Vatican seeks all-out effort to combat vaccine hesitancy
Rome, ItalyAP The Vatican’s bioethics academy and the World Medical Association on Friday called for an all-out effort to combat vaccine hesitancy and correct the “myths and disinformation” that are slowing the fight against the coronavirus. In a joint statement, the groups said some vaccine reluctance in poorer countries is rooted in historical inequalities and […]
Court jails 10 for child trafficking in Ivory Coast cocoa sector
Bouna, Ivory Coast Reuters A court in Ivory Coast on Wednesday sentenced 10 people found guilty of child trafficking to 10 years in jail, part of an effort to clamp down on organised networks that smuggle children to work in cocoa plantations. Ivory Coast, the world’s top cocoa producer, and the companies that buy its […]
Snapshot: Mayan ruins, Belize
See STEPHANIE KLEPACKI’s image…
India’s death toll from coronavirus crosses 400,000
Mumbai, IndiaReuters India reached the grim milestone of 400,000 deaths from the coronavirus on Friday, half of them during a second wave in the past few months that overwhelmed the healthcare system and crematoriums. India has recorded 30.45 million cases since the outbreak of the pandemic last year, and is the second-most affected country behind […]
US Catholic school association seeks rebound from grim year
The organisation overseeing Catholic schools in the United States welcomed a new chief executive this week as it seeks to rebound from its biggest one-year enrollment drop since the 1970s. Amid the pandemic, more than 200 schools closed permanently, and enrollment at the 5,981 remaining schools fell by 6.4 per cent – or more than […]
Facebook asks: Are your friends becoming extremists?
Reuters Facebook Inc is starting to warn some users they might have seen “extremist content” on the social media site, the company said on Thursday. Screenshots shared on Twitter showed a notice asking “Are you concerned that someone you know is becoming an extremist?” and another that alerted users “you may have been exposed to […]
Fund nature protection now or face huge losses, says World Bank
Kuala Lumpur, MalaysiaThomson Reuters Foundation The global economy faces annual losses of $US2.7 trillion by 2030 if ecological tipping points are reached and countries fail to invest more in protecting and restoring nature, the World Bank said on Thursday, calling for a greener COVID-19 recovery. In its first Economic Case for Nature report, the bank […]
Gun violence: How Philadelphia’s reform DA is teaming with clergy to tackle rising tide of shootings
ELIZABETH E EVANS reports for Religion News Service on the role clergy are playing in tackling gun violence in the US city of Philadelphia…
In the US, a letter ties rise in anti-Asian hate to politicians’ Christian nationalist rhetoric
RNS Sometimes a vampire is not just a vampire. Take Dracula. To Lucas Kwong, an assistant professor of English at New York City College of Technology, the popular turn-of-the-century novel and its titular bloodsucker are a parable of white European fear and anti-Asian racism. “’Dracula’ is, in some ways, about reverse colonisation – the fear […]
Essay: How food waste helped us discover the existence of a Christian community in 12th century Islamic Iberia
Researchers MARCOS GARCÍA GARCÍA and GUILLERMO GARCÍA-CONTRERAS RUIZ, report – in an article first published on The Conversation – on the findings of their investigation into Muslim-Christian relations in southern Spain in the 12th century…