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Indian police have rescued hundreds of child slaves, as young as six, during days of raids on workshops in the central city of Hyderabad, a senior officer said.
Residents of Islampur, a remote village in the northern Bangladeshi district of Naogaon, were stunned one night last summer when the darkness was suddenly illuminated by electric lights coming from a village home. Why the surprise? The community has no connection to the country’s power grid. The owner of the house, Rafiqul Islam, is one of around 15M Bangladeshis whose homes are now powered by solar home systems, or SHS, under a government scheme to provide clean power to communities with no access to grid electricity.
Pope Francis has named 15 cardinal-electors “from 14 nations of every continent, showing the inseparable link between the Church of Rome and the particular Churches present in the world.” Their names were announced by Pope Francis after praying the Angelus with a crowd in St Peter’s Square and he formally inducted them into the College of Cardinals on February 14.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed to protect all religious groups, in an apparent response to a series of recent attacks on Christian institutions in New Delhi fueling concerns that minorities are being targeted by Hindu extremists.
With his unexpected broadside at the Vatican’s elite last Christmas, Pope Francis solidified his reputation for surprise. At times it almost seems this maverick pontiff should come with a warning label, like a pack of cigarettes: “Caution … predictions are hazardous to your health!”
WFP officials suspend voucher program that allows refugees to buy food and other necessities. About US$ 64 million are needed for December alone. Since the start of the conflict, the program has injected US$ 800 million in the economies of host countries.
While loved ones braced for the full impact of Typhoon “Hagupit” back home, Filipino activists in Lima urged climate negotiators recently to act, with more urgency, on drafting a global plan to limit such potentially life-threatening events.
The United Nations appealed for $16.4 billion to pay for global humanitarian needs in 2015, saying it needs that money to help 57.5 million of the world’s most vulnerable people.
The cardinal responsible for overseeing Pope Francis’ reform of the Roman Curia has confirmed that two new congregations will be set up and suggested that lay people could be appointed to lead some of Rome’s dicasteries.
Traffickers in Egypt and Libya are increasingly using children to drive boats of migrants to Italy. Many of these teenagers are then detained and imprisoned by the Italian authorities, facing up to 15 years in jail and fines of hundreds of thousands of euros.
