standing ovations from scientists, the world’s biggest atom smasher claimed the discovery of a new subatomic particle Wednesday, calling it “consistent” with the long-sought Higgs boson — popularly known as the “God particle” — that helps explain what gives all matter in the universe size and shape.

“We have now found the missing cornerstone of particle physics,” Rolf Heuer, director of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), told scientists. MORE

Hillary Clinton praised a former president to a crowd of cheering liberal supporters earlier this month as “absolutely committed” and unwavering in his support of one of her causes.

The man she spoke of was not her husband, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama, whom she hopes to succeed. It was George W. Bush — long one of the left’s most potent villains. MORE

Editor’s note: This is part 3 of a series examining Pope Francis’ papacy over the last three years. See part 1 here and part 2 here.

June 15, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – It’s one of the most frequent talking points of Pope Francis. It’s definitely part of his appeal for the media and simultaneously one of the most hurtful things for those inside the Church for whom the faith means everything. I’m speaking of the Pope’s penchant for castigating faithful adherents of the Catholic faith as “obsessed,” “doctors of the law,” “neo-pelagian,” “self-absorbed,” “restorationist,” “fundamentalist,” “rigid,” “ideological,” “hypocritical,” and much more. MORE

The last Catholic priest to have been imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp has died at age 102.

Father Hermann Scheipers was a young priest in 1940 when he was arrested by the Nazis and taken to the camp, near Munich. Dachau had a large population of priests: some 95% of the 2,720 clergymen imprisoned there were Catholic.

Father Scheipers died June 2 in Ochtrup in Münsterland, the same town where he was born on July 24, 1913. MORE

Is it too late?

WASHINGTON — More than 50 State Department diplomats have signed an internal memo sharply critical of the Obama administration’s policy inSyria, urging the United States to carry out military strikes against the government of President Bashar al-Assad to stop its persistent violations of a cease-fire in the country’s five-year-old civil war. MORE