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Pastoral Bible Institute News Date of Annual PBI Meeting The annual meeting of PBI Members and Directors will be held on Friday, July 15, at the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The General Convention of Bible Students will begin on Saturday, July 16, at the same location and end the evening of July 21. Those who are interested in the Pastoral Bible Institute, whether members or not, are encouraged to attend this meeting. Contact the Institute’s secretary for details concerning accommodations.
Religious The proportion of Americans who say they have no religious affiliation doubled over the last decade and now stands at 16% of the population, according to a new study on religious identity. Only Catholics (24%) and Baptists (17%) outnumber the so-called “non-identifiers” [self-described as secular, humanist, ethical-culturalist, agnostic or atheist] said the report—“The Decline of Religious Identity in the United States”—by the Institute for Jewish & Community Research in San Francisco. —Los Angeles Times, 10/30/2004 The top hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States decided to join the broadest alliance of Christian churches in the country so far, a new ecumenical group that would bring the church to the same table as conservative evangelicals and liberal Protestants. Christian Churches Together in the U.S.A. has about 23 members, including Eastern Orthodox churches; the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; evangelical churches; ethnic churches; and religiously oriented groups, like the Salvation Army and World Vision. The National Council of Churches helped create this new group but is not joining, although many of its member churches are. —New York Times, 11/18/2004 Biblical scholar Robert Alter’s major new English translation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible [attempts] to return the work to its original Hebrew meanings and majestic repetitions. The 1611 King James version, perhaps the most famous book ever written by a committee, may reach poetic heights, but Alter says it is fraught with “embarrassing inaccuracies” and often substitutes Greek or Latin words and Renaissance English tonalities and rhythms for biblical ones. Alter said he used the phrase “God’s breath” (in Genesis 1) rather than the “spirit of God” for a simple reason: “The Hebrew word means life’s breath, a constant moving of oxygen in and out. The body-soul split of early Christianity is something not imagined in the early Hebrew.” —Reuters, 11/17/2004 Israeli police indicted four antiques dealers and collectors Wednesday on suspicion of running a sophisticated forgery ring that created a trove of fake biblical artifacts. The forged items include an ossuary that reputedly held the bones of Jesus’ brother James. According to the indictment, the members of the ring took genuine artifacts and added inscriptions to them, falsely increasing their importance and greatly inflating their value. The work was so sophisticated that it fooled leading antiques experts, and some of the artifacts sold for huge sums, authorities said. —Los Angeles Times, 12/30/2004 Social Fifteen-year-olds in the United States rank near the bottom of industrialized countries in math skills according to a new international comparison that economists say is bad news for long-term economic growth. The U.S. ranked 24th among 29 countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which sponsored the study. —OECD study, released 12/6/2004 Across southern Africa, AIDS has reduced life expectancy to levels not seen since the 1800s. In six sub-Saharan nations, the United Nations estimates, the average child born today will not live to 40. The adult HIV infection rate in Swaziland, 38.8 percent, [is now] the world’s highest. Virtually all the Swazis dying today were infected in the 1990s, when the infection rate was far lower than it is today. Those who are just now infected will not fall gravely ill until about 2012—a tidal wave of illness and death that is still eight years away. —New York Times, 11/28/2004 Botswana women are no longer the property of their husbands. The parliament passed a law titled Abolition of Marital Power, which nullifies a husband’s traditional rights over his wife’s body and property. However, advocates say that nothing will change until word gets out to the men who beat their wives and to the women who are most abused. Poor people don’t read newspapers or watch TV. They don’t even take their troubles to court. Instead they go to a traditional village council, known as a kgotla for arbitration. The government will spread the word of the new law village by village, in all local languages, until the entire country knows that women now have rights. —Mmegi newspaper editorial (Botswana), 12/7/2004 Nearly half of Britons in a poll said they had never heard of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in southern Poland that became a symbol of the Holocaust and the attempted genocide of the Jews. The results of the survey conducted by the BBC were released December 2, as Britain’s public broadcaster announced it would show a new series in January to mark the 60th anniversary of the concentration camp’s liberation. —Reuters, 12/2/2004 Only 34 people have died in U.S. commercial airline crashes in the past three years, making it one of the safest periods in aviation history even as more Americans than ever travel by air. On October 20, a Corporate Airlines twin-engine turboprop crashed into the woods on approach to the Kirksville Regional Airport in Missouri, killing 13 people. Those were the only fatalities aboard U.S. scheduled airlines for the year. Air travelers are estimated to have boarded planes 685 million times in 2004, a 3 percent increase over 2000, the previous busiest year, according to the Air Transport Association. —CNN.com, 1/4/2005 The earthquake that created the devastating tsunami off the coast of Sumatra was extremely rare and extremely powerful—at least 23,000 times as strong as the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, according to geophysicists.The 9.0 quake caused a seismic shift so intense, it shook the planet like a bell being rung, wobbling the Earth on its axis and permanently altering the map, moving some islands in the region more than 20 meters. It was the Earth’s most powerful quake in 40 years and one of top five of the past century. Tectonic plates slipped against each other six miles below earth’s surface, displacing a huge volume of water. It resembled a speed bump as it moved at hundreds of miles per hour below the surface—only to rise as high as 40 feet as it approached land. Experts say it is difficult to predict when an undersea earthquake will spawn a tsunami, and even tougher to say when the next one may occur. —Fox News, 12/29/2004 Political Hungary announced that it would withdraw its 300 troops from Iraq. The United States had persuaded 32 countries to provide 22,000 soldiers as part of the multinational force established to stabilize postwar Iraq. A number of countries have withdrawn, some citing the cost but others concerned about security, and many governments face increasing public opposition to the war. Two large contributors to the international force—Britain and Italy—have insisted they will not withdraw. But Poland, the fourth-largest contributor, says it intends to withdraw by the end of next year, and the Netherlands said that the latest rotation of troops would be its last contribution to Iraq. —International Herald Tribune, 11/4/2004 North Korea may be ready to test-fire a long-range ballistic missile capable of reaching parts of the U.S. with a “nuclear-weapon-sized payload,” the Central Intelligence Agency said in a report. The report, spanning July 1 through December 31 of 2003, identifies a range of countries and proliferation concerns, involving China and Iran. Iran also has worked to improve delivery systems by seeking materials, training and equipment and know-how from entities in Russia, China, North Korea and Europe, it said. —Bloomberg News, 11/24/2004 Ukraine is home to 16 different ethnic groups, [has] nearly 50 million people, and is the size of Germany and Britain combined. To this day, many Russians deny that a separate Ukrainian nation exists. The Poles saw it as their historical eastern frontier. On December 1, 1991, when the country secured its independence for the first time, the new rulers decreed that “the Ukraine” simply be called Ukraine in English, without the demeaning article. The first currency, the Karbovanets, lost value so fast it was recycled into toilet paper. But something very basic changed in November and December, when the elections produced a revolution over the results that were deemed tainted by Ukrainians and a civic society grew up a lot more quickly than most people realized, ready and able—when the time came, which it did in November—to wake up and say “Pora!” or It’s Time! (the name of the well-organized Ukrainian student protest group). —Wall Street Journal, 12/13/2004 The mounting body count in Iraq is scaring off military recruits—posing an enormous marketing challenge for the U.S. Army. Nearly a quarter of recruits who signed up to join the Army during the fiscal year ended September 30 didn’t make it to basic training, according to figures from the Army. That rate is 25% higher than during the 2003 period and 90% higher than during the 2002 period. Reasons for the loss range from cold feet to somehow disqualifying for service. The Army has set a recruiting target of 80,000 new soldiers for 2005. —Advertising Age, 12/6/2004 Financial The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC), the federally chartered company that backstops private pension plans, said its long-term deficit expanded to about $23.3 billion in fiscal 2004, from $11.2 billion in 2003. The agency takes over defined-benefit pension plans when they become insolvent and by law pays at least a portion of the benefits promised to retirees. “The PBGC is thoroughly bankrupt, no matter how you look at it,” said Douglas Elliott, president of the Center on Federal Financial Institutions, a Washington think tank. Mr. Elliott estimates that the PBGC could run out of cash around 2020. —Wall Street Journal, 11/16/2004 The wealth held by millionaires world-wide rose to $28.8 trillion as of the end of 2003, according to a study by Capgemini-Merrill, up 11% from $26 trillion in 2001. That’s more than the annual gross domestic products of the U.S., Japan, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom combined. —Wall Street Journal, 12/14/2004 The airborne output of Chinese power plants includes nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and a gaseous form of mercury. Rather than install more sophisticated and costly antipollution equipment, the plant has chosen to pay an annual fee. The option meets Chinese standards but wouldn’t be allowed in the U.S. Just as China’s industrial might is integrating the country into the global economy, its pollution is also becoming a global concern. Among the biggest worries: the impact of China’s vast and growing power industry, mostly fueled by coal, on the buildup of mercury in the world’s water and food supply. Using satellites, airplanes, and computers, scientists are now tracking air pollution with unprecedented precision. Mercury and other pollutants from China’s more than 2,000 coal-fired power plants soar high into the atmosphere and around the globe on what has become a transcontinental conveyor belt of bad air. —Wall Street Journal, 12/17/2004 Airbus showed off its giant A380, a double-decker behemoth that could revolutionize long-haul flying, at a lavish ceremony Tuesday with European leaders gathered for the first official look at the world's largest passenger plane. [It] cost $13 billion to develop. Low-cost carriers could operate the A380 with a single economy-class configuration accommodating as many as 800 passengers. Airbus has already taken 149 orders for the $280 million plane. Singapore Airlines will begin using the plane for services to London and Sydney when it becomes the first carrier to carry commercial passengers aboard the A380 in mid-2006.
—ABC News, 1/18/2005 Hurricanes Ivan and Jeanne in the Caribbean Sea, a record 10 typhoons in the Pacific Ocean and other weather-related disasters will cost the insurance industry at least $35 billion in 2004, the highest figure in 50 years, according to Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurer. Overall economic losses from natural disasters, which also include earthquakes and volcanoes, increased to $90 billion for the first 10 months of 2004, up from $65 billion for the comparable period in 2003. —Bloomberg News, 12/15/2004 Today, 21 percent of what [U.S.] consumers purchase comes from abroad, and the figure has risen by a percentage point every two years since 1990, according to Commerce Department data. Stephen S. Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley, argues that the indebtedness involved in America’s obsessive spending will soon disrupt exchange rates, damaging economies. Foreigners are helping to make the indebtedness possible by subsidizing consumer credit through more than $600 billion a year in loans to the United States. Without that injection of borrowed money, the United States would be hard-pressed to fund both consumer credit and its huge budget deficit. Americans cannot endlessly purchase more than they can pay for, while the producing countries, particularly China, provide endless credit to cover the shortfall. —New York Times, 12/6/2004 After painful restructuring and despite a host of problems, the Central Europeans are enjoying rapid economic growth. Over the past 15 years, downtown Warsaw has gone from having almost no commercial office space to 1.8 million square meters (19.4 million square feet), 90% of it occupied. From 1991 to 2003, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia attracted more than 130 billion Euros of net foreign direct investment. —Wall Street Journal, 11/9/2004 A Senate committee investigating the United Nations oil-for-food program for Iraq estimates that during 13 years of international sanctions, Saddam Hussein’s government made at least $21.3 billion illicitly—more than double previous government estimates. The United Nations aid program for Iraq ran from 1996 to 2003, easing some of the effects of the sanctions by allowing the country to make monitored sales of oil and use the money to purchase aid like food and medicine. —New York Times, 11/16/2004 Israel Millions of locusts swarmed through southern Israel, devouring crops and flowers in the first such invasion since 1959. Residents of Eilat, on the Red Sea, reported clouds of locusts, some as long as 4 inches, eating palm trees bare and wiping out entire gardens. Some Israelis as well as laborers from Thailand, where locusts are a delicacy, made the best of the outbreak by collecting the insects and taking them home for dinner. The locust is the only insect that is considered kosher under Jewish dietary law. —Los Angeles Times, 11/22/2004 Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, has opened a computer database of the names of three million Jewish victims who were exterminated by the Nazi regime. With the generation of survivors growing older, the Web site was part of a major drive to register all 6 million Jews who perished in the death camps set up by the German Nazi regime during World War II. “It is the attempt to reconstruct the names and life stories of all the Jews who perished in the Shoah (Holocaust),” said the museum’s web site, calling on people all over the world to submit names via the site. The database, which also carries photographs and biographical details, can be accessed at http://www.yadvashem.org. —Agence Française de Presse, 11/22/2004 The International Monetary Fund in a September 2003 report said that from 1995 to 2000, the Palestinian Authority’s assets may have exceeded $898 million. The report concluded that much of its revenue from taxes was invested in a variety of commercial enterprises that nominally belonged to the authority, but that the “substantial revenue” they generated was being diverted, as was revenue from monopoly contracts for cement and petroleum. The report said the enterprises operated “with no transparency or accountability.” —Wall Street Journal, 11/24/2004 According to National Insurance Institute statistics for 2003, 1.4 million Israeli citizens live below the poverty line, 660,000 of them minors. Thirty percent of all of Israel’s youngsters under the age of 18 live in dire economic circumstances. Treasury officials claim Israel’s poverty problems stem from low employment participation. More than 60% of families in poverty lack a breadwinner. —Jerusalem Post, 11/21/2004 Hamas, a popular Palestinian terror group, ruled out any truce with Israel on December 5 and repeated its desire to destroy the Jewish state, rejecting what had appeared to be more conciliatory comments by Hassan Youssef, one of the Islamic militant group’s leaders. “There is no talk about a truce now at all,” Mahmoud Al-Zahar, a top Hamas leader, told reporters. “Our strategy is to liberate all Palestinian soil,” Zahar said, referring to the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), Gaza, and the rest of Israel. Hassan Youssef, the top Hamas official in the West Bank, had said on December 3 the group could accept the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and a long-term truce with Israel, signaling a possible new overture to end hostilities. Hamas has killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings and attacks. —Bridges For Peace, 12/5/2004 Former Israeli Chief Rabbi Meir Lau … warned that rising anti-Semitism threatens the Jews of Europe, noting that anti-Semitism is on the rise in nearly every European country—expressed, among other ways, via extreme anti-Israel sentiments. Rabbi Lau cited a report that 62% of Germans are tired of hearing about the Holocaust, and that 70% respond with anger when the subject of Nazi crimes is discussed. —Arutz Sheva, 12/5/2004 |
