Heatwave Kills 21 in Egypt

At least 21 people have died and 66 others suffered exhaustion in Egypt due to a severe heatwave that is sweeping across the Arab country.

Fifteen people have died in the capital Cairo, four in Matrouh city and two in the Upper Egyptian city of Qena, the ministry of health said in a statement on Sunday.

The temperature reached 39 degrees Celsius in Cairo and 45 degrees Celsius in the Upper Egypt governorates on Saturday, according to the Egyptian Meteorological Authority (EMA).

The people have been advised to keep away from the direct sunlight.

The heat wave is expected to continue until August 25.

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Heat Wave in Poland Causing Electricity Shortage, Drought

A heat wave in Poland on Monday forced the national supplier to cut electricity to factories for several hours, and Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz appealed to people to save energy during the day.

Temperatures reached 38 Celsius (100 Fahrenheit) over the weekend and there has been almost no rainfall, leading to a drought in agriculture. The levels of the Vistula and several other rivers have fallen dramatically, disrupting navigation in Warsaw and elsewhere.

“The situation resulting from the heat wave is serious and we have bad forecasts for the next 10 or 11 days,” Kopacz said, following a meeting she convened with the government crisis management team.

She appealed to people not to use energy between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m., if possible, but promised there will be no power cuts to individual clients or to hospitals.

Some dams are to increase the water flow to help cool overheating power plants, Kopacz said.

The highest temperature measured in recent days was 38 Celsius in the western Polish city of Wroclaw and elsewhere in the area.

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Christians Suffering From Increasing and Various Forms Of Persecution Worldwide

Persecution against Christians is on the rise worldwide—ranging from discrimination in Egypt, laws targeting Christians in Pakistan, repression in China, and arson attack in the Holy Land, The Guardian reported.

Mina Fayek grew up a Coptic Christian in Egypt, the largest Christian community in the Middle East and where football is a national sport. However, his interest in the game as well as his skills on the field have been limited by discrimination from a coach who said in an offhand remark that no Christians would join the first team or make it to the finals.

“My parents and I knew this is not going anywhere, and I had to choose another game,” recalled Fayek, now a 26-year-old software engineer and blogger.

He also can never serve in the intelligence branch of the Egyptian military because of his religion. There are no Christians in the supreme council of the armed forces.

“It pushes you to feel disengaged from your country,” Fayek said. “How could someone maintain his love for his country – and be passionate about building it – while at the same time he can’t be whatever he wants to be, whether a military commander or a police commander.”

Fayek believes his social status has protected him from the worst forms of persecution suffered by poorer Egyptian Christians.

In Pakistan, where Christians only make up less than 2 percent of the population as of 1998, Anthony Ibraz, a 31-year-old priest, has suffered along with his family because of their faith. Hard-line neighbours ordered his father to take off the cross he wore and beat him up for spreading God’s Word. His brother was killed by an extortionist who wanted his family’s property. He grew up being discriminated at school and by shopkeepers.

Pakistan’s blasphemy laws are also used to target Christians by implicating them in questionable cases. There have been attacks by mobs on Christian neighbourhoods.

“Persecution is not [only] about the blasphemy law,” said Ibraz at his parish office. “There are different kinds of persecution. There is discrimination, when we go out, in education and jobs … sometimes slavery in Sindh and Punjab. There are people who come to us who say they are educated and capable but they don’t get jobs. The reason is religion.”

In China, Christianity has blossomed under persecution. When hundreds of student protesters were killed in the June 4 Tiananmen massacre, Pastor Xu Yonghai, who is now 55, and his friends converted to Christianity after witnessing the Communist party’s brutality.

“It’s like you finally realise that your old lover is evil and vicious, and then you meet a nice and kind new girl. How can you not love her?” said Xu, who got used to the police-installed CCTV cameras outside his house in Beijing to track his movements.

“It won’t stop me practising Christianity,” said the underground church leader, who has denounced the bulldozing of churches and assaults against preachers in China.

Although the freedom of belief is guaranteed in China’s constitution, crosses of state-approved churches have been removed repeatedly from roofs in the Zhejiang province.

Last year, 13 members of Xu’s 20-member congregation were detained for a month for participating in “illegal gatherings.”

In Israel, the Church of the Multiplication on the shores of the Sea of Galilee was targeted by an arson attack last month allegedly by Jewish extremists.

In the newer annex, attackers painted graffiti on the wall calling for the “destruction of false idols” – included in a Jewish prayer, the Aleinu.

“They came in the middle of the night,” said Father Matthias. “We’re not sure if they came by boat or climbed over the wall. We think there must have been at least three of them because they lit the fire in two places while someone else painted on the wall.”

Since December 2009, around 43 churches and mosques were burned or desecrated but authorities have not prosecuted even a single attacker, said the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land.

“We are really angry. We feel as though not enough is being done by the authorities to find the people behind these attacks. We need to put it in perspective. We know this isn’t Syria, where Christians are frightened for their lives, but what we are asking, as a first priority, is that they bring them to justice so no one else will be inspired to do this kind of thing.”

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Locust Swarms Plague Southern Russia

Millions of locusts have descended on farmlands in southern Russia, devouring entire fields of crops and causing officials to declare a state of emergency in the region.

A vast area of at least 800 hectares is currently being affected as the swarms of insects, each measuring about 8 centimeters long, annihilate fields of corn and other crops.

It’s been more than 30 years since this part of southern Russia suffered such a dense plague of locusts, according to local officials.

Officials say at least 10% of crops have already been destroyed, and the locust feeding frenzy is far from over, threatening to devastate the livelihoods of local farmers.

Walking through what remains of his corn field in the Stavropol region, one farmer, Pyotr Stepanchenka, looks distraught.

“Look,” he says to the camera, “there is nothing left of the corn. The locusts ate it all, from the leaves to the cobs.”

On state television, Russian news broadcasts are linking the plague to climate change, connecting the phenomenon to recent flooding amid higher than average temperatures.

Officials from the Russian ministry of agriculture have declared a state of emergency, but appear helpless to prevent the destruction.

They say they are stepping up efforts to save the harvest by increasing crop-spraying flights.

But high summer temperatures, they say, are decreasing the effectiveness of the powerful pesticides they use.

Also, officials say the locust swarms are moving fast across southern Russia, sometimes too fast for the authorities to keep up, leaving a trail of destruction behind them.

“In Kalmikya, Astrakhan, Volgagrad, and Dagestan, there is already no food left for the locusts, so they have moved on to other sources of food,” says Tatiana Drishcheva of the Russia Argricultural Center, a government organization.

“They have wingspans of nearly 12 centimeters, like small sparrows,” she added.

Some frustrated locals, facing ruin, have posted videos of themselves desperately trying to hold back the tide. But it all seems futile in the face of such an overwhelming Russian swarm.

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UN Warns Myanmar Flood Toll To Rise As Rains Lash Region

The toll from flash floods and landslides in Myanmar caused by days of torrential rain is likely to rise, the UN warned Sunday, as monsoon downpours heaped misery on thousands across the region.

At least 27 people have been killed and more than 150,000 affected by flooding in Myanmar in recent days, with the government declaring the four worst-hit areas in central and western Myanmar “national disaster-affected regions”.

Scores have also perished in India, Nepal, Pakistan and Vietnam following floods and landslides triggered by heavy seasonal rains.

Rescue work in Myanmar has been hampered by continued downpours and the inaccessibility of many of the remote regions battered by the deluges.

In Kalay, one of the worst-hit towns in the country’s northwest Sagaing region, floodwaters on Sunday had risen as high as the roofs of houses and above the tops of coconut trees, an AFP photographer at the scene said.

Vast tracts of farmland had been swallowed up by the flooding, turning a normally fertile flat valley into an expansive lake.

An official at Myanmar’s Relief and Resettlement Department, who asked not to be named, told AFP that at least 166,000 people have now been affected by the floods.

But the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said the real figure was likely to be “significantly higher” because many areas “have still not been reached or reported on by assessment teams”.

OCHA said the official death toll of 27 was also likely an underestimate.

“As further information becomes available, this figure is also expected to increase,” the statement warned.

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‘Incredible’ Heat Dome In Middle East Lifts ‘Feels-Like’ Temperatures To 74 Degrees

If you’re grumbling about the extended cold across southern Australia this winter, spare a thought for people in the Middle East who are sweltering through heat that’s rarely been recorded before.

While it might be snowing in Hobart and Melbourne might be expecting a top of just 11 degrees on Monday, Iraq was forced to declare a four-day holiday from last Thursday to help residents cope with extreme conditions as a heat dome set in over the region.

The Iranian port city of Bandar-e Mahshahr recorded an apparent temperature of as much as 74 degrees on Friday. That remarkable reading came from a heat index that is calculated according to a formula that combines the air temperature – 46 degrees at its peak – with the top humidity or dew-point temperature reached of 32 degrees.

Dew point levels above 26 degrees are considered oppressive as the body struggles to lose heat through perspiration.
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“That was one of the most incredible temperature observations I have ever seen, and it is one of the most extreme readings ever in the world,” AccuWeather meteorologist Anthony Sagliani said in a statement.

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Rare Earthquake Hits Brisbane

QUEENSLANDERS are confused and a little shaken this morning after a rare earthquake rocked the state’s southeast.

The rumble hit Brisbane around 9.41 this morning with baffled residents reporting shaking in their homes.

According to Geoscience Australia a 5.2 magnitude quake struck off Queensland’s south Fraser Coast at a depth of 35km.

The earthquake authority says it is estimated the earthquake could have feel felt by people up to 206km away and could have caused damage up to 16km.

Bundaberg residents reported buildings swaying in the city’s CBD and there were evacuations in the Wide Bay city.

The information is preliminary and could change as details are finalised, a spokesman warned.

The Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre has said there is no tsunami threat to Australia.

This pretty much never happens in Queensland — this is the worst quake to hit the region since 1901 — so people are understandably freaked out.

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Risk of American ‘Megadroughts’ For Decades, NASA Warns

There is no precedent in contemporary weather records for the kinds of droughts the country’s West will face, if greenhouse gas emissions stay on course, a NASA study said.

No precedent even in the past 1,000 years.

The feared droughts would cover most of the western half of the United States — the Central Plains and the Southwest.

Those regions have suffered severe drought in recent years. But it doesn’t compare in the slightest to the ‘megadroughts’ likely to hit them before the century is over due to global warming.

These will be epochal, worthy of a chapter in Earth’s natural history.

Even if emissions drop moderately, droughts in those regions will get much worse than they are now, NASA said.

The space agency’s study conjures visions of the sun scorching cracked earth that is baked dry of moisture for feet below the surface, across vast landscapes, for decades. Great lake reservoirs could dwindle to ponds, leaving cities to ration water to residents who haven’t fled east.

“Our projections for what we are seeing is that, with climate change, many of these types of droughts will likely last for 20, 30, even 40 years,” said NASA climate scientist Ben Cook.

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Mississippi Court Bars Inclusion of Prayers, Religious Sermons In All School Activities

A district court has fined a school district in Mississippi $7,500 and barred it from including prayers and religious sermons in all school activities.

US District Judge Carlton Reeves found the Rankin County School District in Brandon and principal Charles Frazier of Northwest Rankin High School guilty of violating a 2013 agreement that prohibited them from including Christian sermons and prayers in school assemblies.

“Defendants are permanently enjoined from including prayer or religious sermons in any school-sponsored event including but not limited to assemblies, graduations, awards ceremonies, athletic events and any other school event subject to the limitations set out in the Equal Access Act,” Reeves wrote in his decision dated July 10, adding that the defendants should comply with the Consent Decree signed in 2013.

The case stemmed from a complaint filed by 16-year-old M.B., who was then a student at Rankin school, against a series of “Christian Assemblies” held during school hours on April 10, 2013 in which she believed that her attendance was made mandatory, according to court papers.

In response to the complaint, the school district adopted a “religion in public schools policy.”

The following school term in November 2013, a court ruling incorporated the religion policy among school policies and ordered the school district to follow it.

The case filed by M.B. was dismissed with prejudice. But in May 2014, the same student filed a motion to enforce the consent decree and motion for civil contempt when an assembly was held at Brandon High School on April 17, 2014 wherein school officials invited a Christian preacher to deliver a prayer at a ceremony where the complainant was one of the honourees.

The school district denied that the student’s attendance at the ceremony was made mandatory.

But M.B. said the event violated the consent decree by including the Christian preacher in the program.

She said in October last year, after she graduated—with the motion for contempt still pending—the school district assisted the Gideons in the distribution of bibles at one elementary school.

In his decision, Reeves said whether the ceremony cited in the case was mandatory or not is immaterial.

“The event was still coercive as it unnecessarily required Plaintiff to make the difficult decision between being exposed to a religious ritual she found objectionable or not attend an event honouring her and other students for their academic excellence,” the judge wrote.

About the bible distribution, Greeves said, “Even absent the connection of any particular religious group, Bible distribution at public schools is intrinsically unconstitutional because it ‘interfere[s] with the rights of parents to raise their children according to family religious traditions.'”

Reeves ordered the school district to pay M.B. $2,500 for deprivation of her constitutional rights and $5,000 for the distribution of bibles.

“Defendant School District shall pay a fine of $10,000 per infraction to the Plaintiff for any future violations of the Consent Decree,” the judge ordered.

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Jimmy Carter: ‘I Believe Jesus Would Approve of Gay Marriage’

Former president Jimmy Carter said Tuesday that he feels same-sex marriage does not conflict with Christian doctrine.

“I believe Jesus would approve of gay marriage, but that’s just my own personal belief,” he said in an interview with Huff Post Live. “I think Jesus would encourage any love affair if it was honest and sincere and was not damaging to anyone else, and I don’t see that gay marriage damages anyone else.”

Carter, 90, continued that his support of same-sex marriage stopped short only at churches being forced to perform marriages to which they objected.

“I wouldn’t be in favor of the government being able to force a local church congregation to perform gay marriages if they didn’t want to,” he said. “But those partners should be able to go to the local courthouse or to their church and get married.”

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