(The Christian Science Monitor) When Khalid Ismael got a desperate call from an army friend saying militants had surrounded him and five other soldiers, Ismael’s mother didn’t hesitate. Alia Khalaf al-Jabouri ordered Ismael to take his sister and drive through 30 miles of enemy territory to rescue them.
The sister was there for a reason: the extremists known as the Islamic State weren’t stopping vehicles with women.
To protest the anti-Muslim rhetoric of the election season, high school counselor Martha DeVries of North Kansas City, Missouri, is wearing a hijab every Monday until the end of the school year in May.
DeVries, 47, who attends a Baptist church, said she felt a responsibility to display her acceptance of Muslims. DeVries was also inspired by a sermon her pastor preached on making a difference.
c. 2016 Religion News Service
(RNS) The footage, to gamers who like to play Grand Theft Auto, looks familiar. From the point of view of a gunman looking for targets through the speeding car’s window, unsuspecting people take bullets in the chest and crumple to the ground.
c. 2016 Advance Media
NEWARK, New Jersey — The U.S. Department of Justice has opened a civil rights investigation into the decision by Bernards Township authorities to deny a Muslim community’s application to build a mosque in the township, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Newark has confirmed.
c. 2016 Religion News Service
ROME (RNS) A chilling eyewitness account of a deadly attack on a Catholic nursing home in Yemen has detailed how four nuns were sought out by gunmen who then executed them before destroying the Christian symbols in the residence’s chapel.
According to the lone surviving nun, the attackers entered the complex in Aden at around 8:30 a.m. on March 4 and first killed a guard and driver.
c. 2016 Religion News Service
NAIROBI, Kenya (RNS) Churches in eastern and southern Africa are appealing for humanitarian aid in the region, as 36 million people grapple with the worst drought in decades.
Linked to extreme El Niño weather conditions, the drought has affected several countries, including Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Sudan, Malawi, and Zimbabwe. The conditions have reversed normal weather patterns, upsetting people’s livelihoods.
The Church of England has promised to make broad changes in dealing with sexual abuse cases after the publication of the first independent review commissioned by the church into its handling of such cases in the past.
The report’s conclusions highlight the “deeply disturbing” failure of those in senior clerical positions to pass on information about the cries for help from a survivor known only as “Joe” over a period of almost four decades.
(The Christian Science Monitor) The picture might have seemed like something out of a Bernie Sanders rally.
Thousands of people spill into a city square in Raleigh, North Carolina, on a cold February day, calling for rights for women and gay and lesbian people. They thunder that minorities are being systematically disenfranchised. They demand access to affordable health care.
c. 2016 Religion News Service
(RNS) Anti-Semitism goes hand-in-hand with anti-Zionist activities at U.S. colleges, according to a new report that one critic called a “crude rhetorical cudgel” against the so-called Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.
The report was released on Monday, (March 14) by the Amcha Initiative, a group founded by two professors in the University of California system in response to anti-Semitic incidents on campuses.
(The Christian Science Monitor) The federal prosecution of criminal and civil rights violations in two remote towns on the Utah-Arizona border suggests that law enforcement agencies are erasing cultural taboos against prosecuting polygamous sects in the United States.