Category Archives: Global

Guardian: Official forecasts often predict light pollution while US embassy tweets say conditions are bad, hazardous or even ‘crazy bad’

Guardian: Drug firms oppose an EU call for controls on potent chemicals that have been blamed for the gender mutation of freshwater fish . . .

LifeSiteNews: Right now Ontario’s bishops are currently engaged in a high-stakes battle over a name. While Bill 13, the Ontario government’s much-debated anti-bullying bill, mandates that all schools allow so-called “gay-straight alliance” (GSA) clubs, the bishops have drawn a line in the sand. A dotted line, it would seem, because the bishops have already said that they will allow the bill’s anti-bullying clubs in Catholic schools under another name.

NY Times: The rally in Victoria Park, an annual event that commemorates the Tiananmen massacre in Beijing on June 4, 1989, drew 180,000 people this year, according to organizers. The police put the crowd at 85,000. China Daily, published by the Chinese government . . .

Guardian: The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) is calling for a fourfold increase in funding to help an estimated 320,000 people displaced by fighting and insecurity in northern Mali. UNHCR says it now needs $153.7m (£99.9m), up from the $35.6m estimate it made in February. Since then, the situation in Mali has dramatically deteriorated – the country’s civilian government was overthrown in a military coup in March and all territory north of Mopti has fallen into the hands of armed groups.

Telegraph: A town hall docked the pay of a Muslim worker because he took prayer breaks during office hours.

The Hill: The Defense Department is looking for a little help from its friends overseas as the Pentagon and White House try to break Senate opposition to an international treaty on maritime law.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: But the rights-in-childbirth movement also considers the fact that the unborn child may have rights beyond survival, that is, the right to be born in a way that is best for her.

Washington Post: A defense lawyer in Kuwait says a court has sentenced a man to 10 years in prison for Twitter posts deemed insulting to Islam and to the rulers of Gulf allies Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

LifeSiteNews: Despite the uptick in new births, Statistics Canada demographers are warning that without a “substantial increase in fertility,” Canada’s population growth in 20 years will be “close to zero.”

LifeSiteNews: The board of the student union at the oldest university in Australia has voted 6-5 to approve the only pro-life student society in Australia. The decision has been met with outrage by stunned pro-abortion students . . .

LifeNews: Two doctors who fed the bodies of aborted baby girls to dogs in order to hide cases of sex-selection abortions in India has been arrested.

The Center for Reproductive Rights has this post indicating that the United Nations is targeting Peru over its abortion policies.

Raymond Ibrahim at Middle East Forum: Then Burhami made clear what the issue at hand was: Apostasy—if Muslims have the right to leave Islam and convert to other religions. In the words of Burhami . . .

Religion Clause Blog: The New York Times today reports on the dismal situation in Timbuktu, in northern Mali, since Islamists have taken over.

Daniel Pipes at National Review: Djerejian makes a fundamentally faulty assumption here, namely that Islamists can be agents to “broaden political participation.” That illusion remains, two decades later, the abiding hope of the State Department and nearly the whole of the establishment. No, simply put, a deeply anti-democratic ideology cannot bring on democratization. Islamists have picked up on this hope and invariably, including right now in the campaign for the run-off presidential elections in Egypt, present themselves as democrats.

Elizabeth K. (Betsy) Dorminey, Veiled Meaning: Tolerance and Prohibition of the Hijab in the U.S. and France, Engage Volume 13, Issue 1 (March 2012)

WARNING: GRAPHIC VIDEO accompanies the written report at the link below.

Raymond Ibrahim at Gatestone Institute: Liberal talk show host Tawfiq Okasha recently appeared on “Egypt Today” airing a video of Muslims slicing a young man’s head off for the crime of apostasy, in this case, the crime of converting to Christianity and refusing to renounce it.

Washington Times: The yuan and the yen — the currencies of Asia’s two biggest economies — started direct trading Friday in Tokyo and Shanghai. …

LifeSiteNews: Two homeschooled boys, whose parents have been repeatedly fined and criminally convicted by Brazilian government officials for refusing to participate in the public school system, are impressing observers in Brazil and around the world by winning a number of academic contests.

Michael Coren at Toronto Sun (includes video): In a sordid attempt to deflect from scandals and mismanagement, the Liberal government of Ontario has told the Catholic school system it has to do what it’s told, not be Catholic and embrace the lie that gay kids are perennial victims of bullying.

Christian Institute: Being opposed to gay marriage is “not acceptable”, says the Government minister in charge of policing and criminal justice.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: If you thought it was costly to have a child, consider how much one couple in China paid. For violating China’s one-child policy by having a second child, the parents were fined 1.3 million yuan ($204,114).

DW.de: President Joachim Gauck has said in a newspaper interview that Muslims living in Germany are more definitively a part of the country than the religion of Islam, a slight change from the stance of his predecessor.

NC Register: As Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng prepared to give his first speech in the United States, a group of Chinese expatriates gathered in New York City May 29 to discuss abuses in their homeland’s one-child-per-family policy.

Paul Kengor at Townhall: In short, this is an amazing turnabout. What’s going on? Why this sudden conversion by Castro and communist Cuba? Does this make sense? Yes, it does. The root of the answer, once again, is the Marxist/communist assault on marriage.

Washington Times: US officials, lawmakers and technology leaders offered a resounding “no” Thursday to proposals to bring the Internet under United Nations’ control and said they would lead efforts to stop the move. …

AP: Google has fired a new salvo in a censorship battle with Beijing by adding a feature that warns users in China who enter search keywords that might produce blocked results and suggests they try other terms.

AP: A Turkish court has formally charged an internationally known Turkish pianist and composer with insulting Islamic religious values in comments he made on Twitter.

AP: An official in Ireland says voters have offered a decisive “yes” in a referendum to the European Union’s deficit-fighting treaty.

AP: A Pakistani lawyer has filed an appeal against the conviction of a doctor jailed after helping the U.S. find Osama bin Laden.

The Telegraph: A generation of youngsters may be developing a skewed view of sex from pornography, a court has heard, after a 12-year-old schoolboy raped and sexually assaulted a younger girl after copying a hardcore film he watched on the internet.

Irish Times: More children were born in 2009 than in any year since 1891, new figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) show.

CNBC: US and European regulators are essentially forcing banks to buy up their own government’s debt—a move that could end up making the debt crisis even worse, a Citigroup analysis says.

C-Fam: A newly released research paper charges that medical journals and researchers are burying data that shows a link between abortion and dangerous preterm births in later pregnancies. Dr. Byron Calhoun makes these charges in “Abortion and Preterm Birth: Why Medical Journals Aren’t Giving Us The Real Picture,” released by C-FAM (publisher of the Friday Fax).

Christian Institute: Former Director of Public Prosecutions Lord Macdonald QC has thrown his weight behind a campaign to amend Section 5 of the Public Order Act.

Tim Ferguson at Forbes: That’s because Chen in rural Shandong province was fighting, among other things, application of China’s one-child policy that has included pressure or worse to end pregnancies. In the hubbub of Chen’s escape from Shandong and eventual flight to New York, Bob Fu, a Texas activist for Christian causes in China, was seen playing an active role. But in the secular world in which Chen is now ensconced, this part of his struggle now draws little conversation.

NewsTrackIndia: With religious tensions running high in Europe and other parts of the world, a dialogue between Islam and Christianity is the highlight of a global congress of faiths and civilisations this Kazakhstan capital that began here Wednesday and which is being attended, among others, by the head of the Global Islamic League, the metropolitan of Minsk and the chief rabbi of Israel.

AP on Google: Security forces will not hesitate to use lethal force to restore order, said Tunisia’s Interior Minister on Thursday, following a string of violent incidents around the country in recent weeks.

allAfrica.com: Egypt may be following one set of democratic procedures, but it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a transition to democracy, irrespective of who becomes the next President. Elections are only one element of democracy, and to reduce democratic practice to what happens at the polling station is highly problematic. We need to ask ourselves what the conditions are that have influenced people’s choices?

Gatestone Institute: According to the popular Egyptian website, El Bashayer, Muhammad Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood presidential candidate, just declared that he will “achieve the Islamic conquest (fath) of Egypt for the second time, and make all Christians convert to Islam, or else pay the jizya,” the additional Islamic tax, or financial tribute, required of non-Muslims, or financial tribute.

Religion Clause Blog: A 5-judge panel of Malaysia’s Federal Court has upheld the constitutionality of Sec. 53(1) of the state of Negeri Sembilan’s Syariah Criminal Enactment 1992 which outlaws Muslims teaching Islam without accreditation by the state’s Islamic Religious Council.