World in Brief

Islamist terrorists from the East Indonesia Mujahideen killed four Christian farmers in Poso district in Central Sulawesi province. The farmers were working in a coffee plantation in Kalimago village when they were attacked by five men wielding swords.

The police were told wounds were seen on two of the victims’ necks. There were unconfirmed reports that one had been beheaded. A police spokesman said the attack was reported by a fifth farmer who escaped and recognised one of the perpetrators as being a member of East Indonesia Mujahideen.

Marta Shimoni Church, in the eastern Turkish village of Mehr, has been attacked and desecrated by persons unknown.

Marta Shimoni is a cave church built into the mountains, so cannot be destroyed as other church buildings have been. The destruction focused primarily against the Christian artefacts within the church, with crosses and other items strewn down the path leading away from the mountain church’s entrance. Mehr was primarily Chaldean Christian before surrounding conflict forced its evacuation in the early the 1990s.

Two Christian villages in Iraq’s Dohuk Province are reported to have been abandoned following bombardments by the Turkish military. Kesta village was completely evacuated and residents fled to nearby Chalke village. However, Chalke village was itself then emptied except for one individual.

The purpose of the bombardments is to enable Turkey to establish new military bases in the area. Some allege that the timing of the operation was deliberately chosen to coincide with the anniversary of Turkey’s Ottoman-era genocide against Christians.

Muslims in eastern Uganda, upset with a pastor’s plans to build a church on land they sought to buy, are suspected to have poisoned him.

Pastor Yolonim Oduchu, of Raraka village, Pallisa District, died after he declined to sell five acres within the Raraka trading centre to Muslims who wanted to build a school and mosque there. His brother Francis said the Muslims had wanted to buy the land for some time, but their offer was too low and his brother wanted to build a new church on part of it.

Fulani herdsmen in north-central Nigeria kidnapped a pastor’s wife from her home and two nurses from a hospital, while other Islamic extremists may have joined herdsmen in abducting more than 70 people from one village.

Fulaki Ozigi was kidnapped along with her husband (Mercy Place Ministry Church pastor Ozigi Hassan) and their four children and taken from their home in Kudenda, in Kaduna state. Police pursuing the herdsmen into the forest were able to recover the pastor and the children, but the kidnappers escaped with Fulaki.

Two hundred and seventy evangelical pastors have died due to Coronavirus in one state of Mexico alone, it is reported.

This amounts to almost eight and a half per cent of the 3,200 registered evangelical ministers in the area – which is centred on the city of Toluca de Lerdo.

According to Pedro Antonio Mena, the head of Religious Affairs Unit, the deaths are directly related to the coronavirus or to its complications, such as pneumonia or heart attacks. 72 priests and 15 Catholic nuns have also died in the same state.

The Bolivian Evangelical University has agreed to lend its premises, personnel and resources to immunise the population of the city of Santa Cruz against Covid-19.

The agreement aims to speed up immunisation in the area most affected by the third wave of the pandemic, which has reached peaks of more than 1,000 infections per day. To date, the regional Ministry of Health has reported that over 255,000 first doses and more than 79,000 second doses have been administered.

Two European Parliaments have defeated proposed attempts to legalise gender self-identification. In both cases, over 70% of parliamentarians voted against them.

In Spain, Congress voted down the ‘Trans Draft Law’, put forward by Catalan party ERC and supported by leftists Podemos. The latter is one of the two coalition government parties, holding the Equality Ministry in charge of Feminist and LGBT issues.

The German Bundestag also voted against two gender self-identification proposals presented by the liberal party FDP and the Greens. Measures defeated included bringing down the age of gender self-identification to 14.

The Chinese Government has tightened its control over Christian content within cyberspace by banning Christian videos and taking down Christian music and articles.

A notice declared that music with sensitive religious lyrics would be removed as music platforms such as Kugou and Kuwo changed their auditing rules. Many shared playlists containing sacred music or Christian hymns were re-audited or removed on Netease Cloud Music, a freemium music streaming service. Playlists of Hillsong and classic worship music were deleted.

France’s Ministry of Education has prohibited the use of gender ‘inclusive’ language, saying it harms learning French.

The ministry issued a decree to end the use of ‘midpoints’ in schools. Midpoints, full-stop-like dots in the middle of words, separate most of the word from its ending, which designates it as either masculine or feminine. They are used in place of both masculine and feminine word endings. The prestigious Academie Francaise, the institution entrusted with preserving the French language, has stated that ‘gender-inclusive’ words are ‘harmful’ to it.

A gang of about 15 radical Hindu nationalists have shot dead 52-year-old Bhima Bumbariya, the father of a pastor, and wielded swords and sickles to attack other family members.

The men attacked the family of Pastor Ramesh Bumbariya at his home in the Bansawra District in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, saying they were targeted because they refused to renounce their Christian faith. A man in the mob pointed a gun at Ramesh’s head but it misfired. He then shot dead Bhima.

Iranian Christians Amin Khaki, Milad Goodarzi and Alireza Nourmohammadi have been arrested and charged with ‘propaganda that educates in a deviant way contrary to the holy religion of Islam’.

The charge is under recently-added Article 500 of Iran’s Islamic Penal Code that further chokes freedom of religious expression in the country. If found guilty, they could face between two and five years in prison and/or a fine. The three men – who have been released on bail – must report to the intelligence branch of Iran’s police force every week for the next six months.

A further 36 Christian prisoners have been released in Eritrea. Twenty-two are women rounded up by the authorities at a prayer meeting in the capital Asmara. One man from this group is still being detained.

The second group to be released is 14 Christian men who were arrested four years ago and held in Dahlak Island Prison on the Red Sea. Twelve other Christians, who were seized recently in Assab for attending a prayer meeting, are still behind bars.

Kazakhstan courts have so far this year fined at least 17 people for distributing religious literature, texts, videos, audio and items in places and ways the regime declares illegal under its compulsory religious censorship. Most fines averaged about three weeks’ wages.

‘People don’t have the right to distribute religious materials in any form whatsoever, whether text, video or audio,’ insisted Kayrulla Kushkaliyev of Atyrau’s Religious Affairs Department, which brought six prosecutions.

Armed men, suspected to be jihadist militants, have attacked a baptism ceremony in the village of Adjarara, Oudalan province, killing 15 people.

Many others were forced to flee the village, located in mainly Christian northern Burkina Faso near the border with Mali, in fear of their lives. While no jihadist group has claimed responsibility for the attack, groups affiliated to both Al Qaeda and so-called Islamic State are active across Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. The region, together with Nigeria, has recently become the epicentre of global jihadist activity.