Lausanne World Pulse – World Pulse Archives – World Pulse Archives

AIDS: Life expectancies in parts of sub-Saharan Africa have plummeted to less than 33 years, according to a United Nations report issued in July. About 25 million of the world’s estimated 38 million HIV/AIDS sufferers are in Africa.

CHINA: In response to having the world’s most skewed ratio of baby boys to baby girls—118 to 100—aborting unborn children because of their sex will be banned, a government family planning official says. Chinese society values sons, so since the government moved to halt population growth by limiting couples to one child 25 years ago, many have aborted unborn daughters in hopes that their next child would be male. But the policy has led to fears that men won’t find wives, not only feeding crime but also trafficking in baby girls and women for wives.

INDIA: Widowed Australian missionary Gladys Staines is leaving India because she’s tired and needs rest. She says she would return to India to visit and keep her ministry going. In July, she dedicated a new 10-bed hospital named for her husband, Graham, who in 1999 was burned alive by a Hindu mob with their sons Philip, 10, and Timothy, 8. The Staineses worked 30 years with leprosy patients in Orissa.

INDONESIA: Papua is the most Christian region in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Islamic nation. Islam never penetrated the island’s rugged terrain. After decades of missionary labor, a church with a cross stands in almost every village. Papuans are becoming bold evangelists and taking the gospel to hard-core Muslim areas of the country. They minister in Java, Sumatra and Kalimantan. In July the Papua Cross-Cultural Institute opened to train evangelists who will target other parts of Indonesia and some of the few remaining unreached tribes of their own island. While only 20 slots were open for the first class, 100 applied.

IRAQ: While the overthrow of Saddam’s regime was believed to usher in an era of women’s rights, for many Iraqi women, chronic violence and rising religious conservativism are crushing hopes for freedom. Iraqi men are killing their female relatives they say have stained the family honor by doing things they deem un-Islamic. The number of “honor” killings since the United States’ March 2003 invasion may run into the hundreds.

MALARIA: While AIDS last year killed just more than 3 million people and is passing the bubonic plague as the worst disease ever to afflict humanity, malaria is nearly as deadly. Last year malaria afflicted 300 million people and killed 3 million. Most malaria victims are under age 5. But unlike AIDS, malaria can be cured. Cases of malaria in Africa have possibly quadrupled since the 1980s.

MORMONS: More Latin Americans are embracing Mormonism. In 1980, only 700,000 Mormons were in the region. According to church figures, today Latin America has 4.5 million of the 12 million Mormons worldwide.

MUSLIM WOMEN: Some Islamic women are balking at sex segregation at many North American mosques and are challenging their lack of inclusion in worship and communal life. In some mosques, women are pushing to eliminate partitions or walls or just rules that keep them from seeing or hearing the “imam.” In Canada, another group is working on a guide to make mosques women-friendly, suggesting prayer space that includes women, letting women attend lectures, and providing childcare during events. They represent a new generation of Muslim women raised and educated in North America who are immigrants or children of immigrants from Muslim countries.

SRI LANKA: Parliament is considering “The Act for the Protection of Religious Freedom,” a bill drafted by the Ministry for Buddhist Affairs. If passed, the law will state: “No person shall convert or attempt to convert another person to another religion, [or] provide assistance or encouragement towards such conversion to another religion.” If conversion is “committed” by a group, “every director or shareholder… partner, member, employee or officer of that group or company shall be guilty of an offense.” Last September, 1,500 Sri Lankan Buddhist monks called for a ban on Christian activity.

SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA: A UN report finds that Sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s only region where the number of those living in abject poverty has grown over the past 20 years—from 42 percent to 47 percent from 1981 to 2001. At the same time, absolute poverty dropped from 40 percent to 21 percent in the world as a whole. Developing trade and industry is the best way to relieve the region’s poverty, the report says.

UNITED STATES: American Protestants will lose their historic majority status and drop below 50 percent of the US population as soon as this year, finds a study by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. Mainline Protestant churches—Episcopal, Presbyterian and United Methodist, for example —have lost members for many years but those losses are offset in part by rising numbers of evangelicals.

ZIMBABWE: Claiming that Western-funded charities, church and human rights groups and other aid organizations are meddling in domestic politics and trying to return the country to colonial-era domination, President Robert Mugabe said lawmakers will be asked to pass the “Non-governmental Organizations and Churches Bill.” When made law, it will let authorities close some groups and arrest their officials. Mugabe has long accused these groups of siding with his opponents and with Great Britain, Zimbabwe’s former colonial power. He opened parliament with these words: “Non-governmental organizations must work for the betterment of our country. We cannot allow them to be used as conduits and instruments of foreign interference.” In Zimbabwe, average life expectancy is 33.1 years, and 25 percent of the population is HIV-positive.