Boko Haram have overrun a whole town in north-eastern
Nigeria along with several other communities. Mubi, near the border with
Cameroon, has a population of around 130,000 people. Refugees say that the
militants are burning churches; torturing or stoning Christians who refuse to
convert to Islam; publicly amputating the hands of anyone caught looting; and
threatening to marry off unmarried girls and women, for a price. The town was
captured 10 days ago; Nigerian army and police forces were reported to be in
the area to recapture the two 3 days ago.
After extensive diplomatic pressure, North Korea has
released an American missionary along with another American. Kenneth Bae was
leading a tour group from China (which may have been an undercover Christian
missionary trip) in November 2012 when he was arrested. He was charged with
preaching against the North Korean government, and planning a religious coup
d’état named “Operation Jericho”, and was sentenced to 15 years’ hard labour.
He was hospitalised early this year, but after his health was deemed to have
recovered, he was returned to the labour camp. The other American, Matthew
Miller, had claimed asylum in North Korea; he was convicted of espionage after
North Korean officials decided his claim was an attempt to infiltrate their
prison system in order to produce a secret human rights report. Oný the day
before Bae was released, his family had used the second anniversary of his
arrest to remind people of his imprisonment in order to keep his case in the
public eye.
A
legal conflict in Poland between an abortion clinic and pro-life demonstrators
has been decided in favour of the clinic. The Pro-Familia hospital in Rzeszów objected
to the demonstrators claiming that abortion was “killing babies”, arguing that
pregnancy terminations could not be equated with killing. The female judge
strongly agreed with the hospital: she
told the demonstrators to stop using that phrase; to apologize to the hospital
through the media, using words that she had chosen (which included “I was
spreading false information about the work of the hospital”); and to pay all
court fees. She heard no witnesses and kept the explanation of her judgment
confidential. Since Polish law defines a foetus as a ‘person’ from the moment
of conception, and since the judge’s decision seems to be a strong attack on
free speech, her decision has been widely criticised, even in the normally
pro-choice national newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.
A
female pastor in the Philippines, whose home was destroyed and church left
roofless by Typhoon Haiyan a year ago, has been working with Tearfund and other
Christian agencies to rebuild lives and buildings. She has also brought
together nine other churches to set up a duck farm. “God gave me inspiration
about duck-raising,” she said, “because ducks are resistant to almost any kind
of weather and also about egg productions and how it could help our community
because here eggs are expensive.” Some income from the farm will be used to help poor students
continue to attend local schools.
The BBC TV
programme “Songs Of Praise” is to be revamped in an attempt to attract more
viewers. The programme, which was once described by a (Christian) BBC programme
maker as “Top Of The Pops for the over-50s”, usually mixes congregational hymn
singing with short interviews. However, a BBC source says that demographic
changes including immigration have led to declining interest in Anglican-type
services amongst its target audience, but increased interest in Pentecostal and
Catholic services. The show will now feature multiple church settings in a
single programme, including Pentecostal, Roman Catholic and Salvation Army
churches. It will also replace some or all of the interviews with magazine-style
reports on news-related issues.
In technology
news, researchers at the University of Washington have succeeded in
demonstrating how one person’s mind can control another person’s body. They
wired up pairs of volunteers to EEG machines and gave them a simple computer
game (shooting pirate ships with a cannon) to play. The first volunteer could
see the screen for the game but had no keyboard to fire the cannon; the second,
half a mile away, had a keyboard but no screen. The EEG machine for the second
player was wired to send commands directly to his muscles, so that when the
first player thought “fire!” the second player’s hand would move in response to
the transmitted EEG waves. The most successful of the three pairs of players
destroyed 83% of the ships.
And finally, a
12 year old in San Jose, California decided that his school science project
would be to build a Braille printer out of Lego. The result was so successful
that Intel decided to invest in order to bring the printer to market. Normal
Braille printers cost about ₤1,300; the Lego version is about ₤220. The boy has
also set up a company, Braigo Labs, which offers the printer’s software and the
Lego design as open source code so that it can be freely used and improved on
around the world.
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