Tag Archives: Category: Global

George Weigel at EPPC: Despite some hiccups caused by the sorry state of the world economy, China is still The Future for many global analysts. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has even suggested that Americans have a lot to learn politically from the economic successes of Chinese authoritarianism. That China is the rising world power seems taken for granted in many elite foreign policy circles. I’m not buying. I didn’t buy “Japan is Number One” when that was the mantra two decades ago, because Japan had severe demographic problems-as in, very few children; its lack of the most basic form of people power in the most elementary form, I thought, would soon become evident in economic weakness (as it has). China also has serious demographic problems. Thanks to a brutally enforced one-child policy

BBC: A judge has said the arranged marriage of a UK woman of Bangladeshi origin, who is disabled and has severe learning difficulties, should be annulled.

LifeSiteNews: Judge upholds end of life laws in Tony Nicklinson case: he High Court has today ruled on the Tony Nicklinson and ‘Martin’ cases, with three judges reaffirming the long established legal position that ‘voluntary euthanasia is murder, however understandable the motives may be’.

Catholic Culture: Lamenting the “resurgence of violence currently spreading throughout the world,” the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople–the Eastern Orthodox see that holds the primacy of honor–issued a statement on August 14 denounced “barbaric acts” such as “ethnic cleansing, anti-Semitism, [and] destruction of places of worship,” particularly when these acts “are masked with the veil of religion in an effort to justify them.”

Washington Post: Islamic militants in the Sinai Peninsula warned the Egyptian military on Wednesday against cracking down on jihadis and claimed they were not behind a sneak attack earlier this month that killed 16 Egyptian soldiers. In a statement posted on a website which usually carries al-Qaida and similar groups’ statements, the militants said their main focus is Israel and that they do not target Egyptians soldiers.

allAfrica.com: President Kiir said “The Republic of South Sudan has no rooms for a politicized Islam and other religions, leadership of the country will not allow anyone to use Islam for a political Agenda”.

Hilary White at LifeSiteNews: “The fallacy in the anti-abortion argument lies in the shift from the scientifically accurate claim that the fetus is a living individual of the species Homo sapiens to the ethical claim that the fetus therefore has the same right to life as any other human being.”

LifeNews: Increasingly we are learning about the deep-seeded prejudice against girls in some Asian countries. With an estimated 163 million women in Asia “missing” due to sex-selective abortion, which is equivalent to the entire female population of the United States, the lives of Asian women are getting worse not better.

CBC.ca: The federal government should ensure there are at least four women on the Supreme Court of Canada’s bench, according to retiring Justice Marie Deschamps, but she doesn’t think appointees have to be bilingual on day one of the job.

Religion Clause Blog: BosNewsLife reported yesterday that in Hungary, the country’s Ombudsman who is elected by Parliament to protect fundamental civil rights is asking the Constitutional Court to overturn the country’s recently enacted Law on the Right to Freedom of Conscience and Religion, and on Churches, Religions and Religious Community.

AP: Berlin court has rejected an emergency appeal by three mosques to prohibit a far-right group from displaying caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad at a demonstration this weekend.

AP: The deputy leader of Germany’s far-right National Democratic Party has been convicted of defamation over a 2010 speech in which he criticized a Holocaust memorial event.

Eric Trager at Wall Street Journal (via Google): Mohammed Morsi has given himself complete legislative and executive power, plus the right to select writers of a new constitution.

Christian Institute: The Scottish Government’s plans to redefine marriage risk undermining religious freedom, the nation’s top Roman Catholic has warned.

O.Canada.com: The organization representing Canada’s doctors says life begins when a baby emerges from its mother’s womb. Delegates to the Canadian Medical Association’s annual general council meeting Wednesday supported keeping a section of the Criminal Code that declares a child becomes a human being at the moment of birth. Their moves comes after concerns that a private member’s motion in Parliament could be a backdoor to criminalizing abortion and the doctors who perform it.

Washington Post: More than 250 Pakistani Hindus have arrived in India over the past two weeks bearing tales of religious persecution, according to Indian border officials, fueling perceptions of growing discrimination against minorities in Pakistan.

Newsletter.co.uk: However, although the number of abortions in Northern Ireland – less than 100 a year – is miniscule by comparison to the rest of the UK, concerns have been raised that some doctors may be getting around the strict ban on abortions in all cases other than those where the mother’s life is in immediate danger. Figures released in the House of Lords to the Crossbench peer Lord Alton show that in 43 years there have been just 143 abortions in England and Wales to save the mother’s life.

Inquirer News: Senate majority leader Tito Sotto alleged on Wednesday that at least four non-government organizations presenting themselves as “pro-women” receive funding from international groups advocating abortion.

LifeSiteNews: – A judge in this small northern Ontario town has ruled that allowing a biological father access to his 22-month-old son, who is being raised by his biological mother and her lesbian partner, is not in the best interests of the child because of “the risk of there being an adverse affect to the child.” | Deblois v. Lavigne, 2012 ONSC 3949 (CanLII)

AP: The Sipa news agency reported that some parishes ignored the suggested prayer and that churchgoers were divided over whether the church should get involved in politics.

AP: Kuwait’s government has asked the country’s Constitutional Court to determine whether its election law is legal.

Telegraph: Margaret Forrester, a Roman Catholic, was dismissed after a dispute which stemmed from her giving a colleague an anti-abortion booklet. She was told that the booklet, highlighting potential physical and psychological damage some women suffer after an abortion, amounted to “offensive” material.

Montreal Gazette: Under a Parti Québécois government, civil servants won’t be able to wear a hijab or any other overt religious symbol, but the Catholic crucifix will remain displayed in the National Assembly, the PQ announced on a campaign stop Tuesday.

Yahoo News: “If we go on like that, this place will fold up, because there’ll be no original citizens left to form the majority, and we cannot have new citizens, new PRs to settle our social ethos, our social spirit, our social norms,” he said, noting that Chinese reproduction rate is now at 1.08, Indians at 1.09 and Malays at 1.64.

Telegraph: Growing numbers of women are asking for abortions because of financial concerns, a survey of GPs has found.

Conservative Home Tory Diary: When the Government first flirted with the idea of relaxing Sunday trading laws my colleague Paul Goodman was very unimpressed. Is this the most anti-Christian government in British history?, he asked. But it’s not just churchgoers who don’t like the idea. By 52% to 36% most Britons oppose further deregulation of Sunday opening.

Christian Institute: The Government is to consider making extended Olympic Sunday trading hours permanent, but critics are concerned about the impact on families.

Telegraph: “France’s future depends on its ability to reintegrate the suburbs into the national project,” warned respected political scientist Gilles Kepel, a specialist in the Muslim world, in a recent report after a year-long study in Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil, two Paris suburbs where the 2005 riots began. The report found that Islamic institutions and practices are increasingly displacing those of the French state, which has failed to deliver on its promise of “equality”, and that residents of the suburbs increasingly do not see themselves as French.

AFP: Mosque officials said they expected a total of 300,000 worshippers although it was not known how many would be from the West Bank, Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem or from Israel’s Arab minority.

Expatica: The Ifop poll, due to be published on Wednesday by digital magazine La Lettre de l’Opinion, found 65 percent of the French support gay marriage with a smaller majority (53 percent) in favour of gay couples having the right to adopt children.

AP: A Catholic church in Nepal says it has received threatening phone calls from a person claiming to belong to an underground Hindu group that bombed the church three years ago . . .

Jurist: A Bahrain court has sentenced a man to two years of imprisonment for making defamatory comments about a wife of the Prophet Muhammad [BBC backgrounder]. The 19-year-old man allegedly posted offensive comments [AFP report] on a website that insulted Muhammad’s wife Aisha.

Yahoo Finance: a Chinese business magazine said a state bank has provided $1 billion in loans to help companies with listings abroad move them to domestic exchanges . . . The withdrawals follow accusations of improper accounting by some companies and a deadlock between Beijing and Washington over whether U.S. regulators can oversee their China-based auditors. Some Chinese companies say they are pulling out of U.S. markets because a low share price fails to reflect the strength of their business. Withdrawing also eliminates the cost of complying with American financial reporting rules.

Telegraph: Terminally ill children are subjected to needless suffering amounting to “torture” by parents who refuse to allow the withdrawal of treatment because of their religious beliefs, leading doctors have claimed.

Catholic Culture: Rev. Zafar Bhatti, who heads the Jesus World Mission, has been jailed after Muslims complained that he had insulted Islam in text messages.

Telegraph: Relaxing Sunday trading laws to let shops open for longer would be a “major breach of trust” by the Coalition, a senior Conservative MP has warned.

Christian Concern: A Judge ruled on Friday 10 August that doctors can switch off a young boy’s life-support system even though his Christian parents wanted him to be kept alive as they still had hope of his recovery.

The Christian Institute: Campaigners are urging the public to take action to curb easy access to explicit internet pornography. More than 100,000 people have signed a petition urging “the Government to force Internet Service Providers to make accessing pornography an adult only opt-in service”.

Reuters: They blend a toxic mix of smuggling, gun-running and human trafficking with the “takfiri” ideology of al Qaeda – which declares all Muslims who do not follow their purist, Salafist interpretation of Islam as “kafirs” – infidels. Crime and religion are soldered by ferocious opposition to Israel.

CNSNews: “Of all the freedoms we cherish as Americans, of all the rights that we hold sacred, foremost among them is freedom of religion, the right to worship as we choose,” said Obama . . . In his iftar speech, Obama’s phraseology seemed to define freedom of religion as merely “the right to worship as we choose.” The First Amendment, however, does not use the phrase “freedom of religion” or the word “worship.” Rather, it expressly prohibits the government from prohibiting the “free exercise” of religion–meaning government cannot coerce people anywhere in their lives (whether in or outside a house of worship) to act against their consciences or the teachings of their faith.

White House Blog: President Obama Hosts Fourth Annual Iftar Dinner at the White House

AP: The U.S. and the European Union have voiced doubts about Bucharest’s commitment to democracy, after a court failed to rule on whether a referendum to suspend President Traian Basescu was valid.

IsraelNationalNews: Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi has sacked the entire leadership of the country’s defense establishment.

AP: Egypt’s military has shown no sign of opposing the president’s surprise decision to retire the defense minister and chief of staff and seize back the powers the military grabbed from his office.

Charles C.W. Cooke at National Review: . . . no serious observer can contend that the law passed in 1967 bears any meaningful resemblance to the abortion-on-demand culture in Britain that it has created — a culture made infinitely worse by the availability of the procedure via the taxpayer-funded National Health Service

Turtle Bay and Beyond: Zainab Usman wrote a thoughtful article on the Gates’ contraception campaign for ThinkAfricaPress.com that got picked up by AllAfrica.com. Zainab is a Nigerian freelance writer currently working in Brussels and “a budding political economist and political scientist with a keen interest in Current Affairs: Nigerian, African and International affairs.”

Christian Institute: According to the figures 6.4 million abortions were performed on residents of England and Wales between 1968 and 2011. Of these just 143 (0.006 per cent) were performed to save the life of the mother or to prevent serious permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the mother.

Catholic Culture: Iran’s court of appeals has upheld a six-year prison sentence for Farshid Fat’hi, a convert to Christianity who organized a house church.

Religion Clause Blog: In In re the Constitutional Complaints of Mr. P, (Fed. Const. Ct. Germany, July 21, 2012), Germany’s Constitutional Court held that . . .

France24.com: A tradition will be revived in France next week when a “Prayer for France” will be read out at Catholic churches across the country. The text, which attacks the government’s plan to legalise same-sex marriage, has angered France’s gay rights groups.

Christian Concern: The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) should be abolished as it does not contribute anything meaningful to Britain, according to a new report from independent think tank Civitas.

Christian Institute: Researchers watched dads interacting with their infants at three months and then assessed the same babies’ behaviour at twelve months.They found that babies whose dads were more engaged at three months had fewer problems when assessed at twelve months . . . The study of 192 families was published in the journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry

Christian Institute: A former Scottish National Party (SNP) councillor has resigned from the party after nearly half a century because of its plans to redefine marriage.

The Nation: Gunmen suspected to be members of the Boko Haram sect on Monday evening killed an evangelist with a Pentecostal church in Maiduguri, Ali Samari.

C-FAM: Amnesty International, a human rights organization that used to be abortion neutral, is now using the problem of maternal mortality to advocate for abortion.

C-FAM: In the span of one month, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued eleven press releases decrying episodes of violence against “gay,” “lesbian,” and “trans” persons across the American continent. The Inter-American Commission blames the countries where these attacks took place for failing to investigate and prosecute hate crimes and calls on them to provide special protections for persons on the basis of their sexual orientation and identity.

The New American: Radical Islam, which is spreading everywhere in the world, has largely destroyed the once thriving Maronite Christian population of Lebanon (a land long called the “Switzerland of the Middle East” because of its high income, small government, and educated population). Nigeria has not escaped this onslaught.

LifeSiteNews: The Russian punk rock band “Pussy Riot,” currently on trial for desecrating Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral, is being elevated by Western elites and media outlets to the status of a human rights icon.

Religion Clause Blog: RNS reports on a letter released Tuesday from Muslim and Coptic Christian leaders in the United States calling on Egypt’s new government that is drafting a constitution for the country to “recognize the equality of all Egyptians and to reject any language that would discriminate against any citizen of Egypt on the basis of that citizen’s religion or gender.”

Christian Science Monitor: For all its noble intentions, the ICC is a political creature, the Rome Treaty is the product of intense negotiation and compromise. First and foremost, the court and its legacy are closely tied to the politics of the preeminent organization charged with safeguarding international peace and security: the United Nations Security Council.

Reuters: Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair told a German newspaper he was “deeply worried” Britain might opt to leave the European Union in a referendum, particularly if too many powers were transferred to Brussels without democratic legitimacy.

Religion Clause Blog: JTA reported Monday that Norway’s ombudsman for children has proposed that Jews and Muslims replace circumcision of boys with a symbolic non-surgical ritual.

AP: An army official says a mosque attack that killed two soldiers followed a deadly church attack in central Nigeria.

AP: Prostitutes have the right to work from motel rooms in an Australian state, a court said after finding the owner’s refusal to rent to a sex worker was discriminatory.

Pat Buchanan at Human Events: “Apart from political maps of mankind, there are natural maps of mankind. … One of the first laws of political stability is to draw your political boundaries along the lines of the natural map of mankind.” So wrote H.G. Wells in “What Is Coming: A Forecast of Things to Come After the War” in the year of Verdun and the Somme Offensive.

Christian Science Monitor: Christian leaders in Nigeria’s restive north say they may have to ‘rise up’ to protect themselves, and southern insurgents offer to cut off the north from food and other supplies.

Catholic Culture: The six men and 29 women were arrested after police stormed a prayer vigil at a private residence in Jeddah, the nation’s second largest city, in December.

The Christian Institute: Male students at Oxford University can now wear skirts to exams, following pressure from the university’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer Society (LGBTQ Soc).

LifeSiteNews: The proposed law would force medical professionals and businesses to promote and perform a full range of “reproductive health services,” regardless of conscientious objection. The country’s pro-life leaders are particularly concerned about Section 28.e of the Bill that promises to jail and fine any person who “maliciously engages in disinformation about the intent or provisions of this Act.”

LifeSiteNews: Seven years ago, Tang Leqiong was approached by officials in her home, taken to a hospital, and forced to abort her eight-month-old unborn child. Why? Because her permit had expired. Tang was registered as a member of the farm population, entitling her to have a second child after giving birth to a girl in 1996.

LifeNews: Now the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), Britain’s government run health care system, is considering giving financial incentives to hospital units for providing organs for donation and an opt-out system where it is presumed UK citizens want their organs harvested even if they have not said they want to be a donor.

AP: Gunmen fired on a worship service in a church in central Nigeria, killing at least 19 people – including the pastor – and wounding others in a nation often divided by religion, the military said Tuesday . . .

AP: A group of lawmakers from German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative party called Tuesday for same-sex couples in civil partnerships to be given the same tax breaks as heterosexual married couples . . .

The Hindu: India has sought strengthening of security around places of worship in the United States and urged Washington to come out with a strong message of reassurance to the Indian community following the Wisconsin gurdwara shooting that left six dead.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: The International Criminal Court has faced criticism from various quarters, but perhaps not one so elevated and personal as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Until now . . .

Catholic Culture: A leading Malaysian government official is warning non-Muslims that state governments can take punitive action against those who attempt to convert Muslims.