PBI News

The Herald web site (www.heraldmag.org) has undergone a face lift to make it more attractive. Links have also been added to the home page to access The Herald magazine in either Polish or German, and the First Volume in any of 31 languages. Clicking a link immediately redirects the user to the web site containing the information.

World News

Religious

Europe is undergoing a massive population shift—some say the largest in more than a millennium—as Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa cross the Mediterranean in search of work and a better life. The Muslim population of Europe is increasing dramatically; in countries like France, it is already about six million, or 10% of the total, and could easily double in percentage terms in the coming 20 years.

—Wall Street Journal, 7/11/2005

In a chilling irony, women may actually have fewer rights under Iraq’s new, “democratic” constitution than they did under Saddam Hussein. “The United States government has poured millions of dollars into democracy training for Iraqi women, and more than 1,800 Americans have died for Iraqi freedom. But it may turn out to be for Iraqi male freedom,” said Katheryn Coughlin, program administrator for the American Islamic Congress, a nonprofit [agency] doing democracy training in Iraq. The country’s secular civil code may be replaced with Islamic Shariah law under the new constitution, which restricts women’s rights to an education, to careers and marriage partners of their choice, to divorce, and to inheritance.

—Boston Herald, 8/15/2005

In one of his first official acts, Pope Benedict XVI invited Rome’s chief rabbi to his installation ceremony and issued special greetings to Jews. He also assured Muslims that the Roman Catholic Church wants to build “bridges of friendship.” The pope is seeking to keep up interfaith momentum begun by John Paul II, who visited Rome’s central synagogue in 1986 and a mosque in Damascus, Syria, in 2001, both papal firsts.

—St. Louis Post Dispatch, 8/14/2005

Every major religion except Islam is declining in Western Europe, according to the Center for the Study on Global Christianity at the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. The drop is most evident in France, Sweden and the Netherlands, where church attendance is less than 10% in some areas. In 12 major European countries, 38% of people say they never, or practically never, attend church, according to the World Values Survey in 2000. France’s 60% non-attendance rate is the highest in that group. In the USA, only 16% say they rarely go to church.

—USA Today, 8/11/2005

Three Indonesian women are on trial for teaching Christian songs to Muslim children. Muslim extremists are demanding the three women be put to death for allegedly evangelizing Muslim children. Prosecutors are calling for the women to receive five years in jail. By contrast, those convicted of the 2004 bombing that killed 10 people at the Australian embassy are serving only four years. Christians say this discrepancy reveals that Indonesia’s legal system treats Christians and Muslims very differently.

—CBN News, 8/1/2005

Social

The aid agency Oxfam warned that about 3.6 million people, about a third of them children, face starvation in Niger, a West African nation devastated by locusts and drought. The U.N.’s humanitarian agency estimates some 800,000 children under 5 are suffering from hunger, including 150,000 faced with severe malnutrition. This desert nation of 11.3 million regularly ranked among the world’s least developed.

—Associated Press, 7/24/2005

More and more terrorists are using cell phones to remotely detonate bombs—and there’s not much authorities can do about it. Cell phones have been connected to terrorist bombings in Madrid, Bali and Israel. Many roadside bombs in Iraq are believed to be triggered by cell phones. Train bombings in London have yet to be linked to the use of cell phone detonators but U.S. authorities were so worried, they shut down cell phone service in tunnels linking New York and New Jersey for two weeks immediately after the bombings.

—Investors’ Business Daily, 8/29/2005

Japanese women have a life expectancy of 85.59 years, setting the world record for the 20th straight year, the government said. Girls born in Japan in 2004 can expect to live 0.26 year longer than those born in 2003, while Japanese male life expectancy was 78.64 years and placed second only to Icelandic men, who live an average of 78.8 years, the Health Ministry said in a statement. Japanese women have had the world’s longest life expectancy since 1985. Researchers say Japan’s traditional fish-based, low fat diet may be the secret to longevity.

—Associated Press, 7/22/2005

The number of home-schooled students in the U.S. rose from 850,000 in 1999 to at least 1.1 million in 2003. More than 2.2 percent of children through grade 12 are now home-schooled.

—USA Today, 8/4/2005

Hundreds of Shiite Muslim pilgrims participating in an annual religious commemoration in northern Baghdad were killed Wednesday in a stampede on a bridge apparently triggered by fears of an insurgent attack. At least 845 pilgrims, most of them women, children and the elderly, died. The Ministry of Health said the toll could rise to 1,000 or more. It was the highest death toll in any single incident in Iraq since well before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

—Los Angeles Times, 9/1/2005

The death toll from record monsoon rains in western India totaled almost 700, officials said. Three people died after being crushed in a stampede at a Bombay shantytown, sparked by rumors of a tsunami and a burst dam. The city was hit by an unprecedented deluge of up to 37 inches of rain, the heaviest rainfall since India began keeping weather records in 1846.

—Associated Press, 7/29/2005

Political

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior Bush administration officials have abruptly stopped referring to the “war on terror.” Instead, they have replaced it with a new one: the “global struggle against violent extremism.” The old expression was too narrowly focused and thus, misleading, said Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers, “If you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as the solution.” The struggle against the enemies of civilization, Myers said, is “more diplomatic, more economic, more political than military.”

—Barron’s, 8/8/2005

Mark Rasch, former head of the Justice Department’s computer crime unit, has noticed a disturbing trend. Al-Qaida and other terror groups are trying to hire Internet hackers to penetrate government and commercial computer networks, he says. Rasch is now the chief security counsel for Solutionary, a provider of managed information security services. Rasch said that he had documented cases where Chechen rebels with hacking skills were being paid to hack into computers in the U.S. and steal money. He says that plans were recovered in Afghanistan that showed Al-Qaida wanted to attack networks in the U.S. that controlled so-called SCADA systems—computer networks that control heating, ventilation, power generation, air conditioning and dam gates. The Internet is a prime ground for these activities because of the anonymity it affords.

—Investors’ Business Daily, 8/18/2005

Robert Mugabe may be a pariah in western nations but his image clearly remains untarnished in the eyes of Chinese diplomats who named him an honorary professor. Undismayed by criticism of Mr. Mugabe’s urban eviction program, which the UN says has made 700,000 poor people homeless, Beijing’s foreign affairs college instead hailed his “brilliant contribution” to diplomacy and international relations. Such praise and the warm welcome given Mr. Mugabe by China’s president underline Beijing’s willingness to embrace leaders widely shunned in the west as part of its efforts to build international influence and ensure access to key resources.

—Financial Times, 7/27/2005

A Russian court ordered that the radical National Bolshevik Party be disbanded, a move rights activists and analysts said is aimed at silencing a group opposed to President Vladimir Putin and his government. The court didn’t provide a reason for its ruling. “We haven’t spilled a single drop of blood, we haven’t pricked anybody with a pin,” said Eduard Limonov, leader of the party and a writer who has sought change in Russia’s constitutional regime. Critics complain that since Mr. Putin came to power in 2000, the Kremlin has turned parliament into a rubber-stamp body, put national television under state control and ended regional governors’ elections to make them virtual appointees.

—Associated Press, 6/29/2005

In Britain there are 4 million surveillance cameras in public places. The average commuter has his or her image captured 300 times a day.

—The Washington Post, 8/4/2005

Financial

How much will Hurricane Katrina cost? With the Federal Government spending more than $2 billion a day in affected areas, some members of Congress are estimating that the bill could top $200 billion. That’s equal to nearly 9% of what the U.S. government spends each year. Washington is expected to borrow money without finding ways to pay for it. The bulk of the rebuilding costs will probably show up in next year’s budget deficit, which was estimated—pre-Katrina—to exceed $314 billion.

—TIME, 9/19/2005

With the US economy again seeming in good health, it has been tempting to forget about America’s bloated current account deficit. The US has racked up a deficit of around $2.25 trillion since 2001 without suffering the ill effects. But economists point out that US debt to the rest of the world looks set to rise steeply over coming years. By the end of 2005—for the first time since records began in the 1960s—the US is likely to be paying more to service its debts than it receives in foreign income. As this happens, America will find itself borrowing not just to fund current spending, but simply to service previous debts—a position more commonly associated with a developing economy.

—Financial Times, 8/10/2005

That the Chinese currency could occupy center stage on Wall Street is a reflection of how much the world has changed. In the longer run, the impact on trade and on the world financial system could be huge. The most immediate and potentially most significant is the impact on interest rates, as a result of China feeling less need to buy dollars to hold the yuan down. Higher bond yields could spill over into other sectors, pushing up mortgage rates and the costs of borrowing.

—Wall Street Journal, 7/25/2005

The World Bank could face a multi-billion dollar financing shortfall unless donor governments promise more money to fund the Group of Eight rich countries’ debt relief proposal for poor nations. At meetings in London and Scotland, the G8 proposed that the bank immediately write off 100 per cent of the debt owed by 27 nations that have qualified. But the bank is concerned that the rich donor countries that finance the International Development Association—the bank’s loan and grant arm —are not guaranteeing to compensate it for all the repayments it will no longer receive.

—Financial Times, 8/2/2005

By 2020, Russia will take over from France by becoming the largest food and grocery market in Europe. The Russian market will be worth €375bn by that time, rising from the current €134bn.

—Food Production Daily, 7/29/2005

It took us 125 years to use the first trillion barrels of oil. We’ll use the next trillion in 30.

—Chevron Advertisement, 7/12/2005

Israel

Israel is in the middle of what’s being called the worst recession in its 55-year history. For a nation that boomed through most of the 1990s due to mass immigration, foreign investment and its high-tech industry, the fall has been fast and steep. The closure of thousands of businesses has been jarring. Approximately 1.2 million Israelis (almost a fifth of the population) are now living in poverty.

—CBN News, 7/31/2005

More than 1,800 North American Jews will move to Israel this summer. On July 13 [2005] two separate chartered El Al flights with 500 immigrants from the United States and Canada will arrive. This is the largest contingent of North American Jews to make aliyah in one day in Israel’s history. Nefesh B’Nefesh has assisted more than 4,000 newcomers to Israel since 2002.

—Bridges for Peace website, 7/8/2005

In a simultaneous ingathering of exiles from two sides of the globe, two planes filled with new immigrants touched down in Israel on the morning of July 27–one from America and one from Ethiopia. The flight from the United States was the third of seven flights this year bringing immigrants from North America to the Jewish state. Eighty new immigrants also arrived in Israel on July 27 from Ethiopia.

—Arutz 7, 7/28/2005

Professor Chanan Eshel, an archaeologist from Bar-Ilan University, said on July 15 that the discovery of two fragments of a nearly 2,000-year-old parchment scroll from the Dead Sea area gave hope to biblical and archaeological scholars-–frustrated by a dearth of material unearthed in the region in recent years-–that the Judean Desert could yet yield further treasure. The two small pieces of brown animal skin, inscribed in Hebrew with verses from the book of Leviticus, most likely are from “refugee” caves in Nachal Arugot, where Jews hid from the Romans in the second century.

—Jerusalem Post, 7/19/2005

On July 27, Palestinian Authority (PA) Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia said Israel’s planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip would eventually lead to its surrender of the Jews’ ancient capital, Jerusalem. “We are telling the entire world: ‘Today Gaza and tomorrow Jerusalem. Today Gaza and tomorrow an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital,’ ” Qureia said while reviewing PA security forces in Gaza. He insisted the Palestinian Arabs would never agree to end their hostility towards the Jews until the holy city was relinquished to their control. “Without Jerusalem, there will be no peace,” said Qureia a day earlier, amid reports Israel planned to build a new Jewish housing structure in the so-called “Muslim Quarter” of Jerusalem’s Old City.

—Jerusalem Newswire, 7/27/2005

A public opinion poll revealed a majority of Palestinian Arabs believe unrelenting Islamic terrorism brought about Israel’s decision to surrender control of the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria and uproot all Jews living there. Carried out by the Center for Opinion Polls and Survey Studies at An-Najah University in Shechem, the poll also showed nearly half of all Palestinians want to see anti-Jewish violence continue. Asked what factor they believed played the biggest role in causing Israel’s Knesset to approve the disengagement, 40% of respondents voted for “pressure caused by Palestinian resistance”–-meaning the blowing up of Israeli buses, cafes, restaurants and shopping malls, as well as incessant rocket and mortar attacks.

—Jerusalem Newswire, 7/19/2005

The first stage of a state-of-the-art desalination facility has just begun operating at Ashkelon on Israel’s southern coastline. Until two years ago the country’s primary natural reservoir, the Sea of Galilee, dropped alarmingly and the water situation had become quite desperate. The Ashkelon facility is part of a national Desalination Master Plan, launched by the Israeli government in 2000, designed to help address chronic water resource problems. With virtually limitless amounts of seawater available the new plant, and other planned facilities, should allow Israelis and their neighbors to drink and irrigate more easily.

—www.israel21c.com, 8/7/2005

Workers repairing a sewage pipe in the Old City of Jerusalem have discovered the biblical Pool of Siloam, a freshwater reservoir that was a major gathering place for ancient Jews making religious pilgrimages to the city and the reputed site where Jesus cured a man blind from birth, according to the Gospel of John [9:1-7. This ... pool] was built early in the 1st century BC and was destroyed by the Roman Emperor Titus about AD 70. The excavators have been able to date the pool fairly precisely because ... ancient workmen ... buried four coins in the plaster [of the steps leading down to the water. ... All are from the period] 103 to 76 BC. That provides the earliest date at which the pool could have been constructed.

—Los Angeles Times, 8/9/2005

Book Review

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, Thomas L. Friedman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. 496 pages.

“Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill shall be made low.” So states Isaiah 40:4. This is Friedman’s third book on the topic of globalization. His lucid description about what’s happening in the world today illustrates, but never quotes, Isaiah’s prophetic image. The major developments of our time, he claims, is not the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11 or the Iraq war. It is the convergence of technology and events that allow India, China, and so many other countries to become part of a global supply chain for services and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world’s two biggest nations. This is what gives them a huge new stake in the success of globalization. And with this “flattening” of the globe, which requires us to run faster just to stay in the same place, the world may seem to have gotten too fast for human beings.

Friedman’s book is an essential update that nicely supplements what was written in Studies in the Scriptures, vol. 4, a hundred years ago. Friedman shows how globalization and cheap, ubiquitous telecommunications have finally obliterated all impediments to international competition. Those who are successful and the discontents are powerfully illuminated by him.

—Richard Doctor