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European Union leaders, faced with a staggering migration crisis and deep divisions over how to tackle it, managed to agree early Thursday to boost border controls to ease the influx and to send 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) to international agencies helping refugees at camps near their home countries.
Schools are at the heart of the problem but, at the same time, they are the key to defeating terrorism and religious extremism in Pakistan. Many are adamant about this: experts, educators, bishops, civil society organizations, politicians and scholars alike. “For as long as the jihad begins in the classroom and religious hatred is fostered through state school textbooks, it will not be easy to imagine this country as one that exudes tolerance, a peace-building country that strives for harmony,” Professor James Paul Anjum explained to Vatican Insider. Mr. Anjum is a Christian and president of the Pakistan Minorities Teachers’ Association (PMTA).
Continuing the Vatican’s full-court environmental press, Pope Francis, recently, called for radical change in the mining industry, demanding greater respect both for nature and for the human rights of workers. The mining industry, he said, is “called upon to adopt a behavior inspired by the fact that we constitute a single human family.”
In North Korea, state-controlled local elections saw a 99.97% voter turnout on Sunday, July 19, state media reported. New representatives, put forward by the ruling party, were elected.
One in five migrant workers – about 50 million people – lives and works in Europe, making the region home to a quarter of global remittance flows, according to a new report by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).
For more than 14 years, a group of Indonesian nuns has been developing organic farming methods to grow food while protecting the environment through a form of lay apostolate that has attracted the attention of many farmers, most of them Muslims.
The maltreatment of children costs countries in East Asia and the Pacific US$209 billion per year, the equivalent to 2% of the region’s GDP, according to a newly-released study by UNICEF. The report drew on more than 360 studies of child maltreatment produced across the region since 2000, with emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect, the witnessing of domestic violence and death from maltreatment, all given an estimated cost.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warns that two out of every three people in the world could be living under stressed water conditions in 10 years. The warning came as the U.N. marked the World Day to Combat Desertification last June 17 FAO said land degradation and desertification undercut human rights, starting with the right to food and water.
Through 17 months of conflict, tens of thousands of people have been killed in South Sudan and two million more displaced. Schools, health centers and markets have been looted and destroyed. It took a $1.8 billion humanitarian response last year for the country to avoid a famine. And it’s about to get even worse.
Families across Asia continue to await information about loved ones who have forcibly disappeared while thousands of such individuals languish in unknown prisons around the region. “Asia has the most number of cases of enforced disappearance around the world,” said Mary Aileen Bacalso, secretary general of the Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearance (AFAD), on the occasion of this year’s observance of the International Week of the Disappeared. Bacalso said that, in Kashmir alone, some 8,000 young men vanished in the 1990s, most of whom are believed to be buried in unmarked graves.
