Pastoral Bible Institute News
J. Udhayakumar, South India How can one thank you enough for republishing the book Daniel, the Beloved
of Jehovah. Truly I could not put it down after having gotten it. What a treasure and with
so many long hidden gems. Marjorie Theis, Oregon Around the World Israel The threat of missiles aimed at Israel is the most significant since the
War of Independence in 1948, Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai warned recently.
"They can hit our most vital asset, the civilian population we are supposed to be
defending, " he told an international conference in Tel Aviv. Speaking at the
conference hosted by the Galili Center for Strategy and National Security, Mordechai
reiterated his warning to Syria, Iran and other states that Israel would retaliate against
any threat. He noted the difference between today and 1991, when Iraq launched SCUD
missiles against Israel. "They can now cause greater harm, particularly if they are
equipped with non-conventional warheads," he said. Jerusalem Post Footnote: Beginning with this issue, we will
start the news from Israel using selected clips from various issues of the Jerusalem Post,
Israel's leading English language newspaper. This newspaper provides a firsthand look at
developments in Israel. The debate over the status of the ultra-Orthodox in Israel is heating up. When the state of Israel was established 50 years ago, its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, exempted ultra-Orthodox (yeshiva) students from military service. The idea was to reinvigorate a culture of Jewish scholarship that was largely eradicated by the Holocaust. There were 400 such students at the time. Today, 28,550 students a year receive exemption from the mandatory military service-nearly one of 13 Israelis of draft age. These yeshiva students receive housing subsidies and other stipends unavailable to other students. The issue is becoming increasingly contentious in the Knesset (the Israeli congress). A backlash against the very religious is taking on increasingly nasty overtones. At a rally in Tel Aviv last summer, demonstrators chanted a Yiddish slang meaning "freeloader." A recent survey by the Jerusalem Institute for Israeli Studies found that 58 percent of adult males within the ultra-orthodox community are not part of the workforce. The stakes in the debate were raised with the passage of the 1998 budget on January 5. Prime Minister Netanyahu added tens of millions of dollars in extra subsidies to yeshivas and religious boarding schools in order to enlist the support of religious parties in his coalition. Washington Post, 1/16/98 Islam Palestinian President Yassir Arafat has promised the Palestinians they will get their independent state by 1999. Speaking at a meeting ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the "Nakba" (catastrophe) of the founding of Israel in 1948, Arafat said that the Palestinians were fighting "the longest revolution in the world." He stated, "We are here to stay, and soon we will declare our Palestinian state. It will be declared in '99 on the Palestinian land. Those who do not like it can drink the Gaza sea water and the Dea Sea water." Arafat told the audience that he sees the Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. The meeting in Ramallah was the first in a series of meetings to launch Palestinian activities marking the 50th anniversary of the 1948 war. Deutsche Press Agentur (DPA), 2/12/98
Financial Times, 1/6/98 The series of anti-Chinese riots that rocked Indonesia may have been in part provoked by conservative Islamic scholars urging believers to wage a holy war against financial speculators and commodity hoarders. The Indonesian Ulemas Council's (MUI) call for a jihad (holy war) as a means to solve the country's social and economic problems preceded violent unrest in Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi in which mobs, angered by rising food and commodity price rises, looted and torched Chinese shops. Indonesia, the world's largest Moslem nation, has a population of 202 million people, of whom only about five million are Chinese, mostly Christians or Buddhists. Masdar F. Mas'udi, the director of the Indonesian Society for Community Development, said that "the rich need to sacrifice part of their wealth for the needy to minimize the threat of violence in this time of crisis." DPA, 2/20/98 Christendom Reuters, 2/23/98 The Houses of Worship (HOW) Web site, whose goal is to link churches on the Internet, has signed on the 10,000th church. HOW is rapidly creating a vast network whose ultimate goal is to link the activities of more than 300,000 churches across the country for increased interdenominational dialogue and cooperation. More than 90 denominations are now represented. The site enables churches to exchange resources with other congregations; stimulate dialogue among church leaders; empower congregations to find new members and outlets; share information about their houses of worship. Business Wire, 2/19/98
DPA, 1/30/98 A small political movement to put the U.S. into the business of fighting religious persecution of Christians around the globe is gathering momentum. The group is made up of both religious conservatives and liberal evangelicals, as well as the U.S. Catholic Conference. The goal of the movement is to unite behind legislation designed to punish countries that practice or condone persecution based on religious beliefs. Particularly in countries with radical Islamic movements, Christians have been the targets of some horrific persecution: imprisonment in China, beatings in Pakistan, even crucifixion and enslavement in Sudan. The provisions of the proposed legislation would block export-import financing for projects in these countries. If a country is found to engage in widespread religious persecution, non-humanitarian aid to the country would end, trade with government agencies would stop and the U.S. would be required to oppose loans to the country by international lending institutions. Wall Street Journal, 2/4/98 Economics The question of future exchange rate policy is the subject of a detailed discussion paper by the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London. The paper makes the point that European Monetary Union (EMU) will transform a group of small open economies into a large closed economy similar in some respects to that of the U.S. This will change the importance of the exchange rate for domestic policy. The paper argues that this will create a policy of "benign neglect" and could cause extreme economic uncertainties. Currently, when the dollar weakens against the D-mark, other European currencies also weaken against the D-mark. Under EMU, that buffer would no longer be there. "Extreme caution will be required to avoid trade friction from boiling over into political tensions on suspicions of beggar-thy-neighbor policies," said the authors. Policy cooperation would have to be voluntary to avoid crisis. To date relatively little attention has been paid by EU officials to how such policy cooperation would work in practice. Financial Times, 1/6/98 China could be the next country to suffer the economic woes of devaluation. Growth in China has been slowing for the past five years. China has an export-led economy and most of its exports go to Asian countries. A sudden devaluation in China's currency could set off shock waves in global financial markets. Investors' Business Daily, 1/19/98 Science Scientists for the first time have apparently endowed healthy human cells growing in a dish with a quality that alchemists, explorers and mystics have vainly sought for ages: immortality. In the new research, due to be published in the Journal of Science, the scientists genetically altered cells, enabling them to keep dividing long past their allotted life span. The work opens a new path to the treatment of cancer and a variety of degenerative ailments, including heart disease and age-related vision loss. Such healthy human cells might also serve as biological factories for churning out genetically engineered drugs. Los Angeles Times, 1/14/98 Just before Christmas, scientists in the UK and France completed the genome (genetic) sequence of the micro-organism that causes tuberculosis-a killer of about 3 million people annually. This has given drug designers the chemical key to all the genes within the organism that could be targeted by anti-bacterial agents. The screening or mapping out of the entire human genome-a much bigger worldwide research project which is due for completion in 2005-is yielding promising avenues for vaccine development by shedding light on the mechanisms of resistance and susceptibility. "Everything we need to know about the organism, from its biology to its behavior, is encrypted in its genome," says Stuart Cole of the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Novartis [formerly Ciba] Foundation, 1/8/98 The results of a five year natural Environment Research Council program examined how biological molecules in archaeological and fossil materials change over time. The study established that there were severe limits to the amount of knowledge scientists could expect to gain from DNA fossil study. Professor Eglinton of the Research Council said that it is not possible to obtain DNA from samples more than 100,000 years old. There is no hope of extracting it from the fossils of dinosaurs, for example. Many of the ancient animals have been found to have played a key role in the development of oil source rocks, a prime source of energy reserves. Financial Times, 1/20/98 Because of the warming of the Earth's atmosphere over the El Niņo event in the Pacific Ocean, February's average global temperature was the hottest on record, according to researchers at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The average global temperature was 0.95 degrees Fahrenheit above the 10-year average for February. The Northern Hemisphere was 1.21 degrees above the 10-year average, while the Southern Hemisphere was 0.68 degrees above it. Los Angeles Times, 3/19/98 |
