When the choir at Rock Spring Congregational United Church of Christ complained about overheating while harmonizing under incandescent lights more than 15 years ago, congregant John Overholt didn’t just empathize. He acted.
The self-described “handyman who fixes things” replaced the 20-plus blazing hot bulbs in the chancel ceiling with cooler, then state-of-the-art, money-saving compact fluorescents.
What everyone agrees on is that something unusual happened at Tall el-Hammam, an ancient settlement near the Dead Sea.
In a layer of ancient earth, archaeologists claim to have found evidence of an apocalyptic event: Melted rooftops. Disintegrated pottery. Unusual patterns in the rock formations that can be associated with intense heat. For another three to six centuries after 1650 BC, the settlement’s 100 acres lay fallow.
When droughts strike in eastern Africa, clerics, church experts, and faith-based agencies are some of the first to mobilize to address food security and deliver humanitarian aid. Now such groups are moving again as severe drought—the worst in 40 years—unfolds in the east and the Horn of Africa.
Three successive rainy seasons have failed to materialize, and scientists and relief agencies are blaming climate change for bringing droughts in a region battered by conflicts and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mariam is sipping on a juice box while sitting on the front steps outside a hotel not far from the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the holiest of cities for Muslims. She first says she is ten years old but then decides she is eight.
Her mother, in a black abaya and a face veil, is sitting a few steps away on the pavement, selling scarves to a group of pilgrims.
It is 6:30 a.m., and dozens of pilgrims stop as they walk back to their hotels after performing fajr, the morning prayer at the Grand Mosque.
A small but determined group of Ukrainian asylum seekers has discovered that the quickest route to safety in the United States currently runs through Mexico, immigrant rights advocates say.
A diplomatic arrangement predating Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enables Mexico to fast-track Ukrainian passport holders into the country and to the American border, where the majority are gaining entry into the US within three to four days, said Danilo Zak, policy and advocacy manager for the National Immigration Forum.