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Pastoral Bible Institute News PBI Directors Elected The members of the Pastoral Bible Institute have elected these seven individuals to serve as directors for the next twelve months:
This year due to health issues Carl Hagensick, managing editor of this journal since 1992, withdrew his name from consideration as a director. His contributions to both the journal and the Pastoral Bible Institute have been extensive over the last fifteen years, for which we are most appreciative. World News Religious Forty-four percent of Americans have either switched their religious affiliation since childhood or dropped out of any formal religious group, according to the largest recent survey on American religious identification. The survey, released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, found that Americans’ faith identity fluctuates during their lives, with vast numbers moving away from the faith tradition of their childhood to embrace other religious traditions—or no faith at all. Catholicism, claimed by 24 percent of Americans, has experienced the greatest net loss as a result of people switching to a different faith tradition, such as a Protestant denomination. But that loss has been offset by the number of Catholic immigrants. Nearly half of immigrants are Catholics. —Washington Post, 2/25/2008 The Vatican issued a new version of a Roman Catholic prayer that had long offended Jews, but some said the changes don’t go far enough. Jewish groups said they interpreted the new version of the prayer for Jews as requiring members of their faith—and all of humanity—to convert to Christianity in order to find salvation. The prayer for Jews is recited during Good Friday services of Easter Week. —Associated Press, 2/5/2008 Iran is planning on submerging the tomb of King Cyrus (Coresh), the Persian King known for authorizing the Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Holy Temple. The Iranian ayatollahs are planning on destroying the tomb as part of a general campaign to sever the Persian people from their non-Islamic heritage; Cyrus was thought to be a Zoroastrian and was one of the first rulers to enforce a policy of religious tolerance on his huge kingdom. Cyrus, who lived from 576-530 BCE, liberated Babylonian Jewry from their exile in the famous Declaration of Cyrus (mentioned in the book of Ezra in both Hebrew and Aramaic). —Arutz 7, 1/10/2008 Twenty-one prominent Christian leaders have been sentenced to re-education through labor in what China Aid Association (CAA) describes as the largest mass sentencing of house church leaders in China in 25 years. According to news released by CAA, the 21 believers were detained during a mass arrest of 270 Christian leaders on December 7, 2007, in Hedeng District, Linyi City as they gathered for leadership training. The leaders were accused of holding an “illegal religious gathering” and the 21 labeled as members of an “evil cult,” a term which Chinese authorities arbitrarily apply to unregistered religious groups. The mass sentencing follows a significant increase in persecution against the house churches in China last year and a level of expulsion of foreign Christians not seen since the 1950s, according to CAA’s annual report. —Assist News Service, 2/22/2008 The standoff over the fate of Kosovo, with its deep roots in the past, is unlikely to be resolved soon. Serbia, backed by Russia, shows no sign of giving up in its drive to discourage additional countries from recognizing Kosovo’s independence. Enmity between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo dates back centuries. The two groups have lived side by side, jousting over political and economic primacy while sharing neither language nor religion. Serbia ruled Kosovo in the Middle Ages until all of Serbia fell under the Ottoman Empire. It recovered the province in 1912, after Balkan wars that drove the Ottomans out and led to the creation of new, ethnically based nation-states. By then, Kosovo’s Muslim Albanians were already the majority population in the province; Serbs are Orthodox Christians. —Wall Street Journal, 2/25/2008 Although retaining members is a challenge for all evangelizing faiths, the Mormon Church appears to have a particularly poor retention rate in some countries. An American-born denomination, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, now boasts more members abroad than at home—about 55 percent of the world’s 13 million Mormons live outside the U.S., according to church figures. The Mormon church does not publish retention figures, and it is hard to make comparisons because denominations count their members and measure participation differently. —Associated Press, 2/1/2008 Social With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some are relying on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country’s central plateau. The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children as an antacid and source of calcium. Food prices have risen as much as 40 percent on some Caribbean islands. —Associated Press, 1/31/2008 The Indian authorities are on the trail of a doctor who is believed to be the head of a vast criminal organization in control of a lucrative kidney transplant racket in Gurgaon, near New Delhi. … Men roam around the poorest markets in Old Delhi and the cities of Uttar Pradesh in search of donors, and once they find them they lure them with the false promise of a good-paying job and bring them to the transplant centers. Here they are isolated for days, without any information about their fate until they are subjected to the transplant procedure. They are offered between $1,000 and $2,500 for a kidney. But not all of them accept, and those who resist are drugged and operated on anyway. The organs are then sold to rich Indians and non-resident foreigners. —Asia News, 2/1/2008 Scientists probing the purpose of sleep are still largely in the dark. “Why we sleep at all is a strange bastion of the unknown,” said sleep psychologist Matthew Walker at the University of California in Berkeley. In previously published research, collaborators found that sleep helps to stabilize memory. The consequences of too little sleep can be dire. Almost half of all heavy-truck accidents can be traced to driver fatigue. Regular nappers—working men who took a 30 minute siesta at least three times a week—had a 64% lower risk of heart-related death, researchers found. —Science Journal, 1/18/2008 General Motors, a symbol of American industrial might and the world’s top seller of motor vehicles since Herbert Hoover was president, has finally been caught by a foreign rival. GM conceded that Toyota Motor Corp. pulled even last year, each of them selling about 9.37 million vehicles, in another sign that the balance of corporate power is shifting from West to East. It’s the first time GM has been anything other than the exclusive global sales leader since 1931. —Associated Press, 1/23/2008 Naples, Italy, residents set piles of waste on fire as a protest against uncollected garbage. City garbage collectors stopped picking up trash because they said all dumps were full. Naples officials blamed the Mafia, which they say controls the waste-management industry. Naples fills up with uncollected garbage every couple of years. The pile is currently growing at a rate of 800 tons a day. —The Week, 1/18/2008 Researchers at Yale University have identified a gene mutation for “rumination”—the kind of chronic worry in which people obsess over negative thoughts. It’s a variation of a gene known as BDNF that’s active in the hippocampus, an area of the brain involved in thinking and memory. The discovery adds to a growing body of evidence that depression involves an inability to control negative thoughts, not just excess emotion. People can learn to stop these thought processes according to Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, one of the Yale investigators. —Health Journal, 1/15/2008 Cloned cows, pigs and goats and their offspring are safe to enter the U.S. food supply, regulators found amid criticism from lawmakers, consumer groups and worried eaters. The Food and Drug Administration, after a seven-year review, concluded that milk and meat from clones and their offspring are as safe to eat as food from conventionally bred animals. European regulators came to the same conclusion in a draft assessment released on January 11. —Bloomberg, 1/15/2008 Thousands of bats are dying from an unknown illness in the northeastern U.S. at a rate that could cause extinction, New York state wildlife officials said. At eight caves in New York and one in Vermont, scientists have seen bat populations plummet over two years. Some bats in the die-off have a white fungus encircling their noses. Most living bats now are underweight, too thin to make it through the winter. When they’re not hibernating, healthy bats eat about half their weight in bugs every night, including disease-spreading mosquitoes. —-Bloomberg, 1/31/2008 Scientists in the US say they have created a genetically-engineered carrot that provides extra calcium. They hope that adding the vegetable to a normal diet could help ward off conditions such as brittle bone disease and osteoporosis. Someone eating the new carrot absorbs 41% more calcium than if they ate the old, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study suggests. Genetic engineering is being used to develop potatoes with more starch and less water so that they absorb less oil when fried, producing healthier chips or crisps. Work is also being carried out on broccoli so that it contains more sulforaphane, a chemical which may help people ward off cancer. —BBC, 1/15/2008 Political Raúl Castro, who fought beside his brother Fidel in the 1950s revolution and served as Cuba’s defense minister for almost five decades, became the island’s president, officially ending Fidel Castro’s tenure as leader of one of the world’s last remaining communist countries. But change at the top of Cuba’s leadership doesn’t mean change is coming to the Caribbean island anytime soon. —Wall Street Journal, 2/25/2008 In Kenya, violence that began shortly after elections in December is blamed for the deaths of more than 1,000 people and the displacement of 600,000 others. Many who fled their homes now live in church compounds, police stations and other locations across the country. The violence initially focused on the election results. But people caught up in the chaos say the violence is also ethnic-based, with certain groups burning and destroying the homes and businesses of other groups in tensions that date back to colonial times. The result is deserted farmlands, hunger, disease, family breakdown and a widespread feeling of despair. —Voice of America, 2/21/2008 An inmate who injured himself breaking out of a Colorado jail is suing on the grounds that guards should have done more to stop him from escaping. The inmate claims he was badly injured when he fell 40 feet while attempting to scale down the outside wall of the Pueblo County jail and that prison authorities did next to nothing to ensure that the jail was secure and inescapable. —The Week, 1/18/2008 The Chinese government has launched an ambitious plan to build 97 regional airports by 2020 at an estimated cost of $62.5 billion in an attempt to meet soaring domestic passenger and cargo demand. —Financial Times, 1/30/2008 A “doomsday” vault built to withstand an earthquake or nuclear strike is ready to open deep in the permafrost of an Arctic mountain where it will protect millions of seeds from manmade and natural disasters. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault will officially be inaugurated less than a year after crews started drilling in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, about 620 miles from the North Pole. The vault, which Norway built at a cost of about $9.1 million, has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples from around the globe, shielding them from climate change, wars, natural disasters and other threats. The builders expect the vault’s life span to rival that of Egypt’s ancient pyramids. —Associated Press, 2/25/2008 Three French energy companies are jointly bidding for the right to build a pair of nuclear-power reactors in the United Arab Emirates, in France’s latest pitch to export its nuclear technology to countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The French government has signed nuclear-partnership agreements with Algeria and Libya. —Dow Jones, 1/15/2008 In 2008, the first of 78 million Baby Boomers hit retirement age in the U.S. and become eligible for early benefits from government health and retirement programs. Barring radical changes, 47.8 percent of the federal budget will go to cover the costs of Medicare, Medicaid, the Social Security retirement program and a smaller children’s health insurance program, according to projections by the Office of Management and Budget. —Wall Street Journal, 2/1/2008 Financial Societe Generale says wayward trader Jerome Kerviel lost the bank $7.2 billion. The bank has stopped paying Mr. Kerviel and told him not to come to the office, but it hasn’t managed to formally fire him. French law stipulates that before one can be fired, there must first be a sit-down meeting in which the organization explains its dissatisfaction. The employee has a right to bring along a trade-union official or a lawyer. —Wall Street Journal, 2/1/2008 The government budget for fiscal 2009 is projected at $3-trillion plus, with a deficit of more than $400 billion. The next president, if he or she serves two terms, could find the U.S. government so deeply in hock that it would face losing its Triple-A credit rating, something that has never happened since Moody’s Investors Service began grading U.S. securities in 1917. —Wall Street Journal, 2/1/2008 The surging price of oil, from just over $10 a barrel a decade ago to $100 yesterday, is altering the wealth and influence of nations and industries around the world. These power shifts will only widen if prices keep climbing, as many analysts predict. Costly oil already is forcing sweeping changes in the airline and auto sectors. The long oil-price boom is posing wrenching challenges for the world’s poorest nations, while enriching and emboldening producers in the Middle East, Russia and Venezuela. —Wall Street Journal, 1/3/2008 The five biggest U.S. securities firms paid their 185,687 employees $66 billion in 2007, including an estimated $39 billion in bonuses. Merrill Lynch, the largest brokerage, paid $15.9 billion in compensation and benefits, exceeding the firm’s $11.3 billion of revenue for 2007. —Bloomberg, 1/17/2008 Scarcity of water and arable land means that the boom in food prices could last longer than most expect according to a report, published by the UK-based consultants Bidwells Agribusiness. The boom—until now fueled by rising demand from emerging countries and the biofuels industry—would be exacerbated by supply constraints. Wheat and soybean prices have surged to records, corn prices hit a 12-year high this year and rice prices have doubled in the past year to levels not seen since the mid-1990s. The report said water and land scarcity, together with slow improvement in agronomics, would be key factors shaping food production. —Financial Times, 1/22/2008 Israel Mrs Mariam Amash [says] she was born 120 years ago, a claim, if confirmed, that would make her the oldest person in the world. Mrs Amash lives in the predominantly Arab town of Jisr az-Zarqa in northern Israel. The discovery that she may be the oldest person in the world came by chance when she applied for a new Israeli identity card. The Israeli authorities say they issued the identity card based on a birth document issued by the Turkish authorities who ruled the region at the time. Mrs Amash, of Bedouin descent, says that the secret to her longevity is a healthy diet: she eats lots of vegetables. —BBC News, 2/15/2008 Israel’s richest man moved to London for tax reasons. Lev Leviev joined a growing list of Israeli billionaires who have resettled in Britain, where unlike in Israel, they don’t have to pay tax on income earned abroad. Leviev, who emigrated to Israel from Soviet Uzbekistan in 1971, made his $4 billion fortune by buying up diamond mines in Russia, Angola and Nambia, single-handedly breaking the DeBeers company’s hold on the diamond industry. —London Times, 1/18/2008 An Iranian attack on Israel could lead to World War III, US President George Bush said on January 5, adding that the United States would not let Israel face the Iranian threat alone. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has stated that Israel should be wiped off the map. —Infolive.tv, 1/7/2008 Official statistics show that 19,700 olim (new immigrants) came to Israel from over 100 countries in 2007. One third (6,445) of the olim came from the former Soviet Union; 19% (3,607) from Ethiopia; 15% (2,957) from North America; 14% (2,659) from France; 8% from Central and South America and another 3% from Britain and other western European countries. —Arutz, 12/24/2007 The Israel Defense Forces has released details of an operation which caught a truck carrying 6.5 tons of Potassium Nitrate. The capture was made at a crossing point into Judea and Samaria (Westbank). The Potassium Nitrate was found in sugar bags disguised as aid from the European Union. Potassium Nitrate is a banned substance in the Gaza Strip and in the Judea-Samaria region because it is used for the manufacture of Kassam rockets and explosives. Israel allows humanitarian aid to cross into the Palestinian territories. —Bridges for Peace Mosaic Radio, 12/29/2007 The Israeli government has teamed with Renault-Nissan to begin mass-producing silent, emissions-free electric cars. Israel is an ideal market for electric cars, since 90 percent of drivers there travel less than 45 miles per day; the government will give generous tax incentives to help finance the venture. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, “By the end of the next decade we will be completely free of petroleum and its byproducts as the fuel which powers transportation.” —Reuters, 1/21/2008 |
