For over a decade, Cuba has endured shocking shortages of everything from food and clothing to jobs and transportation. Cubans do not lack a sense of humor, however, and can still joke about their poverty.
A fourth American has been confirmed dead after a March 15 attack on five humanitarian workers in northern Iraq.
Three Americans researching needs for humanitarian projects in northern Iraq were killed and two were wounded in a drive-by shooting March 15 in Mosul. The workers were in the area under the auspices of the Southern Baptist International Mission Board.
An American missionary couple and a Ugandan student have been killed in an attack on a Christian agricultural training center in Northwestern Uganda. According to police reports seven armed and uniformed men entered the premises of the school near Yumbe during the night of March 19.
Persecuted Christians in Turkmenistan began an uncertain week Monday, March 15, after autocratic President Saparmurat Niyazov announced he would allow all religious communities “to gain official registration” regardless of how many members they have.
Three Christians will appear in a Chinese court on Monday, facing charges of “providing intelligence to overseas organizations.”
On the afternoon of March 4, public security police units surrounded the Quoc Thanh Theater at 271 Nguyen Trai Street in central Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam, in an attempt to stop a joint worship celebration organized by evangelical Christian house churches, organizers reported.
On February 28, a Nigerian court sentenced three men to death for killing a Christian pastor and attacking worshippers at his the church seven years ago.
A leading human rights group investigating the plight of persecuted Christians in Islamic nations warned Friday, March 5, that Iraq’s interim constitution will not end Muslim violence and discrimination experienced by Iraq’s Christian minority.
A recent upsurge in violence in southern Plateau State in Nigeria has claimed at least 100 lives and in the worst single incident so far, at least 48 people were murdered, many during an early morning prayer service on February 24.
An angry mob of Quechua-speaking Indians destroyed the only evangelical church in the remote village of Chucarasi in the Bolivian Andes on February 28 after beating a congregational elder unconscious. Villagers apparently attacked their Christian neighbors because they blamed them for a hail storm that damaged local crops.
Law enforcement authorities in Vietnam are subjecting house church leaders who confront injustice to relentless harassment, according to sources in Ho Chi Minh City. The renewed pressure is thought to be retaliation for recent incidents where police have had to retreat from persecuting Christians because of effective local and international advocacy.
Christians in Laos have been told they will be killed if they do not give up their faith or leave their village.
Eighteen families of the indigenous Huichol tribe in Tenzompa, Jalisco, Mexico, — more than 80 adults and children, in all — are threatened with expulsion from their homes for the “crime” of believing in the Christian gospel.
Christian leaders in India have released a joint statement in response to allegations made by the weekly newspaper Tehelka against the Christian community. In its inaugural issue on January 30 and a second issue on February 8, Tehelka claimed Christians were carrying out “the conversion agenda of U.S. President George Bush,” and using the HIV/AIDS problem as “an opportunity for evangelism.”
A Chinese house church leader is on the run from Public Security Bureau officers after his church was raided February 9.