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PBI News
Religious Germany’s official Jewish population, now at around 120,000, has grown more than tenfold in the last 20 years — thanks largely to an influx of Jews from the former Soviet Union — but anti-Semitic attacks remain prevalent and policemen guard synagogues around the clock. — Reuters, 9/28/2012Queen Elizabeth’s son and heir apparent, Prince Charles, has said he’s planning a symbolic change if and when he becomes king by taking the title "Defender of Faith" or "Defender of the Faiths" to reflect Britain’s multicultural and multifaith society. That change would mean Charles would be the first monarch to not be the standard-bearer for Protestantism since Henry VIII famously broke from Rome to start his own church. — Huffington Post, 10/11/2012Nearly 1 in 5 Americans now identify themselves as "unaffiliated" when it comes to their religious denomination. That’s according to a new Pew survey tracking the so -called religious "nones," a group that’s increased by 5 percentage points in the past five years — and roughly 10 points in the past two decades — to 19.6 percent of all Americans, or about 46 million people. Atheists and agnostics make up about 6 percent of the total population, or about 13 million people. Two-thirds of the entire "unaffiliated" category expresses some sort of belief in God. — The Slatest, 10/9/2012Unitarian Universalists, a group of people who believe in organized religion but are skeptical about doctrine, grew nationally by 15.8% from 2000 to 2010, according to the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, although they remain small in total numbers with about 211,000 adherents nationwide. — USA Today, 10/2/2012Turkey is turning several secular schools into religious institutions under controversial education reforms. The schools are being received with mixed results. Many parents in Turkey were in for a shock when they discovered that their children’s schools had been turned into religious schools which were originally created to teach future imams or religious leaders. — Deutsche Welle, 9/27/2012Social More than 11 years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, it remains possible to use fake boarding passes to get through airport security checks, according to new evidence from security researchers and official documents. The security gaps center on airline boarding passes, which can be issued up to 24 hours before a flight’s departure. According to security researchers, the bar codes on those passes can be manipulated with widely available technology to change passenger identification, flight data, and codes. — Washington Post, 11/3/2012Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood is home to more than 500,000 residents of Mexican descent. But federal authorities say that Little Village is also home to something else: an American branch of the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel. Members of Mexico’s most powerful cartel are selling a record amount of heroin and methamphetamine from Little Village, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Increasingly, as drug cartels have amassed more control and influence in Mexico, they have extended their reach deeper into the United States, establishing inroads across the Midwest and Southeast, according to American counternarcotics officials. — Washington Post, 11/3/2012Top U.S. natural disasters by decade 2000-2012-4 The new version of the DSM — the international psychiatric diagnostic manual — will list "Internet-use disorder" as a condition "recommended for fur ther study." Essentially, they’re saying that some people who spend a lot of time on the Internet demonstrate similar symptoms to people diagnosed with other addiction disorders, and that the psychiatric community should study it and consider promoting it to a full-blown disorder down the road. — The Slate, 9/2/2012Scientists in Tennessee discovered that combining spinach with silicon produced a much stronger electrical current in solar cells than present methods. — Daily Mail, 9/6/12Those who had spent their money on others reported feeling much happier at the end of the day than those who had spent their money as they usually did, on themselves. There was no difference in happiness between those who spent $5 or $20, suggesting that it is not how much money you spend, but how you spend it, that boosts the spirits. — Forbes, 9/13/2012Scientific misconduct – including fraud, suspected fraud and plagiarism – is the reason behind most retractions of papers published in scientific journals, a new study shows. The study showed that of 2,047 retracted journal articles in the PubMed databases, over 67 percent were due to scientific misconduct. Plagiarism accounted for almost 10 percent and duplicate publication for 14 percent of retractions. — Science News, 11/17/2012Political The head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, Fereydoun Abbasi said that Tehran "occasionally" gave the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) "false information" to protect Iran’s nuclear facilities. In an interview with the London-based al-Hayat newspaper, Abbasi said, "There is no choice but to mislead other intelligence bodies. Sometimes we show weaknesses we don’t have. Sometimes we show strengths we don’t have. Later this is evident in talks with the IAEA." — Honest Reporting, 9/20/2012Outgoing Chinese President Hu Jintao isn’t clinging to any high offices. That’s a contrast with the last two leadership transitions where the outgoing president lingered for a year or two as head of a military commission, offering a vantage point from which to continue influencing events. Instead Xi Jinping will be immediately assuming all of Hu’s old offices. He’s taking over at a time when China’s economic growth rate is clearly slowing from the crazy numbers it put up in the nineties. — The Slate, 11/15/2012Czech lawmakers have passed a key bill on the restitution of assets seized from 17 religious denominations by former Czechoslovakia’s communist regime in 1948 -89. Under the bill, the denominations including Christian and Jewish religious institutions will regain 56 percent of properties seized by the communist regime — toppled in 1989, four years before Czechoslovakia’s peaceful split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. — AFP, 11/7/2012Egypt unveiled a proposed draft of a new constitution amid criticism from liberals and human rights groups that the document is tilted toward Islamic law and endangers the democratic ideals that inspired the uprising. The partial draft revealed the battle lines between Islamists and secularists over the nation’s character. The 100-member assembly that wrote the charter made it clear that civil and religious rights would be shaped through the prism of Islam. The document is a testament to a changing political era in which a nation once run by Western -leaning military men is now, after an uprising and months of tumultuous politics, increasingly in the hands of Islamists. That prospect is recasting alliances and weakening the influence of the U.S. and other Western powers. — LA Times, 10/12/2012The "Innocence of Muslims," an amateurish, privately produced U.S. video that mocked Muhammad’s image, is claimed to have sparked deadly violence in some Islamic countries. The U.N. passed a non -binding resolution calling for the international community to criminalize blasphemy. The vote passed with 37 council members in favor, nine — including European Union members — abstaining and only the United States voting no. — AP, 9/28/2012Jordan, which has long been regarded as a pillar of stability in the Middle East as one of only two Arab countries with diplomatic ties to Israel, faces formidable challenges. The resource-poor kingdom has struggled for years with inadequate supplies of energy and water, and its economy has been pummeled by the global economic downturn as well as a massive influx of refugees from neighboring Syria. Disruptions in the delivery of cheap natural gas from Egypt have forced the government to purchase costly alternative fuels. The government has sought help from the International Monetary Fund and from wealthier Arab countries, but officials have warned of further economic austerity in the months to come, including cuts in government programs and jobs. — Washington Post, 11/21/2012Financial Western government experts estimate that Iran will run out of foreign exchange reserves in six months to a year, making it impossible for the Islamic Republic to sell products abroad and buy the imports it needs to continue its manufacturing sector and run public services, the European diplomat said. Western governments have focused on calculating when Iran’s foreign exchange reserves will run low because they want to force the government to yield on nuclear development before it can enrich enough uranium and acquire sufficient knowledge to build a working warhead. — LA Times, 10/17/2012America’s poor edged up in 2011 to a high of 49.7 million, based on a new census measure that considers medical costs and work -related expenses. The newly developed poverty measure is claimed to provide a fuller picture of poverty that the government believes can be used to assess safety-net programs by factoring in living expenses and taxpayer-provided benefits that the official formula leaves out. The revised formula adds about 3.5 million to the poverty count above what was reported in September 2012. — AP, 11/15/2012Since 1862, an obscure company called American Bureau of Shipping has been approving oceangoing vessels as seaworthy. The Houston- based firm reported $3.17 billion in revenue and just less than $600 million in profits from ship inspections from 2004 to 2010 and paid no U.S. income taxes on those earnings. The company has been registered as a nonprofit for 150 years. ABS shows how an organization that isn’t a charity, a school, a religious institution, a hospital or any other kind of body that commonly has nonprofit status can earn millions of dollars and legally avoid paying U.S. taxes. Another such outfit is the U.S. Polo Association, which tells the IRS its tax-exempt status is allowed because its purpose is to govern the sport of polo in America. — Bloomberg News, 11/14/2012BP Plc will pay $4.5 billion in penalties and plead guilty to felony misconduct in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which caused the worst U.S. offshore oil spill ever. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder called the deal a "critical step forward" but was adamant that it did not end the criminal investigation of the 2010 spill. The settlement in cludes a $1.256 billion criminal fine, the largest such levy in U.S. history. — Reuters, 11/15/2012Jose Mujica, president of Uruguay, has been described as the world’s poorest and most generous political leader; he donates about 90% of his salary to charities, lives in a modest house at his wife’s flower farm, and drives a 1987 VW Beetle. Uruguayans know him as "Pepe" and just about everyone in the country agrees that, in everyday life, he’s a citizen like any other, except he doesn’t have a bank account and has very few debts. By law, Mujica’s annual salary is about US$ 150,000. Pepe keeps 10% of it for personal expenses and transfers the rest to a Foundation. — Daily Good, 11/16/2012As Greece confronts a 25 percent unemployment rate and a cratering economy, it will make an estimated $16 billion in interest payments this year — much of it to other European governments that have lent it money, to the International Monetary Fund and to the European Central Bank. That’s more than Greece expected to spend on education and public health care combined. Greece’s major creditors are unwilling to grant any relief. Even after the latest round of spending cuts, Greece’s government remains $40 billion short of what it is expected to need over the next three years. That is roughly the amount it is also due to make in interest payments, according to the IMF’s most recent public assessment of the country’s finances. — Washington Post, 11/21/2012 Israel Archaeologists excavating at the ancient city of Limyra in southern Turkey recently uncovered the remains of an ancient synagogue. Limyra was part of the Lycian League, a confederation of coastal cit ies considered one of the world’s first democracies before being annexed as a province of the Roman Empire. This is the second synagogue discovered in Lycia and it reflects a wide and rich Jewish population in Lycia. — Bible History Daily, 9/27/2012The Islamist militant group Hamas, which has ruled Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since 2007, is coming under increasing fire — not from its enemy Israel, but from former allies, human rights groups, and its own citizens. Meanwhile, its chief cause, the creation of a Palestinian state, has been almost forgotten amid the post-Arab Spring turmoil in the Middle East, with the threat of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, the deepening civil war in Syria and growing violence between Shiite and Sunni Muslims in Iraq. — The Washington Times, 10/3/2012Aram, an Israeli Maronite Christian group, seeks formal recognition for their cultural and ethnic heritage. Recognized as a non -Arab group by the Lebanese government, the Maronites in Israel supplement their goal for national identity with a linguistic and historical education campaign. In the Israeli village Jish, children are taught Aramaic, a Semitic language once spoken across the Near East. Today, Aramaic is primarily a prayer language, though select communities, including a number of Middle Eastern immigrants in Sweden, speak the language in daily life. There are only a few elderly native Aramaic speakers in Israel, but resources from Swedish Aramaic communities are aiding the language revival in Israel. — Bible History Daily, 10/12/2012An American force of 3500 troops is preparing to join 1000 Israeli soldiers in the largest US-Israel joint military exercise ever. The exact dates are being withheld as a security precaution. The maneuvers take place against the backdrop of increased tension with Iran and international speculation concerning intentions in Jerusalem to forcibly halt the Iranian nuclear program. The stated goal of the $38 million joint mission — most of which is being paid by Washington — is for the American and Israeli armed forces to practice combating threats together. — Media Line, 10/18/2012 There has been a great deal written about the community of scribes that penned the Qumran scrolls. These studies rarely focus on an individual ancient scribe; they generally consider the religious orientation and scholarship of the broader community. Israeli paleographer Ada Yardeni recently identified over 50 Qumran scrolls penned by the same scribe; moreover, she identified a manuscript from the desert fortress at Masada written by the same scribe. — Biblical Archaeological Society, 11/5/2012 Seaweed is prolific in Israel’s Mediterranean Sea. It makes sense, then, that Middle Eastern ancients used it to help alleviate a host of ailments from peptic ulcers to fungal infections and wounds. Based on past and present literature, archeology, history, biology, linguistics, and botany, the Natural Medicine Research Unit for the Study of Complementary, Alternative and Integrated Medicine at Hadassah Medical Organization in Jerusalem is looking into how seaweed can be utilized for its nutritional and medicinal properties. — Israel 21c, 10/24/2012 At Ben Gurion Airport, 240 new Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia arrived from Addis Ababa on a special charter flight arranged by the Jewish Agency. Eventually the remaining 8,000 Jews still remaining in the country will be brought to Israel. In July this year the Israel government decided to increase the rate of aliyah [immigration to Israel] from Ethiopia in order to complete the process as quickly as possible. — Ashernet, 10/29/2012 Israel launched airstrikes against Hamas in the Gaza strip, killing Hamas’ military commander in the most intense fighting in nearly four years. Code name for the operation was Pillar of Defense, after the pillar of fire that protected and led Israel during the exodus. The attack came when Israel seems to be under fire from all directions. Relations are deteriorating with Egypt’s new Islamic government and the Syrian civil war is spilling over into Israel’s northern border. Days of rocket fire disrupted life for some one million people prior to the attack. — AP, 11/15/2012 (See "Today in Prophecy" in this issue for a further discussion.) |
