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BRAZIL: Some politicians are offering women tubal ligations in exchange for their votes. Most women who turn to the politicians are poor and black. In poor neighborhoods in the city of Salvador, vans with candidates’ names cruise the streets and set up free sterilizations. People respond by the droves, the “Washington Post” reports. Brazil’s fertility rate has plummeted from 4.3 children in 1980 to 2 today. But those who get sterilized remain poor. Health organizations, civil rights groups and relief workers contend that such programs feed racist thinking about who should and shouldn’t have children. Some employers, who don’t want to hire women likely to take maternity leave, require proof of sterilization before they’ll hire them. Said the head of one health organization, “You solve poverty by expanding the economy through greater educational opportunities, through land reform. You have to create opportunities for women, not restrict them.” Said another: “If you want to lift someone out of poverty, what is better —educating them or sterilizing them?”

CENTRAL AMERICA: Rising hunger and poverty could lead to political instability if the isthmus doesn’t spend more on agriculture, says the head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Hunger rose 50 percent in the 1990s in Central America even though those hungry in the rest of Latin America either decreased or remained the same. Part of the cause is coffee prices that plummeted worldwide two years ago.

CHINA: Police arrested 100 house church leaders June 11 as they gathered for a retreat in the central city of Wuhan. Among those detained was Xing Jinfu, 39, who has been arrested three previous times for church-related activities. That same day, Shen Xianfeng, a senior leader of the China Gospel Fellowship (CGF), was placed under house arrest. The mass arrest of CGF leaders seems to confirm concerns that the Chinese Communist Party has not changed its repressive religious policies under the leadership of President Hu Jintao…China’s one-child policy decreed by the government in 1979 has leveled off the country’s population to 1.3 billion; without it, China’s population would be 1.6 billion. Because boys are generally favored over girls, sex-selective abortion is widespread, though illegal. China has the world’s most gender-skewed population. While the normal birth rate is about 104 males for every 100 females, China’s ratio is 118 to 100. Because of this, however, China’s population is quickly aging. One Chinese economist decries the potential disaster of few young people caring for many elderly: “We will have the social burden of a rich country and the income of a poor country. No country has faced the same circumstances before.”

EL SALVADOR: Families desperate to survive are sending their children to hard, dangerous work in sugar cane fields for paltry wages. Some 5,000 of these children are under age 18. From age 5 many begin toiling with foot-long machetes, which often cut them. After coffee, sugar is this Central American country’s top crop. Child labor continues the vicious circle by keeping the next generation in the same menial, low-paying work as their parents, typically keeping them from getting an education. Hiring children is attractive to employers because they typically earn less but do the same job as an adult, which depresses wages. The average Salvadoran sugar cane worker’s monthly salary is $75, not enough to pay basic food needs.

IRAN: Police freed Christian pastor Khosroo Yusefi July 6, six weeks after he, his wife Nasrin and two teenage children were arrested in Chalous, a coastal city on the Caspian Sea, “Compass Direct” reports. Yusefi and another Christian believer are the last freed of several dozen evangelicals arrested in May. On June 8 other church leaders jailed with them were freed. Yusefi was jailed May 23 with his and family. A week later, his family was allowed to return home. Yusefi, in his late 40s, converted from Baha’i nearly 20 years ago. He was overseeing unregistered Assemblies of God house churches in the Caspian area when he was arrested. One source reported that the jailed Christians were ordered to stop meeting for worship and to “stop talking about Jesus.” The theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran forbids proselytizing among Muslims.

KYRGYZSTAN: Christians watching this former Soviet republic say that Muslim anger is rising because of conversions to Christianity. The government may launch a campaign against “proselytism.” A report by IslamOnline quoted Russian media in saying that five percent of the majority Islamic population has converted to Christianity because of spreading missionary work. The director of Kyrgyzstan’s religious affairs committee says that the percentage of Muslims declined from 84 percent in 2001 to 79.3 percent in 2004. The director warned that such Christian mission groups endanger national security and may trigger an ethnic conflict or ignite a religious war.

NEPAL: Ten aid agencies from Japan, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom say their workers are being intimidated and extorted by Maoist terrorists, who have also put bombs in offices and threatened property. These agencies have stopped development work in five districts in western Nepal, “Christianity Today” reports. Average annual income in Nepal is $220. Among Nepal’s 26.4 million population are a half-million Christians.

RUSSIA: Jehovah’s Witnesses can be legally banned from Moscow; a court there confirmed June 16. In Russia’s 1997 law on religion, Orthodox Christianity was cited as the country’s predominant religion. The law also pledges respect for what it terms “traditional religions”—Islam, Judaism and Buddhism. The recent ban bodes badly for minority faiths. Some 10,000 JWs live in Moscow and 133,000 live across Russia. The first legal moves to oust the group began in 1998.