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AFRICA: More than 15 million Africans held simultaneous prayer services in rugby stadiums and other venues for the fourth annual Transformation Day of Prayer. Christians prayed for healing the continent of AIDS, famine, drought and social instability. The May 2 event spread across Africa’s 53 countries. Event founder Graham Power said this marked the first year the whole continent prayed together.

COLOMBIA: The drug-fueled 40-year-long war has created the Western Hemisphere’s worst humanitarian disaster, the UN humanitarian chief says. It has displaced 2 million people and threatened entire indigenous peoples with extinction. In addition to killing 3,500 people a year, the war’s displaced people become stuck in a cycle of poverty with no hope, education or future. Some young Colombians’ only job prospects are crime or joining one of several illegal armed groups that have besieged the nation. (See p. 4 article.)

CZECH REPUBLIC: In 10 years, the sex trade has gone from nearly nonexistent to a $100 million industry. The government’s interior ministry study counted more than 860 brothels. Police estimate that 15,000 women and children work as prostitutes. The country has become a destination for sex tourists. In response, however, the government has proposed to legalize the sex trade.

HUNGER: The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that almost 55 million undernourished people are in Latin America and the Caribbean. Its goal to halve world hunger by 2015 is unattainable at current rates even in 150 years, an FAO official says. The roots of hunger lie largely in poverty and lack of investment in the rural sector, where 70 percent of the world’s hungry people live. “As long as we are unable to fight the causes of this situation, we will remain in this vicious circle of unanswerable demands,” the official said. Hunger has risen markedly in Central America in the past decade.

INDIA: Religious freedom triumphed when Sonia Gandhi’s Congress Party won the May general election, although the former government supporters’ propaganda campaign against her led her to resign from party leadership. Gandhi nominated a Sikh, former finance minister Manmohan Singh, to be India’s first non-Hindu prime minister. Ghandi’s foes claimed Italian-born Roman Catholics would support Hindus’ conversion to Christianity. While bitterly disappointed, Indian Christians continued to celebrate. “Civil society is now looking forward to the rejection of the Hindutva (Hindu nation) agenda that has affected many areas of Indian life,” Joseph D’Souza, president of the All India Christian Council told Compass Direct. “A national anti-conversion law is now out of the question.”

MISSIONS: A greater-than-expected response to the Southern Baptist International Mission Board’s 2003 Lottie Moon Christmas Offering prompted IMB trustees to send 200 more workers abroad in 2004. In April, the offering stood at almost $127 million, a figure that’s about 18 percent ahead of the same period last year. The IMB had to limit appointments and cut stateside staff in June 2003 because income from churches wasn’t keeping pace with the growing number of new missionaries coming forward for overseas service.

SOUTH KOREA: Missionaries from South Korea are targeting Muslim lands to spread the gospel. The BBC reports that 12,000 South Korean missionaries are sent around the world and each year 1,000 new ones join them. In April, gunmen in Iraq kidnapped seven South Korean evangelical pastors who had gone to set up a ministry. The gunmen released them the same day. One of the seven, Huh Min-yong, told the news agency that he had no regrets: “We must go to Iraq and the Middle East even if we become martyrs. We must plant the cross so true peace can come. Spreading the word of Jesus can only be done with blood and sacrifice.”

SPAIN: In the wake of militant Islamic attacks in Madrid that killed 191 people on March 11, the government plans to triple its anti-terrorist force and stop radical Muslims from operating through small makeshift mosques. The coordinator for those attacks preached in such a place. The new Spanish interior minister proposed creating a mandatory registry of all religions’ clerics and worship places, and monitoring all sermons. Muslim reaction was so strong that the minister retracted the proposal. Spain has 600,000 Muslims.

TURKEY: The government’s directorate of religious affairs has ordered imams in the nation’s 70,000 mosques to promote women’s rights in their sermons. The imams must tell worshipers that “honor killings” are a sin and unlawful. In honor killings, men murder their wives, sisters or other female relatives for shaming the family, often for the “sin” of having been raped. Turkey is among the Muslim world’s most secular nations. The UN Human Rights Commission’s representative on violence against women said of the decree, “To have the head of the Religious Affairs Ministry seeing women’s rights as important may in itself bring about change. He can reach people the human-rights advocates often cannot-the 15 million men in Turkey who attend services every Friday.” Decades ago the government outlawed women’s head coverings, but traditional society still oppresses many Turkish women.

UGANDA: President Yoweri Museveni helped turn the tide against rising HIV/AIDS infection in the early 1990s and made the country the world’s greatest success story in the war against the pandemic. Now he is decrying a move to pass out condoms to the nation’s schoolchildren. Museveni helped champion the 1993 program “ABC,” which stands for abstinence, be faithful to your spouse, and condoms as a “harm-reducing tool.” Harm reduction means that condoms are a last resort to mitigate danger to innocent victims, such as those married to unfaithful spouses. International AIDS experts credit ABC with reducing Uganda’s infection rates from 15 to just 5 percent of the population within a few years. Museveni told Kampala’s newspaper The Monitor, “We cannot start promoting immorality in schools.”