Tag Archives: Category: Global

Reuters: The U.S. ambassador to Libya and three embassy staff were killed as they rushed away from a consulate building in Benghazi, stormed by al Qaeda-linked gunmen blaming America for a film that they said insulted the Prophet Mohammad.

The Independent: A Christian girl who was detained after being accused of burning pages of the Koran in Pakistan has said she is scared for her life and fears “anyone who might kill us”.

Alan Sears at the Alliance Defending Freedom Blog: For years, under a law oddly-titled “The Freedom of Religion Act,” the province has required that anyone converting to Christianity (or any other faith) had to notify the local magistrate and have the decision made public record within 30 days. Anyone converting to Hinduism – or reverting back to that religion from a previous conversion – was exempt from this requirement.

BBC: Nick Clegg has withdrawn comments about opponents of gay marriage in which he called them “bigots”.

Christian Concern: Abortion provider Marie Stopes International (MSI) has threatened to take legal action against a pro-life pregnancy centre for distributing a leaflet on the adverse effects of abortion on mental health.

Christian Institute: Green councillor who defied her party’s support for redefining marriage should be “expelled”, an internal disciplinary panel has said.

The Record: If the bus driver doesn’t like a passenger, he can’t hand the wheel to someone else. So argued Cambridge Mayor Doug Craig on Monday as council voted 8-1 to have the same minister perform marriage ceremonies for both opposite-sex and same-sex couples. No more handing off same-sex marriages to a backup minister, as has been the practice in Cambridge since 2005.

ABC News: Northern Territory Labor Senator Trish Crossin is co-sponsoring another same-sex marriage bill in the Federal Parliament.

AP: Recessions around the world have pushed a growing number of young people out of education and out of the workforce, according to a report Tuesday that warned of growing danger for “the traditional pathway from school to work or family life.”

Christian Institute: The redefinition of marriage in Northern Ireland has been adopted as party policy by the Alliance Party – to the dismay of a former deputy leader.

Christian Institute: Maria Miller, the newly appointed Minister for Women and Equalities, has voiced her support for controversial plans to rewrite the definition of marriage.

Christian Institute: Assisted suicide should be allowed in Britain according to a newly-appointed health minister – but her comments have been swiftly criticised by a leading doctors’ union and an MP in her own party.

Washington Times: Hundreds of Palestinian Authority Arabs have been assaulting a Jewish village in the Binyamin region since Saturday afternoon, Tatzpit reports.

Religion Clause Blog: In Pakistan today, Rimsha Masih, a Christian girl being held on controversial blasphemy charges, was released on 1 million rupees ($10,500 US) bail.

Religion Clause Blog: According to the London Mail, Iranian Christian pastor Youcef Nadarkhani has been released from prison after extensive pressure from foreign governments.  Last year, Nadarkhani (who was born to Muslim parents) was convicted by a provincial court of apostasy and sentenced to death.

Guardian: Decision is likely to give financial rescue fund the go-ahead against a background of German disillusion with single currency

Christian Institute: Alex Salmond formally included a Bill to rewrite the definition of marriage as he unveiled the Scottish Government’s new legislative programme this week. However, supporters of traditional marriage have vowed to fight the Bill “with every breath”.

Inquirer News: The Senate has removed controversial provisions that purportedly promote abortion and the use of birth control devices in a bid to break a deadlock in its version of the reproductive health (RH) bill.

C-FAM: Several new studies have found abortion drugs – touted as a solution to illegal, unsafe abortions – are linked to increased maternal deaths and suffering.

The Himalayan: A new culture rift is emerging in Iraq, as young women replace shapeless cover-ups with ankle-baring skirts and tight blouses, while men strut around in revealing slacks and spiky haircuts. The relatively skimpy styles have prompted Islamic clerics in at least two Iraqi cities to mobilize local security guards as a “fashion police” in the name of protecting religious values.

Spiegel: They began as a cry for freedom in the Middle East, but the Arab rebellions have become increasingly characterized by an ancient sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. SPIEGEL examines how the power struggle between the two groups is sparking new fears along old frontlines.

Religion Clause Blog: In Bundesrepublik Deutschland v Y and Z, (EU Ct. Justice, Sept. 5, 2012), the Court of Justice of the European Union interpreted the EU’s directive on the status of refugees in the case of two Pakistani members of the Ahmadiyya community who are seeking asylum in Germany.  As summarized by the Court’s press release . . .

Times of Israel: State does not authorize mohels, requires that parents be informed of the procedure’s medical risks before consenting

LifeSiteNews: As the Uruguayan Chamber of Deputies prepares to vote on the depenalization of abortion, ultra-popular ex-president Tabaré Vázquez has a message for legislators: read my veto—again.

CNSNews: So much for Muslim reverence for the Qur’an. Police in Pakistan are investigating allegations that a Muslim cleric himself tore out pages of Islam’s venerated book and added them to burned garbage in a bid to frame a young Christian girl for supposed “blasphemy.”

Reuters: A poster campaign by Germany’s Interior Ministry to advertise a hotline for those worried that a friend or family member may be turning to radical Islam has incensed some Muslims who say it stigmatizes them.

SMH.com.au: The head of the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) Jim Wallace says smoking is healthier than the lifestyle that would be promoted by same-sex marriage. Mr Wallace made the claim in a debate on marriage equality with Greens leader Christine Milne at the University of Tasmania today.

AP: A top state official says infant male circumcision for religious reasons is legal in Berlin . . .

Santiago Times: Chile’s Movement for Homosexual Integration and Liberation (Movilh) announced its lawsuit Monday against the Chilean state over the prohibition of same sex marriages in the country. The lawsuit, which Movilh says is the first of its kind, was presented to the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights.

Fox News: The building of the largest Roman Catholic church in the Gulf was supposed to be a chance for the tiny island kingdom of Bahrain to showcase its traditions of religious tolerance in a conservative Muslim region where churches largely operate under heavy limitations.

CBC.ca: The Canadian Medical Association Journal says it’s time to do away with the Criminal Code’s so-called spanking law. A strongly worded editorial in the journal Tuesday calls for the repeal of Section 43 of the Criminal Code, which gives parents and teachers a legal defence when they physically discipline children.

Yahoo News: Scotland will introduce a bill within nine months on holding a referendum on independence, First Minister Alex Salmond said on Tuesday, paving the way for a vote that could result in the eventual breakup of Britain.

Christian Institute: A humanist in Canada is seeking to stop the Gideons from distributing free copies of the Bible in schools. Rene Chouinard says it is biased for the Bible to be distributed but not free atheist literature.

AP: Egypt’s Islamist leadership took a new move Tuesday to put its stamp on the country’s government, appointing members of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood as provincial governors and installing ultraconservatives and other Islamists in the state’s top human rights body and a powerful media council.

Washington Free Beacon: Several pro-Israel sections of the 2008 Democratic Party platform have been removed from the 2012 platform—on Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees, and Hamas.

Guardian: Thousands of refugees pouring into neighbouring countries with over 100,000 seeking asylum in August

Christian Science Monitor: More than 14 churches have been attacked in Kenya since April, most recently in this week’s violence in Mombasa. Church leaders are suing to force the government to defend them.

SMH.com.au: The Christian girl who was allegedly framed for blasphemy by her local mullah was hailed as a ”daughter of the nation” by one of Pakistan’s most senior Islamic clerics who also vowed to guarantee her safety if she is eventually released from prison.

Gay Star News: Poland’s ruling party announced it will put to the vote a draft bill of registered civil partnership for gay and straight couples

Bayshorebroadcasting.ca: For the first time ever today, Grey County council opened their meeting with a new, neutral prayer — instead of the Lord’s Prayer. And Bruce-Grey-Owen-Sound MP Larry Miller says it’s time to get up and say something about what’s happening.

The high court of India’s Himachal Pradesh province struck down legal provisions Thursday that had restricted Christian conversions. The provisions, part of the improperly named “Freedom of Religion Act,” required that a magistrate be notified of all religious conversions and that they be publicly recorded 30 days in advance.

Religion Clause Blog: According to the New York Times yesterday, a 30-year old Muslim cleric who is at the forefront of those calling for the girl’s prosecution was arrested Saturday on charges of falsifying evidence against her.

Religion Clause Blog: Time reports that last Friday, in the Indian state of Gujarat a special court sentenced Maya Kodnani, the former state minister for women and child development, to 28 years in prison for her role in the 2002 Naroda Patiya massacre during which Hindus killed 96 Muslims as part of widespread Hindu-Muslim violence following the firebombing of a train carrying Hindu pilgrims.

Zenit: The contrasting opinions on this topic were well covered in a recent book that pits two opposing views: “Debating Same-Sex Marriage,” (Oxford University Press) by John Corvino and Maggie Gallagher.

KansasCity.com: The final outcome of the Arab Spring will not be known for years, perhaps decades, but in the meantime Christian communities across the Middle East continue to wither.

NY Daily News: Pakistan’s top Christian politician believes that the discrimination against minorities in a country with a 97 percent Muslim population is a sign that the old feudal caste system has not gone away. He said even if the law were changed, allegations of blasphemy provoke such visceral fury that people would take the law into their own hands.

LifeSiteNews: A three-person civil union was accepted by a notary in Brazil who argued “what we considered a family before isn’t necessarily what we would consider a family today,” reports the BBC.

LifeNews: Why not? He or she is just a ball of cells, a blastocyst. Why would you even care? Maybe because the lives of “spare” IVF embryos do matter. Let Australian Jen Vuk’s testimony to her growing anxiety over what to do with her last frozen offspring speak a warning to the practice of the mass production of embryos in IVF.

Religion Clause Blog: In Evangelical Fellowship of India v. State of Himachal Pradesh, (HC Himachal Pradesh, Aug. 30, 2012), a 2-judge panel the High Court of the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh struck down as unconstitutional provisions in Himachal Pradesh’s Freedom of Religion Act 2006 . . .

Reuters: Centuries-old theological disputes have broken out in cyberspace as religions aim to influence the future presentation of faith on the Internet.

Dawn.com: The district coordination officer of Mardan on Thursday ordered the arrest of six people for refusing vaccination of their children against polio and creating obstacles to immunisation of other children.

Guardian: Damage to crop harvests from exceptionally dry weather this year raises sharply the Bank’s food price index

Fides: A terrorist attack hit innocent Christian faithful and innocent Druzes in the area of Jaramana, a suburb of Damascus: yesterday, August 28, at 2 pm, a bomb in a car was detonated while a crowd of faithful, families, elderly people, women and children, were heading to the cemetery to bury two young people . . . Today in Zamalka a family of Armenian Christians was found murdered, and all members of the family horribly decapitated.

Middle East Forum: In the past two weeks at least nine Americans have been killed by their Afghan allies in what is known to as “insider killings.” Members of the Afghan army, having been trained and armed by NATO forces, are turning their weapons in increasing numbers against their foreign allies, killing at least 40 NATO troops this year so far.

AP: Leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Friday that he is refusing to recognize the results of Mexico’s presidential election . . .

AP: Brazil’s social security agency has for the first time granted a four-month “maternity” leave for a man in a civil union with another man.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: On 28 August 2012, the second section of the European Court of Human Rights issued its first judgment concerning access to pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). This technique of screening and selection of embryos conceived in vitro aims at giving birth to a child who is not suffering from a genetic disease. It stems from this judgment that access to PGD may de facto be considered a human right in Europe, a right indirectly guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights. This judgment is not final; the Italian Government already announced that it will request the referral of the case before the Grand Chamber for reconsideration.

Catholic Culture: Five Protestant churches in Mombasa, Kenya’s second-largest city, were attacked following the August 27 killing of a Muslim cleric, according to Sabahi, a web site sponsored by the Africa Command of the US Armed Forces.

SMH.com.au: THE abortion pill RU486 will be widely available to Australian women after the Therapeutic Goods Administration approved an application to import the drug by the reproductive health group Marie Stopes International.

Sacramento Bee: An estimated 200 heavily armed Islamists destroyed 30 graves at a historic Turkish school in Tripoli’s old city early Wednesday and an unspecified number of other mosques also were attacked, further signs that Libya’s government is facing a major challenge from extremists less than a month after the first elections in this country in 50 years.

Reuters: Russia’s most senior Islamic cleric warned on Wednesday that civil war could break out in the southern region of Dagestan after a moderate Muslim cleric was killed in a suicide bombing that has heightened religious tensions.

Chloe Breyer at the NY Times: A central charge against the three members of the Pussy Riot punk-rock band who were recently sentenced to two years in prison was “inciting religious hatred.” This they are said to have done by briefly dancing at the front of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior and splicing footage of their dance into a video critical of President Vladimir Putin.

AP: A judge hearing the case of a Pakistani Christian girl accused of blasphemy delayed her bail hearing on Thursday after a lawyer questioned a medical report putting the girl’s age at 14, suggesting the government had tried to influence it.

L’Osservatore Romano: For months Christians have been fleeing the northern part of Mali from Islamic fundamentalists. The alarm was sounded by the Algerian daily El Khabar which clearly described  how 200,000 people have taken refugee in camps largely in Mauritania and Algeria.

Family Scholars: A married woman whose husband donated sperm without her knowledge is calling for clinics to be forced to ask for a wife’s consent.

LifeNews: Pham Thi Cuong, 74, is doing what so many in Vietnam refuse to do — care for little babies who die before birth in abortions. A new story profiles her work, finding and burying more than 4,000 unwanted babies who have been killed.

RT.com: Four Orthodox Christian crosses have been chopped down in different parts of Russia. The incidents come after the Femen movement attacked a cross in Kiev to protest the sentence of the punk band Pussy Riot, who received two years in prison.

Pakistan Post: On August 14, when Pakistan was celebrating “Independence Day”, Muqadas Kainat went in fields to pee where she was gang raped and murdered by 5 Muslims and never returned home.

LifeSiteNews: “In these cases, both the woman and her child are equally innocent victims of the rapist, and we have a moral obligation to do everything that we can to help both of them, without taking an innocent life,” Precious Life noted. “Rape victims need long term care and compassion not a ‘quick-fix’ solution of abortion.”

LifeSiteNews: Sean Brady is the Cardinal Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, but according to Ireland’s Labour Party he should have no right to engage in any campaigning against legal abortion in the country.

Religion Clause Blog: According to Interfax today, in Russia, Orthodox Christian activists have physically attacked Moscow’s Erotic Art Museum on the Arbat.

AP: New Zealand lawmakers on Wednesday overwhelmingly cast a first vote in favor of a gay marriage bill that was given impetus by President Barack Obama’s public support of the issue.

Reuters: Religious freedom in Egypt appears to be “quite tenuous” and its government has failed to aggressively prosecute perpetrators of sectarian violence, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Monday.

BBC: A notary in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo has sparked controversy by accepting a civil union between three people.

New Zealand Herald: A bill to legalise gay marriage is expected to clear its historic first hurdle this evening, but the battle lines have been clearly drawn as lobby groups and a growing number of MPs declare their opposition.