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Pastoral
Bible Institute News World News Religious A booming Bible industry is on its way to turning the world’s biggest atheist nation into the world’s largest producer of Bibles. Since the first copy rolled off the presses two decades ago, Amity Printing Company, China’s only state-sanctioned Bible printer, has printed more than 40 million copies in 75 languages and exported to more than 60 countries. The company could well be the biggest Bible factory in the world, cranking out 12 million copies a year. —Los Angeles Times, 6/22/2008 More than 90% of Americans believe in God or a universal power and more than half pray at least once a day, according to a poll conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Nearly three-fourths of Americans believe in heaven as a place where people who have led good lives will be eternally rewarded. Almost 60% believe in a place of eternal punishment for those who lead bad lives and die without repenting. More than 36,000 adults were interviewed in the poll. —The Washington Post, 6/23/2008 A new generation of churches is spreading a strain of evangelical Christianity with worship services as slickly packaged as any U.S. franchise. Rather than seeking converts to a mainstream denomination, these independent churches are forming global organizations anchored by a single leader. The pastor appears via satellite or DVD each week and replicates Sundays at the home church. At least half a dozen U.S. mega-churches have opened international branches in recent years. John Bishop, pastor at Living Hope Church in Washington, has a weekly attendance of 6,000 and has 23 satellite churches. The Healing Place Church in Baton Rouge has eight U.S. branches and has opened churches in Mozambique and Swaziland. These super churches have the resources to expand overseas because of independent followers who are willing to finance expansion. —Wall Street Journal, 6/13/2008 The recent death from untreated diabetes of an 11-year-old Wisconsin girl has invigorated opposition to obscure laws in many states that let parents rely on prayer rather than medicine, to heal sick children. The National Center for Health Statistics, a federal agency, estimated in 2004 that more than 2 percent of the population uses prayer rituals to treat health problems. In all, 45 states offer some legal protections in child-protection laws for parents who use spiritual healing, according to the Christian Science church. —Wall Street Journal, 6/12/2008 Police in eastern India want to display in a museum the head of a woman decapitated after she was accused of practicing witchcraft, hoping it will be a lesson for those who persecute innocent women. In rural India, villagers often accuse women of being witches and blame them for natural disasters or for an illness, death or theft. Hundreds of them are killed every year and police say incidents often take a long time to come to light. —Reuters, 4/23/2008 The Vatican’s recent ban on Mormon microfilming and digitizing of Catholic parish records out of concern they will be used for the LDS practice of baptizing the dead may have a wide-ranging and chilling effect on the whole family history enterprise, some professional genealogists say. “A letter from the Vatican called LDS baptisms for the dead a ”detrimental practice" and directed each Catholic diocesan bishop “not to cooperate with the erroneous practices of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Kathy Kirkpatrick, past president of Utah‘s professional genealogist association, said the irony is that the prohibition will be felt most by Catholics who want to pursue their family history back beyond civil records. —-Salt Lake Tribune, 5/21/2008 Social The spacecraft Phoenix landed safely on Mars, making a hazardous soft landing on the planet’s far north with all its scientific systems apparently intact. About two hours after touchdown, the spacecraft beamed to Earth about four dozen images of its landing site. It was the first successful soft landing on the planet since the twin Viking missions in 1976. —MercuryNews.com, 5/26/2008 Diamonds have been extracted in almost every region of the world. Natural diamonds aren’t particularly rare. In 2006, more than 75,000 pounds were produced worldwide. Lab-grown gemstones are practically indistinguishable from mined diamonds. —Smithsonian [magazine], June 2008 There were 11.4 million refugees and 26 million people displaced by conflict inside their countries at the end of 2007, pushing the number of people under the care of the United Nations to its highest since records began in 1951, the UN said. The number of refugees rose from 9.9 million the year before. —Bloomberg News, 6/17/2008 This year, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies is departing from tradition with its world disasters report, to focus on what it says is one of the most long term and complex problems facing the world: the HIV/Aids epidemic. By any standard, the epidemic is a global disaster: 25 million deaths, 33 million people living with HIV/Aids, 7,000 new infections every day. —BBC, 6/26/2008 A food crisis has ripped across the planet during the past few months. Prices for almost every staple food are soaring at rates of inflation not seen on such a global scale in a generation, resulting in hoarding, widespread food shortages and fears of outright famine in the world’s poorest countries. Rice prices have nearly tripled since January. Wheat has doubled in price in a year. [One] reason why prices are rising: a world grown accustomed to plenty is increasingly unable to produce enough food to sustain itself. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon told the world’s leaders in Rome this week that farmers would need to grow 50% more crops by 2030 in order to avert a massive global shortage of food. —TIME, 6/6/2008 Preliminary results from the July-December 2007 National Health Interview Survey indicate that nearly one out of every six American homes had only wireless telephones during the second half of 2007. Approximately 2.2% of households had no telephone service (neither wireless nor landline). —Centers for Disease Control, 5/23/2008 The Russian Navy has called on international navies to launch joint operations against pirates that have recently stepped up attacks on ships off Africa‘s coasts. Pirate attacks have risen across the world, with most attacks occurring along the Somali coast, where more than 25 ships were seized last year. The call comes as a Dutch cargo ship with a crew of nine, including four Russians, was reported as being seized by pirates off the Somali coast. —Russian News Agency, 5/27/2008 The world’s largest and most expensive home is a 27-story skyscraper in downtown Mumbai [India] with a cost nearing $2 billion. When the [Nita and Mukesh] Ambani residence is finished in January, completing a four-year process, it will be 550 feet high with 400,000 square feet of interior space. —Forbes.com, 4/30/2008 The number of suicides among veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may exceed the combat death toll because of inadequate mental health care, the U.S. government’s top psychiatric researcher said. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, briefed reporters today at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting in Washington. About 4,560 soldiers had died in the conflicts as of today, the Defense Department reported on its Web site. The Pentagon didn’t dispute Insel’s remark. —Bloomberg.com, 5/5/2008 Being physically active, not smoking, drinking alcohol only moderately, and eating at least five servings of fruits and vegetables each day could extend your life by 14 years, researchers reported in the January 2008 issue of the Public Library of Science online journal, PLoS Medicine. The mortality risk for those who adopted all four healthy habits was reduced fourfold compared with people who adopted none of them. —Consumer Reports, June 2008 In Johannesburg, South Africa, mobs hunted down suspected foreign residents—whom they accused of taking away jobs—shooting them, beating them to death and burning some victims alive. After 10 days of violence, officials put the death toll at 24, with hundreds injured. A regional government official said an estimated 20,000 people have been displaced in greater Johannesburg. —Dow Jones, 5/21/2008 The number of out-of-wedlock births in the U.S. jumped by more than a percentage point in 2007, for the third year in row, to 38.5% of all births, the U.S. Census Bureau reported. —The Washington Times, 6/15/2008 The world’s population will reach 7 billion in 2012, only 13 years after it reached 6 billion according to projections from the Census Bureau. There is no consensus on how many people the Earth can sustain according to William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institute. He commented that a key will be how well people manage the Earth’s resources. —Associated Press, 6/19/2008 Political Britain was the world’s biggest arms seller last year, accounting for a third of global arms exports, the Government’s trade promotion organization said. UK Trade and Investment said that arms exporters had added 9.7 billion British Sterling pounds, giving them a larger share of global arms exports than the U.S. —The Times, 6/18/2008 The death toll of China‘s May 12 earthquake increased to 69,146, the State Council Information Office said. 17,516 others remained missing after the 8.0-magnitude quake that jolted southwestern Sichuan Province and neighboring regions about a month ago. Nearly 1.39 million quake survivors have been found and evacuated. The government disaster relief fund had reached 23.46 billion Yuan (about 3.35 billion U.S. dollars). —Peoples Daily Online, 6/10/2008 A federal appeals court declared on Tuesday that the United States discriminates against the blind because American paper money is the same size regardless of a bill’s value. The decision upheld a 2006 ruling by Judge James Robertson of Federal District Court. “Of the more than 180 countries that issue paper currency,” Judge Robertson wrote on Nov. 28, 2006, “only the United States prints bills that are identical in size and color in all their denominations.” —The New York Times, 5/20/20088 U.S. corn production used to make ethanol in... 1997: 5% 2002: 10% 2007: 24% Change in world prices since May 2007 for edible grains such as wheat, rice, corn and barley: 89% —TIME, 5/19/2008 Myanmar’s military leaders seized aid shipments headed for cyclone survivors and told the top U.S. diplomat there Friday that they’re not ready to let in American aid workers despite warnings the country is on the verge of a medical catastrophe. Myanmar says it will accept aid from all countries, but prohibits the entry of foreign workers who would deliver and manage the operations. In Yangon [Rangoon], the price of increasingly scarce water has shot up by more than 500 percent, and rice and oil jumped by 60 percent over the last three days, the Danish Red Cross said. —Associated Press, 5/9/2008 The health of hundreds of thousands of Zimbabwean children is in jeopardy because of the decision by the country’s authorities to ban non-governmental organizations from distributing aid, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned today. UNICEF had been providing support to more than 185,000 orphans in the impoverished Southern African country but it has suspended its programmes in the wake of the Government decision on 5 June to ban aid distribution. —UN News Service, 6/13/2008 The top five countries subject to the most UN condemnation for human rights violations in 2007 were:
1. Israel (criticized by the UN twice as many times as its nearest competitor). North Korea appears at position 44, tied with Australia, Belarus, France, and Guatemala. —EyeOnTheUN.org, chart retrieved 5/6/2008 Financial The population of millionaires grew five times as fast in emerging markets as it did in the U.S. last year. That was the largest divergence between the U.S. and the big emerging markets since the comparisons were first published in 2003.The number of millionaires in Brazil, Russia, India and China jumped 19% in 2007, compared with growth of 3.7% in the U.S., according to the World Wealth Report, produced by Merrill Lynch & Co. and Capgemini. The U.S. still dominates the millionaire economy world-wide. It has more than three million financial millionaires, defined as those with investable assets of $1 million or more. —Wall Street Journal, 6/25/2008 U.S. airlines projected they could lose $10 billion in 2008 due to skyrocketing fuel costs, a sum that would almost match the industry’s worst-ever year loss in 2002. James May of the Air Transport Association also told a joint U.S. Senate hearing that up to 200 communities could lose airline service as a result of carrier capacity cuts that are being imposed to save money. —Reuters, 6/17/2008 74.6% Rise in the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1989 and 2005. In the same period, the real price of fats fell 26.5%. If you’re on a limited income, it’s predictable which kind of food you’ll buy. In the 1950s, kids had three cups of milk for every cup of soda. Today that ratio is reversed, meaning they get all the calories and none of the nutrients. —TIME [cover story on Juvenile Obesity], 6/23/2008 Mideast oil producers are cash-flush with crude oil over $130 a barrel. The huge pool of liquidity is increasingly flowing to China, the world’s fastest growing economy. Some say that could lead to a big shift in global financial power. Kuwait and Saudi firms are building refineries in China. Saudi princes are investing in Chinese hotels. The Kuwaiti Investment Authority was a top investor in the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China’s October 2006 IPO. The Chinese are seeking broader economic ties with the Arab world. Underlying its ties is its ever-growing hunger for oil as the number two consuming nation behind the U.S. —Investor’s Business Daily, 6/17/2008 Americans are shell-shocked at $4-a-gallon gas. But compared with Europe, U.S. motorists have nothing to complain about. In Germany, a gallon costs $8.33, more than double 2002 levels. In London, truck drivers clogged streets this week, demanding that Prime Minister Gordon Brown lower energy taxes. In China, government-mandated low retail gas prices have helped farmers and China‘s urban poor use about 5% more gas in the first four months of this year than last. Meanwhile, the world is driving more than ever: There are 887 million vehicles, up from 553 million just 15 years ago, according to London consultancy Global Insight. —[Detroit] Free Press News Service, 5/31/2008 The rising cost of shipping due to increased oil prices is forcing some manufacturers to bring production back to North America. The movement of factories to low-cost countries has been a bitter-sweet three-decade long story for the U.S. economy, knocking workers out of manufacturing jobs as it drove down the price of goods for consumers. The cost of shipping one 40-foot container to the East Coast from China is three-and-one-half times as expensive as shipping from Mexico, according to CIBC, a trade organization. —Wall Street Journal, 6/13/2008 The International Air Transport Association (IATA) bid farewell to the paper ticket on June 1 with a conversion to 100% electronic ticketing. A paper ticket costs an average of $10 to process versus $1 for an electronic ticket. With 400 million tickets issued through IATA’s settlement system annually, the industry will save over $3 billion each year. —IATA press release, 5/31/2008 In a shift that could change the nature of their business, leading carmakers are rapidly investing in the mass production of models powered entirely or partly by lithium-ion batteries. If oil prices continue to rise and battery prices fall, the electric vehicles could come to account for more than 25 percent of the European market and 10 percent globally. If so, it would mark one of the biggest technological shifts in a century of automotive history. —Financial Times, 5/27/2008 For the second consecutive year, Brazil‘s economy is growing at around 5%. The expansion has enabled Brazil, which seemed on the verge of a massive debt default in 2002, to build up enough stockpiles of U.S. dollars to outweigh its entire foreign debt and become a net creditor nation for the first time in its history. Brazil has enough money that it will set up a sovereign-wealth fund of between $10 billion and $20 billion. —Wall Street Journal, 5/13/2008 Scientists unveiled the world’s fastest supercomputer, a $100 million machine that for the first time has performed 1,000 trillion calculations per second in a sustained exercise. The technology breakthrough was accomplished by engineers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and IBM Corp. on a computer to be used primarily on nuclear weapons work. To put the computer’s speed in perspective, it has roughly the computing power of 100,000 of today’s most powerful laptops stacked 1.5 miles high, according to IBM. —Associated Press, 6/9/2008 People lost their homes at the highest rate on record in the first three months of the year, and late payments soared to a new high, too. Americans’ equity in their homes—usually their single biggest asset—now has dropped to the lowest level on record in figures going back to the end of World War II. Homeowners’ portion of equity fell to 46.2 percent, which means the amount of debt tied up in their homes exceeds the equity they have built up. —Associated Press, 6/5/2008 Israel The Israeli population has increased from 873,000 people in November 1948 to 7.2 million at the beginning of 2008. According to the forecasts for 2030, Israel will have a population of approximately 10 million people. As of now, 5,499,000 are Jewish, of which 69% were born in Israel. 1,461,000 are Arab and 322,000 are considered “others.” —Ynetnews.com, 5/8/2008 Israel’s currency is now legal tender internationally. The shekel can now be used in trading overseas, and with banks throughout the world converting shekels to other currencies, according to Israel’s business daily Globes. Israeli companies also will be able to make payments in shekels to overseas customers. The change comes after Israel received recognition from CLS Bank International, the international currency clearing system. The official membership in CLS recognizes the shekel as one of the strongest currencies in the world, according to Globes. —JTA, Globes, 5/27/2008 Israel has said a strike on Iran will be “unavoidable” if the Islamic regime continues to press ahead with alleged plans for building an atom-bomb. The warning, from Israeli transport minister Shaul Mofaz, is the bluntest threat yet against Tehran from any member of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s administration. Israel, which is the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East, has a long record of taking out perceived strategic threats to its existence. It sent warplanes to destroy Iraq‘s nuclear reactor in 1981, and a similar Israeli sortie over Syria last September destroyed what Washington later claimed was a nuclear reactor site built with North Korean help. —Telegraph.co.uk, 6/7/2008 A 2,000-year-old seed found at Masada which was planted two years ago has produced a plant almost 4 feet tall, and growing strong, according to an update reported in the June 13 2008 issue of the journal Science. The Dead Sea region, where Masada is located, and the Jordan River Valley which extends to the Sea of Galilee, were once a lush forest of such date palms. The large, sweet fruit was famous throughout the civilized world both for its distinctive flavor as well as for its medicinal properties, which are mentioned in the Bible. —Arutz 7, 6/16/2008 An imposing architecturally ornate new overpass was unveiled at the western entrance to Jerusalem.The Bridge of Strings, a $70 million structure designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava was inaugurated at a gala ceremony overseen by Jerusalem mayor Uri Lupolianski and Israel Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz. The bridge, which is suspended from dozens of cables that make it look like a huge white harp, will carry Jerusalem’s light railway set for 2010. For now, it will serve as a pedestrian overpass spanning the busy road leading out of the Israeli capital toward Tel Aviv. —Jerusalem Post, 6/26/2008 As many as 200 Hebrew versions of the New Testament were burned in a bonfire last month, according to police, allegedly by a group of ultra-Orthodox Jewish students. It was the latest in a string of incidents targeting Messianic Jews in Israel, a trend that has alarmed Christian Zionist organizations. It underscores rising tensions between Israeli Jews and a growing Messianic Jewish minority—Jews who believe in Jesus Christ. Some Israelis consider Christian Zionism and Messianic Judaism to be undermining the Jewish faith. —The Statesman, 6/1/2008 |
