World

A female Jehovah’s Witness has been sentenced to two years in a Russian prison for practicing her faith, marking the first time the country has imprisoned a woman since a 2017 ruling that declared the faith group “extremist.” Valentina Baranovskaya, 69, was sentenced Wednesday along with her son.

President Mahmoud Abbas has guaranteed that at least seven seats of a new legislative council will go to Christians in the elections in the occupied territories to be held May 22. The measure would give Christians an outsized representation on the council.

Tanzania’s COVID-denying president is calling on citizens for three days of prayer to defeat unnamed “respiratory diseases” amid warnings that the country is seeing a deadly resurgence in infections.

Fighting in Tigray, a semi-autonomous state in northern Ethiopia, resulted in massacres at ancient religious sites as the country’s military battled the forces of the ruling party in the state, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.

Long-simmering suspicions between Orthodox and evangelical Christians have blown up recently over the refusal of the Jordanian government to allow evangelical churches full legal standing under the country's religiously-divided judicial system.

The Vatican is calling for a new paradigm of care for older people after what it calls the “massacre” wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, which has disproportionately killed people living in nursing homes.

Researchers from the Israel Antiquities Authority, Bar Ilan University, and Tel Aviv University said they had identified pieces of fabric dyed “true purple” dating to the 10th century BCE, when the Hebrew Bible says David and Solomon ruled in Jerusalem.

As COVID-19 vaccination efforts ramps up in countries like the United States, United Kingdom, Israel, and Denmark, the Baptist World Alliance on Friday called for equitable distribution of vaccines and the avoidance of “vaccine nationalism.”

Christians and Muslims in the besieged Central African Republic have taken shelter together in houses of worship in the country as renewed rebel violence forces thousands out of their homes.

Institutions around the world, including the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial museum in Poland, Yad Vashem in Israel, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. have online events planned for International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27.