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Two vast underground aquifers, storing billions of liters of water, have been discovered in the poorest and least developed area of Kenya. The finds, in Turkana county in the north west, were uncovered using new technology to interpret ground-penetrating radar from satellites.
Deep in China’s “spirit world,” an inflation crisis is brewing that would give central bankers chills. For hundreds of years, Chinese have burned stacks of so-called “ghost money” for their ancestors to help ensure their comfort in the afterlife. The fake bills resemble a gaudier version of Monopoly money, emblazoned with the beatific-looking image of the Emperor of the Underworld.
“Each community is “mature” when it professes faith, celebrates it with joy during the liturgy, lives charity, proclaims the Word of God endlessly, leaves one’s own to take it to the “peripheries,” especially to those who have not yet had the opportunity to know Christ,” Francis says in his message for the 87th World Mission Day which will be celebrated next October 20, just after the end of the Year of Faith.
Unemployment, poverty and political marginalization are contributing to the Islamic radicalization of Kenya’s youth, a situation, experts say, that must be addressed through economic empowerment and inclusive policies.
Shakti Samuha, a group of former Nepali sex slaves that frees Asian women and girls from human trafficking in India and China, is among the five recipients of the ‘Ramon Magsaysay Award’ for 2013. Viewed as Asia’s Nobel Prize, the award recognizes people and organizations that have distinguished themselves for changing their societies for the better. The Filipino government, which established the award in 1958, announced.
The true extent of female genital mutilation or cutting is huge, a report from UNICEF last July revealed. It says that a total of 125 million women and girls are now living with the consequences of FGM – and yet the report suggests that the practice continues only because of social convention, while most women and men wish it would end.
On papal trips, what one usually gets are pieces of a pope’s vision, meaning speeches targeted for special groups or occasions that beckon one emphasis or another. Every now and then, however, a pope has a chance to lay out his views in a programmatic fashion, and brought one of those rare moments in a speech Francis delivered to Brazil’s bishops. Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said the Pope’s speech was the longest of Francis’ papacy so far and, if not its most important, certainly “very significant.” Five ideas loomed over the rest:
Cardinal Oswald Gracias underlined the positive impact of Pope Francis in India and Asia during an interview, in Rome, with Gerard O’Conell from the Vatican Insider/La Stampa. When asked about the 100 first days of the pontificate, he was rather enthusiastic about its effect on India: “Very, very positive! Very positive, in the sense that here’s a country with a lot of poverty also while there’s been great progress, and he’s struck a cord immediately with his consistent concern for the poor, the marginalized, and also telling the Church to be for the poor. India’s Catholics have been very impressed as well as the general populace who are not Catholic. He’s getting lots of publicity, everything he says is covered by the secular press, and his pictures appear very often in our papers.”
Last fall, Dwain Adkins was about to be released from prison after serving a six-year sentence for aggravated assault. He had no family to return to on the outside and had not been accepted into a halfway house. “My biggest fear was being homeless,” he said. “It was hard for me to fathom that. It tore me up.” Finally, one week before his release, Adkins got word from Dismas House in Nashville that he would have a place to stay. “Dismas gives guys like me an opportunity, and for that I’m grateful,” he told the Tennessee Register, newspaper of the Nashville diocese.
The Vatican communiqué issued after the meeting between Pope Francis and the President of El Salvador, Carlos Mauricio Funes Cartagena, expressly mentions the late Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero. If any further confirmation was needed about the speeding up – since the arrival of the new Pope – of the beatification cause for the prelate who was gunned down by death squads in 1980, that arrived promptly. And not just in the form of a statement by some influential figure or other, but with a phrase written in black and white on a high-level, official document, like those which are published after visits by heads of state to the Vatican.
