LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA (ANS) — Joni Eareckson Tada, well-known for her Christian disability ministry around the world, took on the case for re-inserting Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube before an audience of millions during a cable television program that aired March 24, 2005.
An Iranian Colonel who, despite Western protests, was jailed last month for his alleged “illegal” conversion to Christianity is held at Tehran’s notorious maximum-security prison with well-known political and religious dissidents, a Christian news agency reported late Friday, March 11.
Another 31 Eritrean Christians have been jailed by police in towns north of the capital Asmara over the past 10 days. The latest police sweeps brings the total to 187 arrests for “illegal” Christian activities in Eritrea since the beginning of January.
A brutal attack on a Christian book publisher in Ukraine has underscored the high stakes struggle over human rights and religious liberty in the former Soviet republic preparing for a re-run of a sharply contested presidential election.
Religious minorities and the Kosovo office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) are seriously concerned by a draft religion law being discussed by Kosovo’s government.
Protestant ministers in the United States generally believe that religious persecution is a major problem in today’s world, and they believe the U.S. should impose sanctions against countries where this is occurring. These findings have just been released from a research study conducted among Protestant clergy in America.
Christians in Sri Lanka continue to face violent attacks and intimidation following the parliamentary elections in early April. Over 45 churches have been attacked since January, and during the past year more than 140 churches have been forced to close, due to attacks, intimidation and threats.
In what the mass-circulation Hurriyet newspaper called a “jet acquittal,” a criminal court in southeastern Turkey dropped all charges yesterday against a Protestant pastor accused of opening an “illegal” church.
Juan Carlos Gonzalez Leiva, a blind Christian human rights lawyer, was given a four year sentence yesterday for his stand for human rights in Cuba.
A criminal court in southeast Turkey has for the second time pressed charges against a Turkish Protestant pastor in Diyarbakir, this time accusing him of “opening an illegal church.”
Persecuted Chinese House Church leaders, including tortured and sexually abused women, have for the first time testified at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights amid claims that the Beijing government is increasing pressure on unregistered churches and active believers, ASSIST News Service (ANS) learned Monday April 5.
In January 2004, top cadres of China’s Religious Affairs Bureau and the policy-making United Front Work Department met for the annual National Religious Working Conference.
It was back in 1999 that the Turkmenistan government declared its intention to “strangle minority faiths. All foreign Christians were expelled and the persecution of national believers, especially ethnic Turkmen, intensified intolerably.
Iraqi Christians who have become targets of attacks by Muslim extremists and bandits are risking their lives to attend church services, ASSIST News Service (ANS) has established.
KABUL/ISLAMABAD (ANS) — The trial of eight Western aid workers accused of spreading Christianity in mainly Moslim Afghanistan resumed in the Afghan Capital Kabul Sunday, September 30, as family members pleaded to United States President George W. Bush to postpone retaliatory action against the country.
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN (ANS) — As the United States began a second day of air and missile attacks against Afghanistan Monday October 8, round the clock prayers intensified for twenty-four Christian aid workers held in a prison of the country’s ruling Taliban regime.
BAGHDAD, IRAQ (ANS) — Iraqi Christians who have become targets of attacks by Muslim extremists and bandits are risking their lives to attend church services, ASSIST News Service (ANS) has established.
An Arab convert to Christianity was killed in a bomb blast last night outside his Tripoli apartment, adjacent to the home of a European missionary family thought to have been targeted in the attack.
Turkmenistan’s most prominent religious prisoner, the Baptist Shageldy Atakov, has been freed before the end of his four-year sentence, Keston News Service has learnt. The US-based Russian Evangelistic Ministries and the German-based Friedensstimme Mission, which maintain close ties with Baptists in the former Soviet republics, have both confirmed that Atakov was released from prison in the Caspian port city of Turkmenbashi (formerly Krasnovodsk) early on 8 January and has now been reunited with his wife Artygul and five children in the town of Kaakhka close to Turkmenistan’s southern border with Iran. “Jesus has given me a Christmas gift,” Atakov was quoted as saying (many Christians in the region celebrate Christmas on 7 January).
The hearing in the case to liquidate the Love Baptist Church in the Azerbaijani capital Baku was postponed yesterday (23 January), the church’s pastor Sary Mirzoyev told Keston News Service from Baku. The Narimanov district court had been due to hear the suit, brought by Rafik Aliev, chairman of the State Committee for Relations with Religious Organisations, in the afternoon of 23 January (see KNS 18 January 2002) but the court agreed to the defendant’s request to postpone the hearing because of ill health. Yahya Mamedov, the church’s deacon and administrator, suffers from diabetes. No date has yet been set for a new hearing, but it is likely to be in about ten days’ time.