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“Forests are an integral part of global sustainable development and food security. They are an antidote against a series of global inter-related challenges that humanity faces.”
By 2025, Asia’s GDP may reach $148 trillion in total, accounting for 51% of the global output, which is the most optimistic scenario of the Asia Development Bank (ADB) offered by ADB Chairman Haruhiko Kuroda. The draft report “Asia 2050-Building an Asian Millennium” was posed at the 44th ADB business summit, attended by finance ministers from Bangladesh, France, India, South Korea, vice ministers from China, Japan, SBV Governor and ADB Chairman.
The Vatican announced that Malaysia is the 179th nation to establish diplomatic ties with the Holy See. The announcement follows a visit of Najib Razak, the country’s prime minister, to Benedict XVI. The Vatican statement confirmed that the diplomatic relations will be at the level of Apostolic Nunciature on the part of the Holy See and of embassy on the part of Malaysia.
Spanish Jesuit Father Luís Ruiz Suarez, who dedicated his entire life to needy people in Macau and mainland China, died on July 27 at the age of 97. Father Ruiz was a giant because of his enormous heart. His missionary work in China began in 1941. It was interrupted by the Second Sino-Japanese War, and resumed after the war ended in 1945. When the Communists took control of China in 1949, he was imprisoned briefly and expelled from the country.
Archaeologists are asserting that they have uncovered the tomb of the Apostle Philip. The discovery took place in Pamukkale, former Hierapolis, in Western Anatolia, Turkey, the city where Philip died, after having preached in Greece and in Asia Minor.
The food crisis in the Horn of Africa (in the East coast of the continent) is likely to continue for most of 2011 and famine is expected to spread to the whole of southern Somalia. “The current food security emergency across the region is expected to persist at least for the coming months,” the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a new regional overview.
Myanmar’s catechists, who number around 2,000, are playing a vital role in the Church’s work by ministering in remote areas that priests cannot easily reach. Performing baptisms, leading funerals and preparing couples for matrimony are their main pastoral duties.
More than two years after Sri Lanka’s decades-long conflict officially ended, the whereabouts of 630 children are unknown, according to a government database. Most went missing during the final phase of the war that ended on 18 May 2009, when government forces declared victory over the now defeated Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who had been fighting for an independent Tamil homeland since 1983. According to reports cited by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 64% of those missing were recruited by the LTTE while 30% were last seen behind government lines.
Default, insolvency, fiscal irresponsibility, debt crisis and similar terms form part of the vocabulary used to describe countries in the developing South in the 1980s and 1990s. A decade later, the world seems to have turned upside down. The “irresponsible debtors” are now in the industrialized North, and the countries of South America, victims of the “lost decade” of the 1980s and the subsequent financial crises, are now working hard to protect themselves against contagion from the crisis in the United States and Europe. A meeting of economy ministers in Lima (Peru) and another scheduled for Buenos Aires (Argentina), where the ministers will be joined by central bank presidents, are being held to discuss the coordination of policies among the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) to deal with the knock-on effects of the crisis still lingering in the developed world.
Violence is the dominant theme of the daily news around the world. In Libya, Syria, Somalia, hundreds are dying and thousands are starving to death because of violence driven by ideological extremism. In the Philippines, a mini civil war is underway; mass killing is the preferred method of crushing dissent and subduing opposition and the struggle for freedom and equality. Here, Al Qaeda-linked groups’ battle for the ideal of Islamic “freedom” which can be more oppressive than what went before.
