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Pastoral
Bible Institute News World News Religious Two car bombs rocked India's
commercial capital of Bombay during lunchtime [yesterday], turning the area
around a jewelry market and a historical landmark into a war zone. At least
45 people were killed and more than 150 were wounded in the successive
blasts. Authorities blamed Muslim groups including the Lashkar-e Taiba and
the Student Islamic Movement of India. Both organizations, which have been
banned in mostly Hindu India for past terrorist attacks, seek independence
for the Indian-held part of Kashmir, a mostly Muslim region. Violence
between Hindus and Muslims has plagued the sub-continent since India and
Pakistan were carved out of the remnants of the British empire in 1947. —Los Angeles
Times, 8/26/2003 On July 1, half a million people poured onto the streets of Hong Kong in angry but peaceful demonstrations, subversion and sedition. The imposition of harsh anti-subversion laws has serious implications for Hong Kong’s large Christian community. Many foreign mission organizations still operate freely in Hong Kong, while churches in the autonomous region continue their quiet support of Chinese believers on the mainland. All this could change if the new laws are strictly enforced. Roman Catholic Bishop Joseph Zen has taken the lead in Christian circles against the new legislation. Born in Shanghai, Zen taught at a Catholic seminary on the mainland for seven years before battles with the authorities over religious freedom led to his eviction. —Religion Today, 7/11/2003 There are approximately 70 sextillion—that’s 7 followed by 22 zeros—stars in the known universe, a team led by Australian astronomer Simon Driver announced this week at the 25th General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Sydney. That means there are more stars in the sky than there are grains of sand in every beach and desert on Earth. The astronomers made the calculation … as part of a project known as the Two-Degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey. —Los Angeles Times, 7/26/2003 B
Social Famine is again stalking Ethiopia. While a million people died in the famine of 1984 and 1985, today more than 12 million are at risk, half of those children under 15. Perhaps the most chilling aspect of today’s crisis is that the famine persists despite generous outside food aid. Drought is the primary reason, but it intertwines with other factors that keep Ethiopians too poor and too sick to recover from drought years. The impact of drought in Ethiopia is magnified by the country’s deforestation and the depletion of soil by farmers who cannot afford to let land lie fallow. Ethiopia now has more than two million people with the AIDS virus, and the infection is exploding. Other countries in southern Africa are also beginning to suffer from hunger that does not go away, and their tribulations may turn into persistent famine as droughts intensify and AIDS incapacitates more and more workers. —New York Times, 7/28/2003 Malaysia is allowing local Muslim men to get divorced by sending a text message on their mobile phones. An ancient practice under Islamic Sharia law permits men to end a marriage by repeating the simple phrase talaq (I divorce thee) three times. An Islamic law court in Malaysia has recognized the divorce of Shamsudin Latif after he sent such a text message to his wife. The ruling was endorsed by Abdul Hamid Othman, the government’s religious adviser, who said that if the message was clear and unambiguous, it was valid under Sharia law. —Financial Times, 7/28/2003 A Nigerian oil pipeline punctured by thieves exploded, killing more than 100 villagers scavenging for fuel, witnesses said Saturday. Nigeria, the world’s eighth biggest exporter of crude oil, is Africa’s biggest oil producer, but it suffers chronic fuel shortages because of technical problems with its four domestic refineries. Witnesses said villagers using buckets and jerrycans had been scooping kerosene from the pipeline since it was deliberately punctured about two months before the accident. A thriving black market is a major incentive to thieves tapping into the more than 3,000 miles of pipelines transporting refined products across the country. —Los Angeles Times, 6/22/2003 Most of the earth’s surface is covered by oceans, and their vastness and biological bounty were long thought to be immune to human influence. But no more. Scientists and marine experts say decades of industrial-scale assaults are taking a heavy toll. More than 70 percent of commercial fish stocks are now considered fully exploited, overfished or collapsed. Sea birds and mammals are endangered. And a growing number of marine species are reaching the precariously low levels where extinction is considered a real possibility. Despite closures of fishing grounds, they may never come back, biologists say, because overfishing has so profoundly changed the ecosystem. In 2000, the American Fisheries Society, representing fishery scientists and managers, reported that populations of 22 species had almost vanished. Recent studies estimate that stocks of many fishes are now a tenth of what they were 50 years ago. —New York Times, 7/30/2003 The staggering number of deaths in France due to the heat wave is finally drawing the nation’s attention to who died and how. The government estimates that the heat killed perhaps 5,000 people. The largest undertaker, General Funeral Services, said Wednesday that the number could be more than twice that. The victims were generally found inside apartments or houses or hotels. In virtually every case, there was no air conditioner. —International Herald Tribune, 8/21/2003 More than 300 million people worldwide are at risk of developing diabetes and the disease’s economic impact in some hard-hit countries could be higher than that of the AIDS pandemic, diabetes experts warned. In a report released at the International Diabetes Federation conference in Paris, experts estimate the annual healthcare costs of diabetes worldwide for people aged 20 to 79 are at least $153 billion. “In some countries with a higher incidence, diabetes has a higher economic impact than AIDS,” Williams Rhys, professor of clinical epidemiology at the University of Wales, told a news conference. “What AIDS was in the last 20 years of the 20th century, diabetes is going to be in the first 20 years of this century,” said Paul Zimmet, foundation director of the International Diabetes Institute. [Experts] warn that type II diabetes was increasing in children and adolescents in many countries and is linked to rising obesity. —Reuters, 8/26/2003 G Civil North Korean officials said that they had finished producing enough plutonium to make a half-dozen nuclear bombs, and that they intended to move ahead quickly to turn the material into weapons, senior American officials said today. “It’s the mirror image of the Iraq problem,” one official said. “We spent years looking for evidence Iraq was lying when it said it didn’t have a nuclear program. Now North Korea says it’s about to go nuclear, and everyone is trying to figure out whether they’ve finally done it, or if it’s the big lie.” North Korea boasted in April that it was working to convert its 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium. —New York Times, 7/15/2003 Idi Amin, who died in Saudi Arabia, got away with thousands of murders. His murderous reign in Uganda (began with) a beating here, an expulsion there, a brutal whipping here, a murder here, a mini-massacre there and then a full-scale purge to round it off. Amin is accused of killing hundreds of thousands of his own people. Those who try to rationalize his bloodlust present the reason that he was frightened of his rivals and struck at them first before they could strike at him. Africa is in (a) dank hole of poverty because of people like Amin, because people have been so frightened of their brutality they have not dared to challenge them. Now, the poverty is almost universal. —The Daily News (Zimbabwe), 8/21/2003 Starting next year, Chinese
citizens will face something new and breathtaking in scale: an electronic
card that will store that vital information for all 960 million eligible
citizens on chips that the authorities anywhere can access. The vagueness
and vastness of the undertaking has prompted some criticism that the data
collection could be used to quash dissent and to infringe on privacy. The
project comes at a time when China is doggedly remaking itself into a leaner
economic machine in line with the standards of the World Trade Organization.
There has been little public discussion or news about the new cards. Brief
but rapturous accounts in the official press say the cards will “protect
citizens.” Yet many of China’s toughest critics, at home and abroad, are
skeptical, objecting to the concentration of so much information at the
government’s fingertips. —New York
Times, 8/19/2003
The electrical blackout in the United States in August has revived the debate over energy generation. Generating electricity is a simple technology, more than a century old. The technology becomes a little more complex when you have to choose the optimal way of generating it. Hydro is great but requires big investments in dams. To make steam, you have a choice of coal, nuclear, natural gas, manufactured gas or oil. There are a few other complexities, but on the whole, any Third World Country can do it. The complicated part is the politics. Millions of conservatives are trying to peddle windmill farms amidst debate about destroying the scenic beauty of places like California and the Dutch coast. Nuclear power, a clean, safe and cost-effective way of making steam, has been stalled by the protestors in the U.S. The lack of incentives for utilities to invest in the infrastructure of transmission has limited the ability to deliver demand for increased electricity in growing population areas. Welcome to the bizarre world of energy politics. —Wall Street Journal (Opinion), 8/19/2003 In a chilling final report, Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission said Thursday that 69,000 people may have died in [the last two decades of the 20th century] of rebel and state-sponsored violence. Peru was racked by parallel wars waged by Shining Path and Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement guerrillas seeking to impose communist rule. In response, the military and police committed widespread human rights abuses. Three-quarters of the victims were native speakers of the Quechua language and most died in the region of Ayacucho, which translated as “corner of death.” —Los Angeles Times, 8/29/2003 $ Financial Bulgaria
holds almost $2 billion of debt owed to it by Iraq since the 1970s and
1980s. The amount owed Bulgaria is a fraction of that due Russia, France and
other Paris club members. But, according to finance minister Milen Veltchev,
Bulgaria is at the top of the pain index when creditors are ranked
according to the proportion of Iraqi debt represented in the country’s
Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Bulgaria’s Iraqi debt is 12.5% of its GDP. Iraqi’s
total debt represents 300% of its annual GDP.
Bulgaria is still paying off the debts left from its former communist
rulers. —Global Finance, July/August 2003. Inside
North Korea, it goes by the Orwellian name of Division 39. It is a largely
unpublicized trading network and slush fund. The money it generates is the
lifeblood of Kim Jong II’s dictatorship. According to interviews with
defectors, Division 39 has generated a cash hoard as large as $5 billion
that is salted away in places as disparate as Macau, Switzerland and
Pyongyang. It produces a steady flow of money that Mr. Kim uses to buy
political support and loyalty. Intelligence officials have also tied it to
Pyongyang’s efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction. Division 39
was set up during the mid-1970s. Citizens are required to make annual
donations to Division 39 on important holidays honoring the so-called Dear
Leader and his father. —Wall Street Journal, 7/14/2003 An onslaught of rogue computer programs disrupted important commercial infrastructure [in August]. In one of the most serious incidents, CSX Corp., the third largest railroad company in North America, said it temporarily stopped service after one of the viruses struck. The day before, some passengers of Air Canada encountered delays because a “worm” program affected the airline’s reservation system. The incidents highlight the (U.S.) economy’s dependence on personal computers and the Internet, making it easier than ever for malicious computer code to spread rapidly. —Wall Street Journal, 8/21/2003 Turkey’s government will need to find $8 billion to protect Istanbul from the effects of a possible earthquake. Istanbul’s municipal government will have to reinforce or demolish about 75 percent of the city’s 1 million buildings. Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city with a population of about 10 million, stands near a fault line that has caused several quakes in recent years. An earthquake in Izmit, about 100 kilometers from Istanbul, killed 17,000 people in 1999. Death tolls are higher than they should be because of low standards of construction which result from failure to enforce building rules. —Hurriyet (Istanbul), 8/19/2003 South Africa will suffer “a complete economic collapse” within four generations if it does nothing to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic, according to new research from the World Bank. The authors of the World Bank report claim the AIDS epidemic could have such a devastating impact on the economy that family incomes could fall by more than a half and middle-income South Africa could become more like a poor African nation. They argue that the real economic threat from AIDS is its potential to kill young adults, which can destroy a country’s ability to create human capital. … Around 15 per cent of [South African] adults are HIV-positive. —Financial Times, 7/14/2003 European farmers are preparing for their worst crisis in decades as record heat parches crops, threatening to cause billions of euros in damages to products from Tuscan olives to French wheat and German rye. In France, 54 of 58 regions have asked for agricultural disaster funds. Italy has declared a state of emergency for four regions because of the longest heat wave in two centuries. Germany’s agricultural association expects almost a fifth of farmers in the worst-affected areas will lose their jobs. Europe’s 288 billion-euro farming industry, which accounts for 4.2 percent of the region’s workforce, and 1.7 percent of gross domestic product, has faced flooding, droughts and record high and low temperatures in the past three years. In France, Europe’s biggest agricultural producer, drought is gripping three-quarters of the country. —Bloomberg News, 8/7/2003 Y Israel In perhaps the most delicate of ironies, Germany last year passed Israel as the leading destination for Jewish emigrants from the former Soviet Union: 19,262 admissions, compared with 18,878 for Israel. Germany is attractive, in part, because it grants all Jews from the former Soviet Union citizenship and automatic government benefits. Germany’s pre-war Jewish community of 500,000 was just 15,000 after the war. Now it’s back up to 200,000. —Newsweek, 7/14/2003 Ever since its discovery nearly three years ago, the Gaza Marine natural-gas field off the Gaza Strip has been hostage to the seismic volatility of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But recently, peace hopes inspired by the U.S.-backed “road map” have breathed new life into the project. Its champions say it would lead the way in repairing economic ties severed by 34 months of bloodshed. But for others, distrust now runs so deep that any collaboration of this kind is a pipe dream. The 1.6 trillion cubic feet of gas off Gaza could earn $50 million to $100 million a year for the Palestinian Authority, a lot for a government whose monthly revenues at the end of last year were just $18 million. —Wall Street Journal, 7/14/2003 Israel is ready for a terrorist attack on the scale of the September 11 attacks in the US, a senior official in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office told Ariel Sharon’s security cabinet members on August 6. Danny Arditi, who heads the task force on fighting terror, presented several possible terrorist attacks that could take place and explained how the country would react. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said the possibility of such attacks requires a major investment in order to be fully prepared. He said the budget should reflect the need to make such preparations a national priority. —Jerusalem Post, 8/7/2003 Book
Review Yasir
Arafat: A Political Biography, Barry and Judith Rubin. For more than four decades, since he founded Fatah in 1959 and then the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1964, Yasir Arafat has enjoyed the flattering glare of the international spotlight. Mr. Arafat is one of the inventors of modern terrorism and continues to instigate it to this day. Despite this, a multitude of admirers and apologists in the West have been taken in by his pose of moderation, at least until recently. As a result, he has visited nearly every royal palace and presidential residence in Europe and was a guest of honor at the White House several times. He has even won the Nobel Peace Prize. How did this happen? As [the Rubins] show in their admirable, impressively documented book, he is one of the great con men of modern politics. Even those who know what a slippery character Mr. Arafat is may be surprised to learn from the Rubin's account just how deceitful he can be. He claims to have been born in Jerusalem, for instance, but was in fact born in Cairo. He has told of single-handedly stopping an Israeli tank column in the 1948 war, though the evidence places him in Egypt at the time. Some of his falsehoods have been utterly fantastic such as that there was never a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. As for political tactics, the Rubins remind us that Mr. Arafat is often astute, positioning himself between competing Islamic, Marxist, and nationalist Palestinian groupings. Even today, though the Western media talks of a “new Palestinian prime minister,” Chairman Arafat retains control of almost all the key elements of power in Palestinian politics. The Rubins, along with documenting his corruption and misrule, make clear how much Palestinians and Israelis alike have suffered from his refusal to entertain a two-state solution. —Tom
Gross, Wall Street Journal, 8/21/2003 (Gross
is a former Jerusalem correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph |
