Prime Minister John Key has expressed alarm over a video showing two men being beaten by Fiji police. Key said the New Zealand government was taking reports of the attack seriously. “And we expect the Fijian authorities to deal with them appropriately and hold those people who have undertaken those beatings to account,” Key said. Read more
Far-right Catholics in France have been warned they will be disbanded if they show evidence of a “religious pathology” that could lead to violence. The warning — which has been decried by religious freedom experts — came from Interior Minister Manuel Valls at a conference on the official state policy of secularism. Valls said foreign-born Read more
An Upper Hutt primary school principal suffered a split head and bruised ribs after a “sustained beating” from a relative of one of his pupils. The pupil’s uncle laid into St Joseph’s School principal Peter Ahern during a meeting over his nephew, punching the stunned principal then kicking him while he was on the ground. Read more
Let’s just say that suddenly you are a social scientist and you want to study peace. That is, you want to understand what makes for a peaceful society. Let’s say that, for years in your work in various parts of the world, you’ve been surrounded by evidence of violence and war. From individual people, you’ve Read more
Pope Benedict XVI has for the second time in two months appealed for the international community to send aid to the suffering people of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The eastern part of the African nation is being convulsed by a second wave of violence and spreading hunger, leading the Pope to describe the suffering Read more
Seventy million Christian martyrs since the time of Christ . . . at least 100,000 new martyrs for the Christian faith each year in the first decade of this millennium . . . 11 Christians killed every hour of every day for the whole of the past decade. These figures from a conference on the Read more
Recent school boy brawls in Suva have lead to calls by some Fijian leaders for the re-introduction of corporal punishment. And earlier in the year the Prime Minster of Samoa also threatened to reintroduce corporal punishment in response to school brawls at sporting events. There is no evidence however that the abandonment of corporal punishment has made Read more
This week in Suva, Fiji, there have been a number brawls involving students from the city’s boys’ secondary schools. Brawls last Friday and on Monday involved students from Suva Grammar and Marist Brothers’ High School. Three people were hospitalised and a Marist student was arrested. He appeared in the Magistrates Court on Wednesday and was charged with Read more
Roman Catholic officials in Israel appealed to authorities this week to take a stronger stand against violence aimed at Catholic churches. An Associated Press report quoted Rev. Pierbattista Pizzaballa expressing worry over relations between Jews and Christians in the Holy Land. “I think the main atmosphere is ignorance,” Pizzaballa said in an interview with the Read more
Bombs, shootings, violence, screaming, deaths rage in the city of Damascus in these hours. People “suffer, hope, escape, pray and, in these tragic hours, turn their gaze to the Blessed Martyrs of Damascus, of whom on July 10 we celebrated the memory,” says Monsignor Samir Nassar, Maronite Archbishop of Damascus. “On the streets of Damascus Read more