Browse past isues
Help the mission
Support the mission
Get in touch
Believers are urged to replace religious artifacts in their homes with posters of the Communist Party leader if they want to benefit from poverty-relief efforts
Pollution costs Beijing 1.6 million lives per year, 17% of all deaths; 92% of Chinese people breathed at least 120 hours of unhealthy air between April and August 2014; 38% of the people live, on average, in an atmosphere harmful to health, according to U.S. environmental parameters. This was discovered by scientists at the University of Berkeley, who conducted research on Chinese territory using Google Maps platform that Beijing has blocked nationwide.
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.
