News & Views

News and Views

May 1, 2020

Religious Religious riots between Hindus and Muslims in New Delhi, India have left about 38 people dead, and 200 injured. The protests were centered arounda new law, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) which was passed in December 2019 by the Parliament of India. The CAA grants an easier path to citizenship for Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, and Parsis, who are illegally in the country. Muslims were specifically excluded from the CAA causing hundreds of Indian Muslims to protest in the streets. […]

News and Views

March 1, 2020

Religious The Guardian Angels private crime prevention group have begun patrolling Brooklyn’s Jewish neighborhoods to provide “visual deterrence” following an ongoing rise in the number of anti-Semitic attacks against the city’s Jews. Curtis Sliwa, who founded the unarmed group in 1979 promised in an interview with NBC News on Saturday evening their patrols would begin in the Crown Heights neighborhood. As promised, the patrols did indeed begin right on schedule. Sliwa said the patrols would expand to the Williamsburg and Borough Park […]

News and Views

January 1, 2020

Religious There were 1.5 million Christians in Iraq before 2003, but by mid-2019 that figure had fallen to well below 150,000; by some estimates the number of Christians there may have fallen as low as 120,000 — a decline of more than 90 percent within a single generation. In Syria, the size of the Christian population has fallen by two-thirds since the country’s civil war began in 2011, when Christians still numbered more than 2 million. The 2019 edition of “Persecuted and […]

News and Views

November 1, 2019

Religious After 36 years of lobbying by Iraq, the ancient Mesopotamian city of Babylon was designated in July a UNESCO World Heritage Site. UNESCO warned that the site is in an “extremely vulnerable condition” and in need of urgent conservation. “The property suffers from a variety of threats including illegal constructions, trash dumping and burning, small-scale industrial pollution, urban encroachments and other environmental factors. At the time of inscription, and despite conservation efforts undertaken since 2008 with international collaboration, the general physical […]

News and Views

September 1, 2019

Religious Churches in Kansas, California, Maryland, Illinois, Virginia, Texas and elsewhere have been donating to RIP Medical Debt, a nonprofit organization based in Rye, New York, that arranges payoff of medical debt, which contributes to two-thirds of bankruptcies, according to the American Journal of Public Health. When a person can’t pay a bill, that debt is often packaged with other people’s debt and sold to bill collectors for some fraction of the total amount of the bill. RIP Medical Debt buys debt […]