A court in Egypt has jailed four police personnel, including a captain and a plainclothes informant, for beating a man to death during interrogation.Three of the accused, including the captain, were sentenced to seven years. A fourth received a three-year term.
Egypt has seen been a number of recent high-profile incidents and allegations of routine abuse of detainees.
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A British teacher has been charged in Sudan with insulting religion, inciting hatred and showing contempt for religious beliefs.The Foreign Office has confirmed that charges have been laid against Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool.
She was arrested in Khartoum after allowing her class of primary school pupils to name a teddy bear Muhammad.
Foreign Secretary David Miliband has said he will summon the Sudanese ambassador “as a matter of urgency”.
In a statement, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was “surprised and disappointed” at the charges.
A spokesman said the first step was to “understand the rationale behind the charge”, something which would be discussed by Mr Miliband and the ambassador as soon as possible.
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Investigative committee omits Islamist causes, killings in report to state officials.
KANO, Nigeria, November 28 (Compass Direct News) - A Kano state committee investigating the September 28 Muslim rioting in Tudun Wada Dankadai learned at public hearings that 19 Christians were killed, but it only reported three deaths in its interim report to state authorities.
The committee, made up of nine Muslims and three Christians, discovered from at least two official sources that 17 Muslims and Islamic preacher Isa Jihad were responsible for starting the violence, but in its report to the state government it sought to blame the disturbance on Christian students.
Inexplicably, in its report to state authorities earlier this month the committee stated that Christian students began the violent rampage when they supposedly became upset that one had converted to Islam.
The nine Muslims on the committee overruled protests by the three Christians against withholding the total number of deaths and actual causes from the state government, said the Rev. Murtala Marti Dangora, a member of the committee. The panel found that Islamic agitators burned down 10 churches, 36 houses belonging to Christians, and looted and destroyed 147 Christian-owned shops.
The committee also found that the Muslim rampage displaced 350 Christian families and that there is not a single house belonging to a Christian now standing in Tudun Wada Dankadai.
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ISTANBUL, November 27 (Compass Direct News) - Police detained an Egyptian convert to Christianity on her wedding anniversary in Upper Egypt last week, her husband said.
Plainclothes officers arrested Siham Ibrahim Muhammad Hassan al-Sharqawi at 3 p.m. on Thursday (November 22) on the outskirts of Qena, 300 miles south of Cairo, according to an eyewitness. The reason for the arrest was not immediately clear.
The convert had attempted to leave a friend’s apartment building by a backdoor after realizing that plainclothes policemen were standing at the entrance, the source said.
Officers intercepted Al-Sharqawi, 24, on the street and took her to Qena’s security police headquarters, where she was interrogated until yesterday morning. Witnesses said that police treated the woman like a prostitute, calling her a “whore,” and threatening to beat her.
Sources gave conflicting reports about whether State Security Investigation officials used physical violence against Al-Sharqawi or limited themselves to only threats.
Many Egyptian Christian converts from Islam have been tortured at the hands of security police according to a report this month by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. A Christian helping converts in Alexandria told Compass that in December 2006 police applied electrical shocks to his genitals and other sensitive areas of his body for seven hours.
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London, Nov 28, 2007 / 02:30 pm (CNA).- British churches have expressed concern that legislation punishing hate crimes based on sexual orientation could be used to silence Christian disapproval of certain sexual behaviors.
Both the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales and the Church of England have issued a memorandum concerning an amendment to the Public Order Act of 1986 that would make incitement to hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation an offense punishable by law.”Christians engaged in teaching or preaching and those seeking to act in accord with Christian convictions in their daily lives need to be assured that the expression of strong opinions on marriage or sexuality will not be illegal,” the memorandum says.
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KANO, Nigeria, November 26 (Compass Direct News) - Christians said violence over elections in the Sumaila area this month included a strong religious element, with Muslims killing one Christian in an attack on a Christian settlement.
Eyewitnesses said violence broke out in the Gani electoral ward of Sumaila on November 17 after news reports showed that the Christian candidate for councillor for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Zara Gambo, was ahead in the polls, signifying the first ever victory for a Christian in the area.
As a result, they said, Muslims attacked Christians in Gani town and in Gani Mission, a Christian settlement in the area, injuring several of them, destroying their houses and shops and killing elementary school teacher Danyaro Bala. He is survived by a wife and 11 children.
Sani Duma, Bala’s younger brother, told Compass that he believes Muslims killed the local church elder in order to cow area Christians into submitting to Islam.
“Religion is at the center of this attack on us and the killing of my brother,” Duma said. “The selection of only houses of Christians and their shops for destruction shows clearly that Muslims were out to force us into submitting to their hold on political leadership.”
Coptic heritage rediscovered - Watani Newspaper
On the evening of Sunday 11 November, in an amazingly beautiful evening on the plaza court of the Coptic Museum, AUC Press launched The Churches of Egypt. Some 300 people attended; ambassadors, bishops, priests, dignitaries, and friends and members of the American University in Cairo (AUC) staff.
Three TV stations and other media venues covered the event while AUC photographers took photos.
Watani contacted Carolyn Ludwig, co-author and editor of the book, who was in Cairo for the launching of the book.
We hope you’re fine and enjoying your stay in Cairo.
My husband, Bruce Ludwig and I are very comfortable in Egypt, always.
Kindly brief us on whom Mrs Ludwig regards herself to be?
I regard myself to be a project driven woman. After raising our two daughters and working in the volunteer world I loved seeing my husband help other photographers and scientists realise their dreams in producing their work in books.
It was then that my first book, “Jewels In Our Crown, Churches of Los Angeles,” was begun. I believe all of us hear the voice of God in different ways during our lives. Some of us are fortunate enough to listen. I listened, and did the book of churches in Los Angeles with my niece, Brianne Sanada, doing the photography. The book showed the many different Christian denominations and how they began their communities in Southern California from 1850 up to 2000. Any profit from that book went to the Good Shepherd Center for Homeless Women and Children.
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WASHINGTON (CNN) — As many as 60 percent of the foreign fighters who entered Iraq in the past year have come from Saudi Arabia and Libya, according to documents discovered in a raid in September near the Syrian border, a senior U.S. military official in Baghdad confirmed to CNN Thursday.
A Syrian soldier stands guard at a border post with Iraq. The majority of foreign fighters coming into Iraq have entered via Syria.
The documents confiscated in that raid listed the identities of more than 700 foreign fighters in Iraq, whom the United States believes entered that country since August 2006. The official describes the documents as “an al Qaeda rolodex.”
Elegant paintings of prehistoric man threatened by actions of travelers in Egypt, Libya, Sudan.
By Charles Onians - CAIRO
A rising tide of travellers seeking out the new frontier of Egyptian tourism is threatening priceless rock art preserved for millennia in one of the most-isolated reaches of the Sahara.
In Egypt’s southwest corner, straddling the borders of Sudan and Libya, the elegant paintings of prehistoric man and beast in the mountains of Gilf Kabir and Jebel Ouenat are as stunning in their simplicity as anything by Picasso.
But lying 500 kilometres (330 miles) from the nearest habitation, the desert offers little sanctuary for these masterpieces and any effective protected designation first requires a deal between the three sometimes quarrelsome nations.
Not only the rock art is at stake, but the region’s entire cultural and natural heritage.
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By Archbishop Charles Chaput, O.F.M. Cap
Denver, Nov 21, 2007 / 07:30 pm (CNA).- The Roman statesman Cicero once said that, “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.” Gratitude expresses our dependence on others. By its nature, it leads to humility and wisdom, because a grateful heart understands than none of us is really independent. We have obligations to each other. We also have needs from each other. We’re designed to depend on each other as a family; and to depend as a family on God.Probably no other holiday speaks to the soul of the American experience like Thanksgiving. The origin of Thanksgiving is thoroughly religious. It’s also very specifically Christian. The Protestant Christians who began this tradition nearly 400 years ago practiced their gratitude in the midst of scarcity, disease, high mortality and a harsh new land. Precisely because of their suffering, they understood their own limitations; their radical dependence on God. For the people who started it, Thanksgiving was never about holiday sales, self-satisfied comfort or an annual nod to the generic Life Force. It was a personal conversation with God. At its heart, Thanksgiving has always been about acknowledging our dependence on God, and offering Him our love and gratitude. Obviously, people of any religious faith and no religious faith can have grateful hearts and can take part deeply in the joy of Thanksgiving. But scrubbing God out of the Thanksgiving experience - turning it into yet another secular excuse for consuming more products - leaves two basic questions unanswered: Who exactly are we thanking, and why are we thanking Him?
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