BEIJING (AP) — China has announced that individuals and groups are banned from privately adopting abandoned infants, in a country where tens of thousands are abandoned each year and where baby trafficking has been a perennial problem. The Ministry of Civil Affairs announced Tuesday that people who find an abandoned child must immediately tell local […]

CAIRO (AP) — A hard-line Muslim cleric received an 11-year suspended sentence Sunday for tearing up and burning a Bible, Egypt’s official news agency said. Cairo’s Nasr City court sentenced Ahmed Abdullah and his son was given a suspended sentence of eight years over the same incident, the Middle East News Agency reported. The two […]

(CNN) – Pope Francis said a ‘gay lobby’ exists inside the Vatican, a surprising disclosure from a pope who has already delivered his share of stunners, and a resurrection of church conflicts that had bedeviled his predecessor’s papacy. “In the Curia,” Francis said, referring to Catholicism’s central bureaucracy, “there are holy people. But there is […]

Sex workers and their supporters marched and rallied in several Canadian cities Saturday to call for the decriminalization of prostitution, days before a Supreme Court hearing on whether laws restricting the sale of sex should be tossed out. Dozens of demonstrators brandished red umbrellas — a symbol for sex workers’ rights — and chanted “Sex […]

The Belgian Federal Parliament is reportedly about to expand its controversial “right to die” policies to include access to euthanasia for some gravely ill children. A consensus among members of the legislative body has reportedly formed in support of legislation to allow children to choose to undergo euthanasia in certain dire cases, according to a […]

The Salvadoran high court rejected the over-hyped claims of abortion advocates in favor of common-sense protections for mother and child on Wednesday. The ruling upholds El Salvador’s constitutional protection of the right to life beginning at fertilization. Over the past few months, international abortion activists have exploited the case of a 22-year-old Salvadoran woman known […]

A newborn Chinese baby was rescued from a toilet pipe after he was flushed away by his parents, state TV reports. Chinese firefighters found the tiny boy lodged in a sewage pipe below a squat toilet in an apartment building in Jinhua, Zhejiang province. His placenta was still attached. Firefighters sawed out an L-shaped section […]

ISTANBUL (Morning Star News) – Security forces arrested an Iranian pastor in Tehran after raiding his house and pressuring his church to close as a crackdown on Christians intensified ahead of June elections. Robert Asserian was arrested Tuesday during a prayer meeting at his Central Assemblies of God Church after authorities entered his house and […]

Sharofat Allamova, a Protestant from north-western Khorezm Region, has been given one and half years of corrective labor after being convicted under criminal charges of the “illegal production, storage, import or distribution of religious literature.” Fines have also been imposed on people for meeting in a private home and having Christian literature, as well as […]

STAFFORD, N.J. — The pastor of a local evangelical church wants to turn a house of porn into a house of the Lord. On the outskirts of a neighborhood known as Mud City, the Rev. Patrick J. Sharkey of Victory Christian Fellowship has found a wholly American solution for dealing with an adult bookstore he believes […]