A second day of fighting between Sudan and South Sudan in their disputed border regions has prompted international concern that the conflict might develop into outright war.
The African Union says it is deeply alarmed by the clashes over oilfields, and called on both sides to exercise the utmost restraint.
Sudan has pulled out of negotiations with South Sudan.
John McCain and Joseph Lieberman have already called for arming Syria’s rebels, in statements last month from the US Senate where they serve. But they repeated their demand in more dramatic fashion Tuesday ”“ from a Syrian refugee camp in Turkey and with violence unabated, as the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad disregarded the UN plan that was to have silenced the Syrian Army’s guns Tuesday morning.
The two senators joined a growing international chorus of voices finding that the unimplemented plan, brokered by former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, is simply allowing the Assad regime to continue its oppression.
At least 38 people have died in a car bombing in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna, officials said.
Many others were injured in the attack, which took place when officials stopped the vehicle as it approached a church.
Just hours afterwards, a bomb exploded in the central city of Jos, injuring several people.
Easter celebrations will be taking place in Nigeria under the threat of terrorist attacks by the Islamist group Boko Haram.
“In the past celebrations of the major feasts, Boku Haram has attacked the Christian Churches,” said Father Patrick Tor Alumuku, director of social communications for the Archdiocese of Abuja.
Last Christmas, Boko Haram killed 41 people in a series of shootings and bombings.
“There is a feeling of uncertainty and of worry, generally, about how these celebrations will be concluded” Father Alumuki told Vatican Radio. “However, we have hope, and we pray everything will go well.”
Father Alumuki also pointed out most Muslims in Nigeria do not support Boku Haram, and prominent leaders of the country’s Islamic community have sent messages wishing Christians a happy Easter.
The U.N. Security Council demanded Thursday that Syria “urgently and visibly” halt its attacks on opposition targets as special emissary Kofi Annan told the U.N. General Assembly that Syrian “military operations in civilian population centers have not stopped.”
The 15-nation council’s demand was aimed at bolstering Annan’s efforts to secure a cease-fire that would end the government’s year-long crackdown on dissent and prevent a descent into all-out civil war. It also appeared intended to press Syria to honor a four-day-old commitment to stop shelling residential areas and withdraw its heavy weapons and troops from urban areas by an April 10 deadline.
The Barnabas Fund reports that the “city of Homs, the third largest in Syria, has now seen almost its entire Christian population of 50,000 to 60,000 flee.”
America’s ambassador to the UN has warned Syria not to intensify violence in the days leading up to a ceasefire proposed by the UN and Arab League.
Susan Rice said the Security Council must respond urgently if Syria failed to keep its pledge to end military operations by 10 April.
Syria says it will honour the deadline, but Ms Rice said she doubted this.
Two fighters from the Islamist group Boko Haram were killed in a shootout Monday that reveals mounting frustration among residents of northern Nigeria with the group’s campaign of violence.
The two came into the Sheka neighborhood of Kano on a motorcycle, shooting bullets into the air, according to an eyewitness who requested anonymity for safety reasons. “People in the area summoned courage and nabbed them. As they were planning to hand them over to the police, gunmen came from nowhere and shot them instantly to death,” the witness said.
With five weeks’ passage, the fateful encounter between a black youth who wanted to go to college and a Hispanic man who wanted to be a judge has polarized the nation.
And, now this modest central Florida community finds its name being mentioned with Selma and Birmingham on a civil rights list held sacred in black American culture, while across the country, the parsing of the case has become cacophonic and political, punctuated by pleas for tolerance, words of hatred, and spins from the left and right.
Read it all and also note The Events Leading to the Shooting of Trayvon Martin.
While much of the frenzy has centered on Zimmerman’s past run-ins with police and on Martin’s musings and photos posted to Twitter and MySpace, the avalanche of coverage has been unable to resolve the most critical unknowns: Who instigated the final confrontation? Did Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain, have good reason to feel he was in danger? Did local police handle the case evenhandedly?
Past experience – for example, in the 1991 Rodney King beating – has demonstrated that facts aren’t easily agreed to when cases take on a racial tinge. Opinions and preconceptions have even greater currency in an era of 24-hour news and social networking.
Members of the Jama’atu Ahlis Sunnati Lidda’awati Wal Jihad, also known as Boko Haram, may have concluded arrangements to engage the security operatives in Kaduna State in a free for all. They have warned residents to flee all security formations in the state.
In a letter distributed in Kaduna, the sect said it is ready to fight security operatives in the state and warns residents whose houses are located near military, police, SSS as well as prison formations to relocate with immediate effect to avoid being victims of the planned attack.
Confirming the report, the state police commissioner, Mohammed Abubakar, said: “Yes, we are aware of it… that unless their people are released from detention, if not they will come and stage attacks. We are aware of that one. We have strategized and are waiting for them….
Two days after he was consecrated as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida, Gregory Brewer was marching Monday with the crowd demanding justice for Trayvon Martin.
He was the only white clergyman to address the Sanford City Commission inside the Civic Center that evening, urging city leaders to address the concerns of the black community.
“I thought it was very courageous,” said Andy Searles, a pastor with Aloma United Methodist Church in Winter Park. “It would have been very easy for him to sit in his office and organize the paperwork on his desk, but he made a statement of what the church should be.”
[This case]…is evolving into a case of two justices: separate and, like Jim Crow laws, far from equal.
From the apparent racial profiling, overt violation of neighborhood watch protocols and real-time police directives, to accusations of tampered evidence, to the failure to undertake reasonable measures afforded by the law, I count a multitude glaring discrepancies. How did “The System” fail to ensure that this boy’s life was not inconsequential?
As a citizen, I understand that no case is all black or all white, despite appearances to the contrary. I realize that justice is fraught with nuances, not the very least of which is Florida’s “stand your ground” law, which was designed to protect threatened parties, and in all irony of all ironies appears to be the very thing keeping the instigator out of prison, in complete contrast to the spirit of the controversial pro-gun law.
I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.
Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has warned that arming either side in Syria will lead to a “proxy war”.
He was speaking at the opening of an Arab League summit which is discussing a joint plan with the UN to end a year of violence in Syria.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has agreed to the plan and will spare no effort to make it succeed, Syrian state news agency Sana reported.
Why were white clergy so reluctant to engage in this issue? It may be because they lead suburban congregations composed by and large of parishioners whose daily lives are socially isolated, antiseptic, homogeneous, and largely segregated by race and class. It may also be the lingering legacy of the South, except that many of the faith leaders, like those in the pews, have moved here from other regions of the country. They have different explanations for the silence. They may simply have been waiting for all the facts of the incident to emerge, and not rush to judgment.
“To be honest, I don’t know why,” said the Rev. David Charlton, the recently arrive pastor of Sanford’s First United Methodist Church. “I don’t have a good answer, and it’s happened on my front steps.”
Read it all (and alert blog readers are asked to note the quote from Bishop Greg Brewer mentioned in the previous blog post–KSH)
I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.
Hindu and Christian representatives say forced conversions to Islam have become the latest weapon of Islamic extremists in what they call a growing campaign against Pakistan’s religious minorities, on top of assassinations and mob intimidation of houses of worship. The groups are increasingly wondering if they still have a place in Pakistan.
“It is a conspiracy that Hindus and Christians and other minorities should leave Pakistan,” says Amar Lal, the lawyer representing Kumari in the Supreme Court. “As a minority, we feel more and more insecure. It is getting worse day by day.”
“The ongoing war against Christians and African indigenous people is more of an ”˜ethnic cleansing’ in that they kill all black people, including Muslims, but they give specific connotation to the war in targeting Christians to secure funding and support from the Arab and Islamic world by saying this war is a religious war,” he said. “And in so doing, they get huge support from those countries.”
Aerial bombardment killed the five members of the Asaja Dalami Kuku family, which belonged to the Episcopal Church of Sudan, in Umsirdipa in the Nuba Mountains on Feb. 25, the source said.
The government in Khartoum is using Antonov airplanes to drop bombs, “coupled with state-sponsored militia targeting churches and Christian families,” said the humanitarian worker.
The French Interior minister says Mohammed Merah, the prime suspect in seven murders in and around Toulouse, died Thursday morning in a jump from an apartment window after “shooting madly” at police who raided the building.
French Interior Minister Claude Gueant said police entered the apartment Thursday after hearing nothing from Merah overnight, only to be ambushed by the suspect who “came out of the bathroom shooting madly at everybody.”
“At the end, Mohammed Merah jumped out of the window with a weapon in hand, continuing to shoot. He was found dead on the ground below,” said Gueant.
Syria is locked in an ominous and violent stalemate: With overwhelming firepower and a willingness to kill, President Bashar al-Assad could hold on to power for months or even years, keeping the opposition from controlling any territory and denying it breathing space to develop a coherent, effective leadership, according to analysts, diplomats and Syrians involved in the uprising.
Syrians and regional analysts say sheer force alone is unlikely to eradicate what has become a diffuse and unpredictable insurgency, one able to strike out even after the government has used crushing force against centers of resistance like Homs, Idlib and Dara’a. Broad areas of the country are hostile territory for government troops, and attackers have managed to hit centers of power, even in the capital, Damascus.
But with so much blood spilled, diplomacy stalled and both sides refusing to negotiate, there is no obvious path out….
Seven years after Florida adopted its sweeping self-defense law, the shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, has put that law at the center of an increasingly angry debate over how he was killed and whether law enforcement has the authority to charge the man who killed him.
The law, called Stand Your Ground, is one of 21 such laws around the country, many of them passed within the last few years. In Florida, it was pushed heavily by the National Rifle Association but opposed vigorously by law enforcement.
It gives the benefit of the doubt to a person who claims self-defense, regardless of whether the killing takes place on a street, in a car or in a bar ”” not just in one’s home, the standard cited in more restrictive laws. In Florida, if people feel they are in imminent danger from being killed or badly injured, they do not have to retreat, even if it would seem reasonable to do so. They have the right to “stand their ground” and protect themselves.
The US Department of Justice has announced an investigation into the shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Florida in February.
Trayvon Martin, 17, was killed by neighbourhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, 28, while walking through a gated community in a suburb of Orlando.
Mr Zimmerman says he was acting in self-defence.
More and more cases of intolerance and discrimination against Christians in Europe are being recorded. At the same time, increasing media interest has given voice to the anonymous suffering of people’s cases which are gaining international significance. This emerges from the 2011 report on cases of intolerance and discrimination against Christians in Europe released…[this week] on the website of the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe….Martin Kugler is a member of the Observatory, and described their work: “Our NGO”¦ started to cover these issues because there is a growing awareness in some international organisations like the United Nations or the OSCE who are concerned about human rights, and especially religious freedom. And the new and growing phenomenon in the western world in some countries in Europe is a kind of marginalisation of Christians.”
Two nuns in Upper Egypt faced “unimaginable fear”–with one later hospitalized over the emotional trauma–when 1,500 Muslim villagers brandishing swords and knives trapped them inside a guesthouse last week and threatened to burn them out.
The next day, the assailants frightened children at the school; attendance has since dropped by more than a third.
French police are linking the shootings of four people at a Jewish school in Toulouse to the killings of three soldiers of North African descent in two separate incidents last week.
The same gun and the same stolen scooter were used in all three attacks, sources close to the investigation say.
A teacher and three children were shot dead at the Ozar Hatorah school, and a teenage boy was seriously injured.
Burned-out rubble is all that’s left of Christian shopkeeper Abskharon Suleiman’s appliance store in the northern Egyptian village of Sharbat. His home was destroyed as well as shops owned by his adult children ”“ all targeted because they are Christians.
A man aged 20 has been arrested in northern Italy on suspicion of plotting an attack on a synagogue in Milan.
The suspect, described as Moroccan-born, was said to have had details of the synagogue and plans for an attack on his computer.
Police in London said a 40-year-old woman was also arrested on suspicion of collecting information useful to terrorism.
Everyone willing to follow the Lord is supposed to have listened in some way to this seemingly imperious command: “Come!” a command which implies an act of faith, referred to sometimes as the “leap of faith.” As it is clear from the Scriptures, what we are able to see is not faith, as the biblical faith is defined as : “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” We have to decide “in spite of”’, in order to experience the power of God. But we need to remember that everything must be done according the Word of God. Peter did not experience the possibility to walk on water because he decided to leave the boat but because of the Word, the Command of the Lord.
The Word of God tell us to “expect to suffer hardship” and dishonor for the sake of His Name. Our Christian confession is not acceptable if we ignore this statement, if we do not manifest the patience of the Lord in our sufferings. Anybody ignoring it will be ashamed in that day.
Let us remember that sometimes the leap of faith leads us towards some impasses. Just as the Word led the sons of Israel leaving Egypt toward the impasse of the Red sea. These impasses are midway between promises of God and their fulfillments and they challenge our faith. Believers are to accept these challenges as a part of their spiritual course. The Son was challenged at Calvary in the hardest way, as it is written in the Scriptures….
An estimated 100 people have been killed in South Sudan in the latest of a series of ethnic clashes and cattle raids, officials say.
Jonglei state Law Enforcement Minister Gabriel Duop Lam told the BBC that at least 200 people had been injured.
The BBC’s James Copnall, in Khartoum, says these figures suggest the attacks were on a very large scale.
US President Barack Obama has promised that international forces will not “rush for the exits” in Afghanistan, after an American soldier was accused of murdering 16 civilians.
Mr Obama said foreign troops must be withdrawn in a responsible way.
The killings in Kandahar province have strained relations between Afghans and foreign forces.
All the signs are that the United States military and its NATO allies have not only outlived their welcome in Afghanistan but also passed the point at which their presence is anything other than toxic. While the exact details of the incident are still unclear, it’s known that early Sunday morning, an American solider in Kandahar province’s Panjwai district apparently murdered up to sixteen Afghan civilians in cold blood. Nine of the victims were reportedly children. This is merely the latest in a string of episodes in which American soldiers””in spite of the positive intentions of an overwhelming majority of the troops there””have shown scorn, disrespect, and, increasingly and tragically, hatred for the people of the country hosting them.