Belarus: election protests update
27 Aug 2020
Two senior figures in Belarus's protest movement were given ten-day jail terms at the notorious Okrestino detention centre for organising demonstrations. Olga Kovalkova and Sergei Dylevsky are high-profile members of the National Coordination Council, set up to organise a rerun of the election. Meanwhile teachers gathered outside the education ministry to protest against Mr Lukashenko's threat to sack teachers who fail to back the government. He promised to crack down on his opponents as daily demonstrations swelled into unprecedented, mass protests in Minsk. In her latest video statement from neighbouring Lithuania, opposition leader Ms Tikhanovskaya told the European Parliament that protesters were being ‘illegally detained, imprisoned and beaten’, emphasising the ‘democratic revolution’ was neither pro- nor anti-Russian, nor pro- or anti-European. In Lithuania 50,000 people expressed solidarity with Belarusians by forming a human chain from Lithuania’s capital Vilnius to Medininkai on the border with Belarus.
Germany scraps plans for Brexit talks
27 Aug 2020
The German government, which holds the rotating presidency of the EU council, had intended to discuss Brexit during a meeting of EU ambassadors on 2 September, but has now decided to drop the Brexit issue because there has not been ‘any tangible progress’ in talks. EU officials now believe the UK government is prepared to risk a no-deal exit when the transition period comes to an end, and will try to pin the blame on Brussels if talks fail. A diplomat said, ‘Brussels laments a completely wasted summer as there is a lack of tangible Brexit progress.’
USA: Hurricane Laura
27 Aug 2020
Powerful Hurricane Laura battered the Louisiana and Texas coastline, bringing unsurvivable storm surges up to 20 feet in Louisiana and Texas with 150 mph winds. Parts of Lake Charles will be underwater that no-one has seen before. 100,000 residents are at risk of flooding. Pray for the search and rescue operations as they swing into action. The storm is complicating evacuations in the midst of a pandemic, as officials send evacuees to hotel rooms. Pray for all evacuees now in fear for the future. Some first responders in Louisiana stood outside the sheriff's office for a moment of prayer before the hurricane made landfall. Over 270,000 homes in Texas and Louisiana are without power. Pray for hospitals and the vulnerable who need electric machines to survive. People refusing to evacuate were told, ‘Write your name, address, social security number and next of kin and put it in a Ziploc bag in your pocket. Pray that it does not come to this.’
Wisconsin’s governor called in the National Guard to help quell unrest after police shot unarmed Jacob Blake in the back seven times at close range. The incident was videoed and went viral on the internet sparking nationwide demonstrations and the postponement of major sporting events as players protested against the shooting. Trump’s administration made its sympathies clear: ‘We will always stand with the men and women who serve on the thin blue line of law enforcement.’ Meanwhile Rev Al Sharpton and his National Action Network are leading a march on Washington to demand action on police brutality. He said, ‘That policeman’s life was never under threat, and yet he shot multiple times. That’s why we’re marching.’ Some say, ‘Riots are not saving Black lives, they’re destroying lives, businesses and the social fabric of cities.’ Others reply, ‘There needs to be unrest in the streets as long as there’s unrest in our lives’. See
Dr Martin Luther King Jr said we must live together as brothers or perish together as fools. His niece Dr Alveda King said, ‘We're fighting over trying to reconcile separate races when we are only one race - the human race.’ Bishop Harry Jackson said, ‘We're seeing a readiness to respond to race across racial boundaries. But what's missing is in Galatians 3:26; we say there's neither Jew nor Greek, there's neither bond nor free. These distinctions can be solved by coming together in Christ.’ We can pray for Christians to lead the way with answers to the ills of society. We have the Bible and the Holy Spirit to guide us. The church must find answers and right any wrongs that exist and then boldly become part of the national discussion on race relations in America. Bishop Williams added, ‘When someone needs blood, they don’t ask if it was black blood, white blood or Jewish blood; they need blood.’
Uzbekistan: restrictions remain in new law
27 Aug 2020
The draft religion law now in parliament would, in defiance of human rights, continue to ban all exercise of freedom of religion without state permission, banning teaching about religion without state permission, continuation of compulsory censorship of all religious materials and to ban sharing of faith. ‘There's not much difference between the draft law and the current one’, commented human rights defender Bahodyr Eliboyev. Although the draft reduces the number of adult citizens required to apply for a community to be allowed to exist from 100 to 50, it would retain the registration process and most of the restrictions. ‘The state must not be afraid of giving full religious freedoms,’ insists Abduvohid Yakubov, an independent rights defender from Tashkent who is also critical of the draft law.
Two Protestant families who were forced to sign an illegal agreement to renounce their right to hold religious services in order to have their access to essential services reinstated have now been told they risk being cut off again if they cannot pay the remainder of a fine that was levied as part of the agreement. In 2019 they refused to sign a similar document renouncing their faith when other Protestants in the village signed it. Their refusal to do so caused their access to water, drainage, government benefit programmes and the community mill cut off for over a year until they signed it. They were also threatened with forced displacement by community leaders unless they contributed to local Roman Catholic festivals and participated in other activities which conflicted with their religious beliefs.
China: ‘brave new world’
27 Aug 2020
The Chinese government is obtaining blood samples from up to 70 million – 10% of all men and boys – as the high-tech surveillance state builds a ‘DNA Skynet’ of the country’s 700 million males. Any individual who refuses to give blood samples risks his family being barred from benefits such as travel, fast internet connection and hospital treatment. The powerful genetic mapping tool, which is being compiled from samples collected since 2017, will join up with China’s existing countrywide video-surveillance network. The system will be capable of tracking every male relative of any individual man just from a sample of his genetic material, such as skin or hair. Only 5-10% of the male population needs to be sampled in order to build a complete genetic map, because one sample unlocks the identity of all related males.