Trends
Wars
Back in August 1998, we identified war as being one of the 10 top vulnerabilities that could hamper missions to the unreached and the growth of the church. This remains true today. A list of the ongoing conflicts from Wikipedia and Globalsecurity.org… is revealing. Few of these are in the regular news headlines, yet they [...]
Migration leading to xenophobia
Refugee numbers were going down until 2005 (UNCHR). Peace agreements had ended wars. Millions went home. 4 million refugees in Afghanistan returned after the overthrow of the Taliban; now just 2 million remain in Pakistan. But now wars are starting up again, and refugees are on the move again. Extreme poverty, rising food and energy [...]
Social networking in Asia
Friendster is the No. 1 social network in Asia, with over 50 million registered users and 34 million monthly unique visitors from Asia. In Asia, Friendster is more than twice the size of any other social network: Facebook has 16 million, MySpace.com… and MySpace.cn have only 15 million combined, Mixi (Japan) has 14 million, CyWorld [...]
India’s Naxalite insurgency
“On the night of Apr 24, a group of 300 men and women, armed with bows and arrows and sickles and led by gun-wielding commanders, emerged swiftly and silently from the dense forest in India’s Chhattisgarh state. The guerrillas descended on an iron ore processing plant owned by Essar Steel, one of India’s biggest companies. [...]
Bidi smoking in India
Over 100 million people smoke bidi in India, which annually kills 600,000 people in India. Nearly 85% of the world’s bidi tobacco is grown in India; 70% of it is smoked in the country. More Indians have now been found to be dying of bidi smoking than from all other forms of tobacco combined. Bidi [...]
What to do about the food riots
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates 820 million people are hungry in the developing world, and some experts estimate the crisis could force as many as 100 million people deeper into poverty. Riots have broken out from Bangladesh to Egypt to Burkina Faso. In Haiti, the prime minister was ousted as a result [...]
Social networking website users
MySpace, Facebook and other social-networking sites aren’t just competing for customers in the USA. They’re expanding aggressively overseas, where a vast majority of Internet users live. About 80% of the world’s estimated 1.2 billion Internet users are outside the USA (Computer Industry Almanac). Half the $40 billion online advertising market is non-US (eMarketer). The 40 [...]
Advances against malaria
Efforts to rid the developing world of malaria (including those by the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation) are reporting significnat progress. Widespread distribution of mosquito nets and a new medicine
has sharply reduced malaria deaths in several African countries, according to the World Health Organization. If the programs are replicated elsewhere, doctors believe they could reduce [...]
Turkey lifting headscarf ban
Turkey’s parliament lifted a ban on Saturday on female students wearing the Muslim headscarf at university, a landmark decision that some Turks fear will undermine the foundations of their secular state. Turkey’s powerful secular establishment, which includes army generals, judges and university rectors, sees the headscarf as a symbol of radical Islam and believe it [...]
Chinese tourists heading out
Over 21 million tourists will depart mainland China in the first half of 2008, according to a report issued by MasterCard Worldwide. In total, the report anticipates more than 80 million tourists from Asia’s Pacific Coast. Factors include the increase in the number of middle-class families in China: from 35 million in 2006 to 100 [...]
Categories
Most Emailed
- How new missionaries choose their country of service: do we need a change? - 13 emails
- Google Motion Chart: Global Population by Religion, 1800-2025 - 9 emails
- The Chinese are Coming - 9 emails
- For Profit Structures in Mission Movements - 8 emails
- Second Coming in 2015! - 6 emails
