Christians in India are facing horrific levels of violence from Hindu radical extremists as the government advances an agenda to turn the country into a Hindu nation.

A new report by a human rights group claims that despite a four-month coronavirus lockdown, Christians in India are facing an uptick in religiously-motivated persecution.

According to Persecution Relief, the four states of Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Chhatisgarh are now the most dangerous places for Christians, where beatings, arrests, church destruction, and at times death, are regular occurrences.

“The police will be called and at times the Christian will be arrested and accused of creating communal disharmony, accused of causing problems by being a Christian,” Todd Nettleton of Voice of the Martyrs told CBN News.

“Prime Minister Modi was elected last year and he promised to make India more Hindu,” Nettleton said. “They believe that India is a Hindu nation, literally the soil is Hindu soil, and if you want to live there you should be a Hindu.”

For more than seven decades, India has been held together by its secular constitution, rich culture, and pluralistic values.

Now, human rights groups say all that is under threat as Modi and his political party pursue an aggressive and deadly agenda of trying to turn India into a Hindu nation.

A naturalized American citizen and pastor’s son has been charged with “inciting secession” and “colluding with foreign powers” under Hong Kong’s new national security law.

Samuel Chu is a pro-democracy activist and managing director of the Hong Kong Democracy Council, based in Washington DC.

A warrant for the arrest of the activist, who is now in Los Angeles, has been issued by Hong Kong police, NBC News reports.

Writing in the New York Times, Chu warned that no one was beyond the law’s reach.

“It doesn’t matter that I’ve been an American citizen for 25 years — having left Hong Kong in 1990 to live in the United States,” he said.

“Nobody is beyond the law’s reach, not me in the United States, and certainly not the estimated 85,000 Americans living and working in Hong Kong itself,” he warned.

A leading Catholic voice has called on Pope Francis to speak out against China’s brutal suppression of its Uigher Muslim minority, and its authoritarian crackdown on Hong Kong.

Writing in the Washington Post, George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said that in the past, under Pope John Paul II, the Holy See was uncompromising in defense of fundamental human rights.

Two years ago, the Holy See signed an accord with China, but the situation of believers seems to have deteriorated rather than improved. State efforts to ‘Sinicize’ religious communities have intensified, with Catholic and other churches now compelled to teach the thought of Xi Jinping. Church buildings continue to be stripped of external religious symbols. Catholic schools in Hong Kong have been ‘advised’ to extol the virtues of the new national security law Beijing recently imposed on the city. “Even more gravely, a horrific persecution of more than 1 million Muslim Uighurs is being conducted in Xinjiang, using concentration camps, forced sterilizations and other terrors that reek of Nazi practice.”

As the Chinese-Vatican accord is up for renewal, Weigel says the Holy See negotiators should press their Chinese interlocutors on Hong Kong, the genocide of the Uighurs, the persecution of Protestant house-church Christians and Falun Gong devotees, and the continuing assault on Tibetan Buddhists.

More than 13,500 abortions were carried out last year in Scotland, according to Public Health Scotland figures.

It is the second highest total on record and the most abortions since 2008.

More than half of the 13,583 procedures involved mothers in their twenties.

Scotland’s abortion rate also saw a significant increase, with 13.2 per thousand women aged 15 to 44 aborting their unborn children. This is up from 11.4 per thousand five years ago.

The figures remain higher in England and Wales, at 18.6 per 1000 in the same age group.

Public Health Scotland also revealed that 581 of the abortions were for women over 40, a record number for this age group.

Andrew Mitchell, MP for Sutton Coldfield and the newly appointed co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group for choice at the end of life, said he believes a law legalising euthanasia could be passed before the end of the current parliament in 2024.

However, Lord Alton, a long-time pro-life advocate, disagrees.

“Too often statements like these are not predictions but indicative of a determination to make the wish father to the deed,” Lord Alton told The Catholic Universe.

“The proponents of euthanasia drip, drip, drip the thought that changing the law to permit lawful killing is inevitable. But what is it they want to make lawful?

“They argue that euthanasia should be allowed in limited circumstances to alleviate pain when someone is dying.

“But we all know this is a monumental deceit,” Lord Alton said.

CervicalCheck campaigner Vicky Phelan said wants a law enabling people with terminal illnesses to die by assisted suicide.

In an interview with Virgin Media One aired on Monday, Ms Phelan said she feels people who are terminally ill should have a choice in deciding how and when they should die.

“I’d actually had a phone call from Gino Keny, a TD who was bringing this bill forward again. It was brought forward in 2015. And then it didn’t go through like a lot of things. And he had asked me would I help him support it.

“I said , ‘Absolutely.’ I have huge invested interest in this, I think people should have a choice. Because unfortunately, in my position, I wouldn’t be able to get on the plane now and go to Switzerland or Oregon because I wouldn’t get there because I’m known at this stage,” she said.

“And as well as that, I wouldn’t like to do that. Because I want to die at home in my own country. I don’t want to have to go somewhere else and have my poor family travel over and then travel back with a coffin.”

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/i-want-to-die-at-home-in-my-own-country-vicky-phelan-on-assisted-suicide-ruth-morrisseys-passing-and-spending-time-with-her-children-39493634.html

The Muslim man who had kidnapped a 14-year-old Christian girl in Pakistan threatened to kill her and her family unless she gave court statements falsely affirming that she had married him and converted to Islam of her own free will, the girl told Morning Star News.

Maira Shahbaz of Medina Town, Faisalabad, was abducted on April 28 by Nakash Tariq, according to family members.

“Nakash and two other men took me to an unknown place at gunpoint, where Nakash repeatedly raped me.”

She said she had been forced to sign blank papers and denied consenting to becoming a Muslim.

“I was coerced into making those statements in the courtrooms,” she said. “They threatened to kill us all.”

Prior to the court case, Maira had been placed in a women’s refuge, but The High Court in Lahore accepted her coerced statements and ordered she be returned to her kidnapper.

Five days ago, Maira escaped from her captor and is now in hiding.

The Workplace Relations Commission has ruled that it has no legal authority to adjudicate claims of discrimination in attending Mass or the dispensing of Catholic sacraments.

The WRC agreed with a preliminary legal argument raised by representatives for Bishop Drennan that the Holy Communion Mass provided by the Catholic Church as a religious service did not constitute a service within the meaning of the legislation.

The WRC said if religious services or sacraments had come within the ambit of the legislation, it would be unlawful for churches to refuse the sacrament of matrimony to persons who were divorced or of the same sex, or similarly to only ordain men as priests.

“There seems to be no reason in law or logic to differentiate between these types of religious services and a Holy Communion Mass,” said Ms Boyle.

She added: “If the Oireachtas had intended to apply the principle of equal status, enshrined in the Act, to all of these situations, it would have said so in express terms.”

Former minister John Halligan has said he helped people travel to Switzerland to access assisted suicide and would do so again.

The former Independent Alliance TD also called on politicians to finish the work he started on a bill that would legalise assisted suicide.

In 2015 Mr Halligan introduced the “Dying with Dignity” bill but it stalled after the government collapsed the following year.

Gino Kenny, the People Before Profit TD, has now introduced the same bill.

If passed, it would give people with incurable and progressive illnesses the right to a legal assisted suicide if they are likely to die within six months. At the moment, assisted suicide is a crime in Ireland which is punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

Mr Halligan said he believed “conservative elements” in Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil would try to block assisted suicide.

He added that the Irish Catholic Church would also staunchly oppose such a change, and that “religious” arguments would be involved.

“Would a God want to inflict unnecessary suffering on someone? I don’t believe in God, but I think that if there was a God, he or she would not want that,” he said.

The birth rate dropped by almost 10pc during the first quarter of this year compared with the same period last year, new figures reveal.

Data from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) showed that births decreased by 1,522 in the first three months of 2020.

In the first quarter of 2019, there were 15,893 babies born in Ireland while in the same period this year there were only 14,371 births.

The birth rate stood at 11.7 per thousand in the population, the lowest ever on record.

This corresponds to a fertility rate of 1.77, where 2.1 is needed to achieve population replacement.

Senior lecturer at the UCD Smurfit School of Business, Jim Power, said the decline in births is “one of the biggest challenges facing the country” as there won’t be enough income to pay for pensions. However, he told the Irish Daily Mail that having more children was “not going to happen”.

He said the pension age will have to be raised, or there will have to be a lot of inward migration to make up the difference.

“Unfortunately, many of our political leaders just don’t have the political strength to state the bleeding obvious—it’s a time bomb ticking away.”