Iraq will soon be without the Christian faith as approximately 20 Christian families desert the country each month, according to Patriarch of the Chaldean Catholic Church, Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako.

Iraq was once home to more than one and a half million Christians.

Pervasive persecution, at times amounting to genocide, has seen millions of Christians in the Middle East killed, kidnapped, uprooted, imprisoned and discriminated against.

It has taken a toll on the survival of the oldest Christian communities in the world, located in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine.

A century ago, Christians comprised 20 percent of the population in the Middle East, but currently, the region is home to less than 4 percent or roughly 15 million Christians.

More than 500,000 Christians left Iraq due to the sectarian conflict that started with the self-styled caliphate of ISIS in 2013. Earlier, the 2003 US-led invasion had wreaked havoc on the oil-rich country.

More than 100 doctors, nurses, midwives and other healthcare professionals, including consultants, obstetricians and senior medical staff in maternity services, have signed an open letter “strongly urging” the Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly, to retain the 3-day period of reflection before undergoing an abortion.

The letter says that there “is no medical basis” for scrapping the 3-day wait, and points to figures released by the Department of Health which strongly suggest that some 1,000 women change their mind during that period of reflection and do not proceed with an abortion.

“The 3-day wait helps women, it gives them time to think, and the figures strongly suggest it reduces the number of abortions,” Dr Ronan Cleary of Doctors for Life said.

The Court was asked to review the validity of Northern Ireland’s ban on “direct” and “indirect” pro-life “influence” within 100m of abortion facilities. The bill in question criminalises not only harassment, which is already illegal; but also quiet or silent prayer, or the offer of leaflets about charitable services available which provide alternative options to abortion, including through financial or practical support.

“We are of course disappointed to see today’s ruling from the Supreme Court, which fails to protect the basic freedoms to pray or to offer help to women who may want to know about practical support available to avoid abortion. Peaceful presence, mere conversation, quiet or silent prayer – these activities should never be criminalised in a democratic society like the UK,” said Jeremiah Igunnubole, Legal Counsel for ADF UK.

“The criminalisation of any kind of ‘influencing’ is vague, uncertain and reduces the threshold of criminality to an impermissibly low level. Northern Ireland’s broadly drafted law hands arbitrary power to police officers, with the inevitable consequence being the unjust arrest and prosecution of those expressing pro-life views, even though such views are protected under domestic and international human rights law,” he continued.

Croatia is moving to ban shopping on all but 16 Sundays of a year, giving retailers the right to decide when they would use the exemption. The rationale is that Sundays will become more of a family day.

Shops in countries like France, Germany and Spain are routinely closed on Sundays.

“We want to make it possible for retail employees to spend Sundays with their families,” the government said on Twitter on Thursday.

Most retailers are expected to use the exception during summer at the height of the tourist season.

Retail stores that are part of airports, bus and train stations, ferries, hotels, gas stations or museums would be completely exempted from the new law.

GPs were paid fees totaling more than €9.5 million for providing abortions in the first three years of the State’s abortion program, new figures show.

The fees relate to almost 24,000 initial consultations with women and about 19,500 completed GP-administered abortions between 2019 and last year.

The total cost of claims made by GPs providing abortions in community settings has remained relatively constant – €3 million in 2019 and €3.26 million in 2020 and 2021, according to HSE figures.

Under the scheme, GPs are paid a €150 fee for a first consultation with a woman seeking an abortion.

The HSE pays a €300 combined fee for administering drugs and providing aftercare.

A separate €100 fee is payable to GPs who provide aftercare for patients who underwent abortions in hospital and were discharged to the community.

Parents in a Dublin suburb are being consulted on whether they want to remove the Catholic patronage of one of three church-run schools.

Key meetings are taking place this week in Raheny, on the city’s northside, as part of the Department of Education’s schools’ reconfiguration process.

It is one of a number of communities around the country where there is no multi-denominational or educate-together primary school and where the possibility of transferring patronage of a school from the Catholic Church is being explored.

Some parents in the Raheny area have been campaigning for change, not only for multi-denominational, but also a co-educational school for their children beyond first class.

However, in Raheny, and elsewhere, not all parents may support such a move and the views of all are considered in the process.

While the Catholic Church no longer receives the broad support in Irish society it once enjoyed, many parents are reluctant to give up the local church-run management of schools.

There was a major controversy in the Malahide-Portmarnock area of Dublin in 2019 when some school staff and parents objected to a plan to divest one of eight Catholic schools in the area, a move that was subsequently shelved.

A fully Government-funded abortion program is to be set up in Northern Ireland, three years after a radically permissive law was imposed by Westminster over the objections of local politicians.

The Catholic and Presbyterian Churches have called the latest move “deplorable”.

Northern Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris confirmed on Friday that he has written to Stormont’s Department of Health instructing it to formally commission the scheme

The move follows a UK intervention in October, when Mr Heaton-Harris accused the department of “continued inaction” on the issue and said it was “not right” that women and girls were unable to access a procedure to which they were “lawfully entitled”.

Rev Trevor Gribben, Clerk of the General Assembly and General Secretary of the Presbyterian Church said the decision on services was “deeply regrettable” and added that Mr Heaton-Harris had “chosen to give life to the most destructive and liberal abortion regime in these islands”.

“We should not forget that 79% of people responding to the UK Government’s 2019 abortion proposals opposed the introduction of these measures,” he said.

“Not only have these developments been an abuse of the fragile devolution settlement, but their genesis came about by a shameful manipulation of the democratic processes of the House of Commons in 2019.”

Ireland is ageing faster than anywhere else in Europe, placing growing pressure on the health service and posing challenges for planning its future, according to a new report by the Department of Health. A lot of this is due to a ‘catch-up’ with the older populations in other European countries.

There are currently five tax-contributing workers for every one person over 65, but in 20 years this ratio will drop to three to one, the Health in Ireland — Key Trends report says.

The over-65 population has grown by 35 per cent over the past decade — more than three times the rate of growth in the overall population and faster than elsewhere in Europe, according to the report.

Meanwhile, births are down by one-fifth, a fall that would have been even greater but for a 4.4 per cent uptick in 2021, the first rise in a decade. Because fertility continues to drop elsewhere, we still have the sixth-highest rate in Europe.

Religious schools in the US state of Vermont will now be allowed to make use of a tuition assistance program that previously excluded them, after the state settled two lawsuits on the matter Nov. 30.

The State is one of the most leftist in America.

Vermont’s Town Tuition Program helps pay the fees of students who live in towns without public schools, and it previously allowed payments to secular private schools but not religious ones. As part of the court-approved settlements, state and local government officials agreed that Vermont’s exclusion of religious private schools from the program is unconstitutional and unenforceable.

Vermont’s school choice program dates to 1869. The state had barred religious schools from the program since 1999, following a state Supreme Court ruling that held that public funds may not be used to “support any place of worship” under Vermont’s constitution. The lawsuits against the state were filed more than two decades later, in 2020.

The settlements in the present cases come in light of a landmark ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in June in the case Carson v. Makin. In that decision, the court ruled 6-3 that Maine’s policy barring students in a student-aid program from using their aid to attend “sectarian” schools violates the free exercise clause of the US Constitution’s First Amendment.

Faith-based schools should be forced to teach pro-choice and gender ideology, according to a report by a group of Irish NGOs submitted to the Council of Europe.

Published on Friday by the Irish Observatory on Violence Against Women, it says the lack of State control over school curriculums is perpetuating gender stereotypes and gender inequality.

The report says that with 90 per cent of national schools under Catholic patronage, the State lacks “full control” on the implementation of the national curriculum, which means “some schools may be excluding topics such as abortion, same sex relationships and gender identity”.

This is happening because of the “ethos” clause in the rules for national schools, it says. However, the national curriculum as it stands does not require teaching a pro-abortion or gender ideology views.

The report claims: “Such an ethos clause therefore violates Article 14 of the Istanbul Convention and must be removed to ensure that all students in Ireland have access to education on equality between women and men, non-stereotyped gender roles, mutual respect, non-violent conflict resolution in interpersonal relationships, domestic, sexual and gender-based violence against women and the right to personal integrity,” the report says.

The report makes 35 recommendations, including that the State: “remove the ethos clause from the Rules for National Schools and have full control over the curriculum.”