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- WAQAR MUSTAFA
Lahore, Pakistan
Thomson Reuters Foundation
Pakistan is to set up more than 1,000 courts dedicated to tackling violence against women, the country's top judge announced on Wednesday, seeking to tackle a problem activists say the criminal justice system has long neglected.
Asif Saeed Khosa said the special courts
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- JACK JENKINS
A new survey finds that white evangelical Protestants are more concerned about made-up or “fake” news than any other major religious group and are also the most likely to blame journalists for creating it.
According to a new report unveiled earlier this month by Pew Research,
Catholic bishops in Australian state of Victoria reiterate opposition as assisted dying laws take effect
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- David Adams
Catholic bishops in the Australian state of Victoria have reiterated their opposition to the introduction of an assisted dying scheme in the state as new laws legalising it come into force this week.
In a pastoral letter released on Sunday, Peter Comensoli, the Archbishop of Melbourne, along with
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- CHRISTINE MURRAY
Mexico City, Mexico
Thomson Reuters Foundation
Mexico will stop giving financial aid to anti-human trafficking organisations and instead run shelters and victim care directly, the President said this week, drawing criticism from activists who said the plan lacked detail.
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador blamed past corruption for
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- A CORRESPONDENT
An evangelical church in central Ethiopia has been ordered to vacate its building, 10 years after it started meeting there, and churches elsewhere in the region say pressure is increasing on them, too.
The Mekane Yesus Evangelical Church in the town of Robe in Bale
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- TOM MILES
Geneva, Switzerland
Reuters
The world should impose a moratorium on the sale and use of surveillance software until there are rules in place to stop governments using it to spy on opponents and critics, a UN expert recommended.
David Kaye, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression,
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- YONAT SHIMRON
Day and overnight camps are a staple of summer, a welcome relief for working parents.
But they can also present opportunities for sexual predators.
Last week, Noah Paradis, 19, a staffer at a LifeWay camp in Arizona, was arrested on five counts of inappropriate touching.
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- ADELLE M BANKS
The Freedom From Religion Foundation has dropped its long-running fight against the clergy housing allowance permitted by the US Government.
“We have full confidence in the legal merits of our challenge of the discriminatory pastoral housing allowance privileges,” the Wisconsin-based atheist watchdog announced last week.
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- NELLIE PEYTON
Dakar, Senegal
Thomson Reuters Foundation
West Africa's Sahel region must reduce rates of child marriage to end spiralling ethnic and jihadist conflict, the regional head of the United Nations Population Fund said this week.
Marrying girls off as teenagers leads to them having more children, and explosive population
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- JONATHAN LANDAY AND MATT SPETALNICK
Washington, DC
Reuters
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has blocked the inclusion of Saudi Arabia on a US list of countries that recruit child soldiers, dismissing his experts' findings that a Saudi-led coalition has been using under-age fighters in Yemen’s civil war, according to four people familiar
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- EMMA BATHA
London
Thomson Reuters Foundation
Britain's Prince Harry on Monday threw his weight behind mine clearance efforts in Angola, a cause championed by his mother more than two decades ago when she made global headlines by walking through a minefield in the country.
The prince welcomed an announcement that
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- SONIA ELKS
London
Thomson Reuters Foundation
The number of complaints of sexual abuse, harassment and other unacceptable behaviour against field workers at Medecins Sans Frontieres almost doubled last year, the medical aid organisation said on Monday.
MSF, which runs 43,000 field workers around the world, said it hoped
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- JACK JENKINS
Washington, DC
RNS
Former Vice President Joe Biden kicked off a major forum on faith and poverty issues Monday afternoon, fielding questions from faith leaders and low-income Americans during a gathering organised by the Poor People’s Campaign.
“We have the greatest income inequity...in the United States of America
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- SONIA ELKS
London
Thomson Reuters Foundation
China is murdering members of the Falun Gong spiritual group and harvesting their organs for transplant, a panel of lawyers and experts on Monday as they invited further investigations into a potential genocide.
Members said they had heard clear evidence forced organ harvesting had
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- PHILIP PULLELLA
