News Update—1/23/12

Sudan Threatens to Arrest Church Leaders
Sudan’s Ministry of Guidance and Religious Endowments has threatened to arrest church leaders if they carry out evangelistic activities and do not comply with an order for churches to provide their names and contact information, Compass Direct News reports.

The warning in a Jan. 3 letter to leaders of the Sudan Presbyterian Evangelical Church (SPEC) arrived just days after Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, announced that the country’s constitution would be more deeply entrenched in sharia (Islamic law).

“We will take legal procedures against pastors who are involved in preaching or evangelistic activities,” wrote Hamid Yousif Adam of the Ministry of Guidance to the church leaders. “We have all legal rights to take them to court.”

Sources said the order was aimed at oppressing Christians amid growing hostility toward Christianity. “This is a critical situation faced by our church in Sudan,” said the Rev. Yousif Matar, secretary general of SPEC.

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Muslim Brotherhood: Ultimate Goal ‘Mastership of the World’
Earlier this week, Egypt’s newly elected parliament announced that the extremist Muslim Brotherhood would hold a leadership role as speaker of the Islamic-majority governing body that is expected to be seated by the end of February.

According to Christian Solidarity Worldwide, the Muslim Brotherhood’s supreme leader, Dr. Muhammad Badi, said: “The Brotherhood is getting closer to achieving its greatest goal…. This will be accomplished by establishing a righteous and fair ruling system [based on Islamic sharia], with all its institutions and associations, including a government evolving into a rightly guided caliphate and mastership of the world.”

 Badi defined the long-term goal of the Brotherhood as “utilizing events, waiting, making appropriate preparations and prior designs, and a comprehensive and total reform of all aspects of life.”

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Laos Frees Christian Leaders, But Confiscates Churches
Seven Christian leaders who were detained and tortured for nearly a month in southern Laos have been released, but concerns remain about the confiscation of church buildings in the area, according to International Christian Concern.

The Christians, who were arrested for violating their village’s local traditional customs and spirit beliefs because of their Christian faith practices, were held in wooden stocks, sometimes combined with exposure to red fire ants as a form of torture, and forced to pay steep fines, said Sirikoon Prasertsee, director of the Human Rights Watch for Lao Religious Freedom.

While pleased the church leaders were released, Prasertsee said he remained concerned about churches being confiscated nearby. Authorities have barred Christians from entering two church buildings in Savannakhet province, and 23 others are at risk of government seizure.

The Christian minority in Laos is generally viewed as a threat to the communist government, although officials repeatedly deny human rights abuses against minorities.

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NYC’s 40 Percent Abortion Rate Highest in the U.S.
According to a recent report released by the local health department, the abortion rate in New York City is more than double the national average, CBN News reports.

Statistics show that 40 percent of all pregnancies in the city end in abortion, the highest rate in the United States. More than 83,000 abortions were performed in 2010, down 1 percent from 2009.

The report showed that the abortion rate was highest in the African-American community, with 60 percent of all pregnancies ending in abortion, and that pregnant teenagers had abortions 63 percent of the time.

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Pro-Life Activists Call for Support of ‘Sanctity of Human Life Sunday’
This Sunday, January 22, is Sanctity of Human Life Sunday, and pro-life activists are calling for national support.

In a Jan. 13, 1984 proclamation, then-president Ronald Reagan designated the third Sunday of January as “National Sanctity of Human Life Day,” a date chosen to coincide with the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case that legalized abortion in America. In the now almost 40 years since Roe v. Wade, the Guttmacher Institute estimates that more than 50 million abortions have taken place in the U.S.

Christian singer, author and pro-life activist Rebecca St. James is calling on Americans this Sunday to remember the pro-life cause and the mission of crisis pregnancy centers, who every day “empower women to choose life,” she said. Recent statistics show Americans are increasingly supporting the pro-life agenda, she added, and emphasized the need to let their voices and funding make a difference.

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Tebow Listed as America’s Favorite Pro Athlete
According to the monthly ESPN Sports Poll, Denver Broncos quarterback and professing Christian Tim Tebow is now America’s favorite active pro athlete. In the 18 years of the poll, only 11 different athletes have been No. 1, including Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and LeBron James, and nobody has been No. 1 so soon after the start of their professional career.

Former NFL quarterback Fran Tarkenton wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “…Isn’t it refreshing that the chatter around the NFL is about a great athlete with great character who says and does all the right things and is a relentless leader for his team—and not about more arrests and bad behavior from our presumptive ‘heroes’? Tim Tebow is the story of this football season, and a great story it is.”

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Fewer Children Being Born in the U.S., Under-18 Population Declines
The U.S. under-18 population fell between 2010 and 2011, for the first time in at least two decades, the Wall Street Journal reports. In July 2011, the under-18 population was 73,934,272, down 247,000 or 0.3 percent from July 2010.

According to an analysis of Census data by demographer William H. Frey of The Brookings Institution, fewer children are being born and “it doesn’t look like a youth boom will reverberate any time soon.”

States with the biggest drop in children tended to be concentrated in the Rust Belt and New England; every New England state’s under-18 population fell at least 1 percent from April 2010 to July 11.

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