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Pastoral Bible Institute News Religious
Talk of trials, burned witches and forbidden books
echoed in the Vatican on Tuesday as Pope John Paul asked
forgiveness for the Inquisition, in which the Church tortured and killed people
branded as heretics. The pope made his request in a letter read out at a news
conference on a new book on the Inquisition. He repeated a phrase from a 2000
document in which he first asked pardon "for errors committed in the
service of truth through use of methods that had nothing to do with the
Gospel." That was shorthand for torture, summary trials, forced
conversions and burnings at the stake. --Reuters, 6/17/2004 Militants from a predominantly Christian tribe killed at least 500 people in two attacks on a Muslim town in central Nigeria. Red Cross workers who interviewed witnesses and families of victims, and inspected a mass burial site "estimate 500 to 600 dead," said Umar Abdu Mairiga, head of the Nigerian Red Cross team visiting the mostly Muslim town of Yelwa after the assaults by the Tarok tribe. Thousands of people fled the fighting, and at least 158 people were wounded. Religious, ethnic and political enmities—often intertwined—have fueled outbreaks of communal bloodshed resulting in more than 10,000 dead since President Olusegun Obasanjo was first elected in 1999, ending 15 years of repressive military rule. In February, Muslim militants in Yelwa were blamed for killing nearly 50 people, many of them Christians who took refuge in a church. --Associated Press, 5/6/2004
--Newsweek, 5/24/2004 Social 43,220 people were killed on U.S. highways in 2003. That represented the highest number of deaths since 1990. Motor vehicle crashes are the eighth leading cause of death for Americans. They are the top cause of death from ages 4 through 33, and for toddlers aged 2, according to a recent National Highway Traffic Safety Administration analysis. Motorcycle fatalities increased last year by 11% to 3,592, as more states abandoned mandatory helmet laws. Nearly half of the motorcyclists killed were 40 or older. --Los Angeles Times, 4/29/2004 The
drought gripping the West could be the biggest in 500 years, with effects in
the Colorado
River basin considerably worse than during the Dust Bowl years, scientists at
the U.S. Geological Survey said Thursday. The Colorado River has been in a
drought for 10 years, reducing an important source of water for millions of
people across the West, including Southern California. Scientists use
tree-ring reconstructions of Colorado River flows to estimate what conditions
were like before record --Los Angeles Times, 6/19/2004 Polio has swept from Nigeria into ten other African countries that had been declared polio-free, threatening the largest outbreak seen in years. The epicenter of the polio outbreak is Kano state in northern Nigeria, a Muslim area that suspended polio vaccinations last year after religious leaders warned that they caused female infertility, officials from the World Health Organization said. Nigeria now accounts for 77% of all polio cases. The polio virus mainly affects children younger than five. Most will be paralyzed for life. Few will be able to walk. In many of the countries where polio has resurfaced, no more than 30% of children are vaccinated against the disease. Tests by Nigerian health authorities several months ago proved the vaccinations to be safe. --Los Angeles Times, 6/23/2004 The death toll from floods and mudslides on the island of Hispaniola jumped to more than 860 Wednesday as emergency workers searched for survivors and buried victims. The death toll has been high because the border area [between Haiti and the Dominican Republic] is largely deforested, allowing flash floods carrying mud and debris to easily sweep away flimsy homes and crude shacks of wood and tin. [Rescue teams said] the death toll could go much higher. --Los Angeles Times, 5/27/2004 Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have discovered a protein that extends life by as much as 50 percent. The protein is released in the body during times of famine. The finding may explain why severe restriction of calories leads to longer lives, a phenomenon shown repeatedly in mice, fruit flies and other organisms. The MIT experiments were on mice; researchers believe humans have the same survival reflex. The scientists say their goal is to find an anti-obesity drug that mimics the molecular effect of famine without the dieting. Ageing is not considered a disease, and required human trials could span one hundred years or more, making such a drug commercially unfeasible. Extending life expectancy in the industrialized world by 50 per cent would mean most of us could expect to live until 120, and some could make it to 180, according to experts. --Nature, 6/3/2004 Political The United States has started to lose its worldwide dominance in critical areas of science and innovation, according to federal and private experts who point to strong evidence like prizes awarded to Americans and the number of papers in major professional journals. Foreign advances in basic science now often rival or even exceed America's, apparently with little public awareness of the trend or its implications for jobs, industry, national security or the vigor of the nation's intellectual and cultural life. "The rest of the world is catching up," said John E. Jankowski, a senior analyst at the National Science Foundation, the federal agency that tracks science trends. "Science excellence is no longer the domain of just the U.S." Even analysts worried by the trend concede that an expansion of the world's brain trust, with new approaches, could invigorate the fight against disease, develop new sources of energy and wrestle with knotty environmental problems. --New York Times, 5/3/2004 As many as 1 million people may die in the western Sudanese region of Darfur if sufficient international aid can’t be sent there, U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Andrew Natsios said. The U.N. said Darfur is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. Thousands of civilians have been killed and thousands more driven from their homes. The U.S. has urged the Sudanese government to clamp down on what it has described as a government-supported militia targeting black Sudanese in the area. Eric Reeves, who has written more than 600 articles on Sudan and testified before the U.S. Congress, said the dead are victims of a genocidal campaign by the Sudanese government that he said armed the so-called Arab jenjaweed militia to destroy entire populations of Africans. Natsios said that a famine is unavoidable because no crops have been planted because of people fleeing their lands. --Bloomberg News, 6/3/2004 Verbal and violent anti-Semitism in the Netherlands is probably greater today than it has been during any other time in the last two centuries, with the exception of the Nazi occupation. Excessive Dutch tolerance has become an incentive for crime. Developments in anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism are good indicators of what is happening in Dutch society at large. Due to the relatively high crime-rate among the Dutch Moroccan community, and the international Arab anti-Semitic hate propaganda, Jews are highest on the list of targets for the racists’ behavior. Easily recognizable, Jews often try to hide their identity in public. --Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, 6/25/2004 Financial The World Trade Organization (WTO) [has] favored Brazil in a complaint that the U.S. cotton subsidy program violates global trading rules by distorting world prices and blocking developing nations' goods from reaching market. It was the first case by the WTO to examine the effect of export subsidies on agricultural products. The U.S. last year gave producers of rice, wheat, cotton, and other commodities more than $19 billion in aid. The White House vowed to appeal the WTO's decision and said it considered the subsidies to be "fully consistent" with international trading rules. --Los Angeles Times, 4/28/2004 [China] is the world's biggest consumer of copper, tin, zinc, platinum, steel and iron ore; second biggest of aluminum and lead; third largest of nickel ... It is now the world's second-largest oil consumer [after the United States], and accounted for 35 percent of the global rise in oil demand in 2003. --Asian Development Bank's annual economic report, Newsweek 5/31/2004 A new study finds that one of every 125 Americans is a millionaire—reflecting a growth rate not seen since the late 1990s, at the peak of the stock-market bubble. The 2004 World Wealth Report, compiled by brokerage firm Merrill Lynch & Co. and consultancy Capgemini Group, paints a picture of financial resurgence among the world’s wealthy. The U.S. and Canada together added more new millionaires in 2003 than Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East combined. The report highlights the extent to which wealth remains concentrated among the few. The wealthiest 1% in the U.S. control more than a third of the nation’s wealth—the starkest such concentration among industrialized countries. --Wall Street Journal, 6/15/2004 Israel The Israeli Supreme Court decided that municipalities must allow the sale of pork if a majority of residents demand it. Secular rights activists hailed the ruling but Orthodox Jews warned that it would undermine the nation's Jewish identity. Pork consumption is forbidden under Jewish law. Under a 1956 Israeli law, it is up to municipalities to decide whether to allow pork sales. The court decision came in a case brought against three municipalities that did not allow the sales. --Los Angeles Times, 6/16/2004 The world's smallest computer - about a trillionth the size of a drop of water - may also be the world's tiniest medical kit. Made entirely of biological molecules, this computer was programmed by Israel's Weizmann Institute researchers to identify changes in the body's balance of molecules indicating the presence of certain cancers, to diagnose the type of cancer, and to react by producing a drug molecule to fight the cancer cells. The Weizmann Institute of Science team that developed the computer published these results last month in Nature magazine. In one series of test-tube experiments, the team programmed the computer to identify RNA molecules that indicate the presence of prostate cancer and, following a correct diagnosis, to release the short DNA strands designed to kill cancer cells. Similarly, they were able to identify, in a test tube, the signs of one form of lung cancer. One day in the future, they hope to create a "doctor in a cell", which will be able to operate inside a living body, spot disease and apply the necessary treatment before external symptoms even appear. "It is clear that the road to realizing our vision is a long one," said Prof. Ehud Shapiro, head of the team of scientists. "It may take decades before such a system operating inside the human body becomes reality. Nevertheless, only two years ago we predicted that it would take another ten years to reach the point we have reached today." --Arutz 7, 5/5/2004 Kidney disease affects as many as one in 12 people and causes millions of deaths each year. But its diagnosis, based mainly on blood and urine tests, is not always accurate. Standard hospital and clinic magnetic resonance imaging scanners, which are used to view many organs, don't always present the whole picture for kidneys because they image water molecules. But in waterlogged kidneys, the technology may not distinguish between different functional parts. Now, Professor Hadassa Degani of the Weizmann Institute's biological regulation department and her team have found a way to see into kidneys using MRI that scans sodium ions rather than water. "If we were able to see so much in a tiny rat kidney, think of how much more we can see in a human kidney," says Degani. "It's a wonder the method had not been applied before." --The Jerusalem Post, 5/9/2004 Today, the State of Israel took a step of great importance for its future. The government of Israel approved the disengagement plan I presented. We sent a clear message to the people of Israel, our Palestinian neighbors, and the entire world. Israel is taking its future into its own hands. The disengagement process has begun. Today, the government decided that it is Israel's intention to relocate all Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip and four settlements in Samaria by the end of 2005. Most Israelis understand the great importance of today's government resolution. It is a resolution that ensures the future of Israel. It is a resolution that is good for Israel's security, its international standing, its economy, and the demography of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. Today's government resolution gives hope to every citizen of Israel. During the past three and a half years, the terror organizations have tried to break the spirit of the people of Israel. They did not succeed. The Jewish people cannot be broken; we will never break. --Speech by Ariel Sharon as reported by Reuters and Haaretz Service, 6/6/2004 U.S. President Bush has, once again, suspended the relocation of the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Israel's capital, Jerusalem. Asserting that U.S. national security will be harmed if he implements the U.S. law requiring the move, Bush signed yet another six-month security waiver. Congress overwhelmingly approved the Jerusalem Embassy Relocation Act in 1995, mandating that the embassy be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by May 1999 and that the U.S. recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who promised in both of his presidential campaigns to move the embassy, signed successive six-month security waivers, thus passing on the "hot potato" to his successor. --Arutz Sheva, 6/18/2004 The Jewish Agency reports that aliyah [Jewish immigration to Israel] from France more than doubled in 2002 compared with the year before, from 1,000 to over 2,030, and increased slightly in 2003, to 2,083. In Great Britain, by contrast, where the Jewish population is almost half that in France, the number of olim [immigrants] last year was only 405 - up from 277 the year before. Michael Jankelowitz of the Jewish Agency reports that last year's most dramatic increase in aliyah occurred in Venezuela, home to 16,000 Jews. Only 37 made aliyah in 2002, but this number tripled to 109 last year. From the United States and Canada, 2,385 Jews came home to Israel in 2003 - up from 1,664 in 2002, but still only a tiny fraction of the total Jewish population. --Arutz Sheva, 6/20/2004 A pool that served as a main water reservoir for Jerusalem residents 2,000 years ago has been uncovered, the Antiquities Authority announced on June 9. The Pool of Siloam was uncovered by chance at the southern end of the City of David - in what today is Silwan - while the city was carrying out infrastructure work for a new sewage pipe. Archaeologist Eli Shukrun said that two millennia ago, Jewish residents would use the pool to gather water for their homes, as a meeting place, and also possibly as a mikveh (ritual immersion pool). After lying untouched for 2,000 years, archaeologists first uncovered one step, and then several more, leading down to the pool, whose water came from the nearby Gihon spring. "This find is of major importance to the archaeological world," Antiquities Authority director Shuka Dorfman said on June 9 at a short ceremony at the site, where excavations are ongoing. For the time being, the site will not be open to the public. --The Jerusalem Post, 6/10/1004 Book Review Desire of The Everlasting Hills. The World Before and After Jesus. Thomas Cahill. Anchor Books, New York, 1999. 353 pp. Thomas Cahill is a well-known author who began a series of perspectives on history which he calls, “The Hinges of History.” He profiled both the Irish and the Jews in previous treatises, and in this third volume of his works (he says four additional volumes are planned), he deals with the historical figure of Jesus. His chronicles are aimed at imparting the positive elements of history rather than the catastrophical elements. As he describes it, “History is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.” In this profile of Jesus, he gives the reader a remarkable look into the secular world before and after Jesus, relating how Jesus made a difference in the unfolding of history, and radically altered the course of Western society. Of particular interest to Bible Students will be the commentary around social background of the development of the early church. One passage will indicate the value this serves in Bible study: “The overwhelming majority of Jesus’ original followers—and all the witnesses to his resurrection—were Jews, as devout about their religion as Jesus had been. In their encounters with Paul’s gentile “Jews” they often found themselves shocked at the new converts’ blank ignorance of Jewish law and practice. How could these strange new people, admittedly believers in the risen Jesus, be admitted to the fold of Judaism? They were unclean and knew nothing of the need for ritual bathings and washings; they ate anything; they did not keep the Sabbath; their men were uncircumcised.” Because Cahill does not write from a fundamentalist’s point of view, his commentary is valuable (although one must sort out his higher criticism) to those wishing to read an unbiased view of the accounts of the Roman, Jewish and Greek worlds at the time of Jesus and Paul. The book will help the reader to understand how the philosophy of the Greeks infiltrated the church at such an early stage. However, it may also challenge a reader who believes Paul taught the rejection of the Law and Judaism. --Len Griehs |
