The Christian Post reports:

Conservative groups critical of Target’s bathroom policies are stepping up their boycott against the chain store giant this coming Christmas, urging conservative shoppers not to support what they call a “radical social agenda.”

Lance Wray, executive director of watchdog group 2ndVote, said that last year its #AnywhereButTARGET campaign helped see a three percent drop in sales over the Christmas season for Target, along with a 43 percent profits decrease.

USA Today reported earlier in November that Target’s latest quarter report, ending Oct. 28, brought good news for the company with an uptick in sales and traffic.

Target revealed that sales at stores open for a year or more “crept up 0.9% in the three-month period ending Oct. 28, while overall sales rose 1.4% to $16.7 billion as compared to $16.4 billion in 2016.”

Given the reality of other people’s lives, a widespread Evangelical perception of their group as mass victims reveals a lack of empathy that should make thoughtful believers cringe. And indeed, Alan Nobel, managing editor of Christ and Pop Culture, and a professor at Oklahoma Baptist University, wrote a pained analysis this summer of what he called Evangelical persecution complex. Nobel contrasted the privileged position of American Christians with the real and serious persecution Christian minorities experience under ISIS, for example, and he examined the ways in which victimization can become a part of Christian identity to the detriment of Christians and outsiders alike. What he neglected to spell out clearly was the extent to which the Bible itself sets up this problem.

Christianity, born in the harsh desert cultures of the Middle East, got its start by defining itself in opposition to both Judaism and the surrounding pagan religions of the Roman empire. Consequently, from the get-go teachings emerged that helped believers deal with the inevitable conflict, by both predicting and glorifying suffering at the hands of outsiders. Indeed, persecution was framed as making believers more righteous, more like their suffering savior. Long before the Catholic Church made saints out of martyrs, a myriad of texts encouraged believers to embrace suffering or persecution, or even to bring it on.

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In the case of Christianity, the theology of persecution serves to give the faithful hope. It inspires persistence in the face of hardship, including the many hardships that life brings on all of us through no fault of our own. But it has also blinded generations of believers to the possibility that sometimes the hardships they face are due not to their faith or evildoers hating Jesus, but to the fact that they hit first. And sometimes the bewildering hostility they perceive may simply be something that the theology of persecution set them up to expect, whether it is there or not.

The resurgence of Australian nationalist politics has been halted at a state election in coal-rich Queensland, with Pauline Hanson's One Nation party at risk of being almost completely wiped from the state assembly.

Australia's center-left Labor party is leading in the tight race after three-quarters of votes were counted following Saturday's poll, while Hanson's party has yet to confirm victory in a single seat.

The official result may not be known for several days although political analysts believe Labor will win the 47 seats it needs to govern in Queensland 93-seat assembly, a result that would allow it to form a government without support from independents or minor parties.

"I am confident of a Labor majority," Queensland's Labor Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk told reporters on Sunday.

A New York Times profile on a white nationalist has drawn criticism from those who say the feature normalised his beliefs.

The piece titled A Voice of Hate in America's Heartland focused on 29-year-old Tony Hovater from Ohio, who is described in the piece as a Donald Trump supporter, a "far-right extremist" and a "Nazi sympathizer next door."

Although the article doesn't condone his lifestyle choices, the article has been lambasted for potentially making Hovater's views appear more normal and everyday.

Hovater is a founding member of the Traditionalist Worker Party, one of the groups that were involved in the violent clashes in Charlottesville in August and has also taken part in a "White Lives Matter" rally.

Given the uneasy political climate of 2017 and the rise of racism in America, people have taken exception to the New York Times piece.

Addressing the annual DUP conference near Belfast today, Mr Dodds said the party had “never had more influence” in Westminster.

He said: “If I’m honest I did not believe that in 2017 we were heading for a hung parliament where the DUP would hold the balance of power.

“But looking back I don’t think it was an accident how things turned out.

“On reflection it’s hard to imagine how the results could have done more to maximise our influence.

“A few more seats for the Conservatives and they could have ploughed on alone. Had they won a fewer number of seats, even with our help they could not have secured a majority.”

And he said: “We entered the negotiations with the guiding star of doing what was right not for the DUP, but for Northern Ireland in particular and the United Kingdom as a whole.”

A DUP source told PoliticsHome the reference to it being no “accident” was an “allusion to guidance from a higher power so to speak”.

In a report on how Trump’s support for Roy Moore has handed the Democrats a juicy midterms talking point, the New York Times reveals this nugget:

Something deeper has been consuming Mr. Trump. He sees the calls for Mr. Moore to step aside as a version of the response to the now-famous “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he boasted about grabbing women’s genitalia, and the flood of groping accusations against him that followed soon after. He suggested to a senator earlier this year that it was not authentic, and repeated that claim to an adviser more recently. (In the hours after it was revealed in October 2016, Mr. Trump acknowledged that the voice was his, and he apologized.)

So Mr. Trump has been particularly open to the idea, pushed by Mr. Moore’s defenders, that the candidate is being wrongly accused, even as Mr. McConnell and a parade of other Republicans have said they believe the accusers. When a group of senators gathered with the president in the White House last week to discuss the tax overhaul, it took little to get Mr. Trump onto the topic of Mr. Moore — and he immediately offered up the same it-was-40-years-ago defense, according to officials at the meeting.