Ravi Zacharias at the Mormon Tabernacle

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John Maxwell on "Be Salt and Light"

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India is no longer home to the largest number of poor people in the world. Nigeria is.

By Joanna Slater, Washington Post, July 10, 2018

It is a distinction that no country wants: the place with the most people living in extreme poverty.

For decades, India remained stubbornly in the top spot, a reflection of its huge population and its enduring struggle against poverty.

Now new estimates indicate that Nigeria has knocked India out of that position, part of a profound shift taking place in the geography of the world’s poorest people.

According to a recent report from the Brookings Institution, Nigeria overtook India in May to become the country with the world’s highest number of people living in extreme poverty, which is defined as living on less than $1.90 a day. The threshold captures those who struggle to obtain even basic necessities such as food, shelter and clothing, and takes into account differences in purchasing power between countries.

The Brookings report was based on estimates generated by the World Poverty Clock, a model created to track progress against poverty in real time. As of Monday, its figures showed that India had 70.6 million people living in extreme poverty, while Nigeria had 87 million.

What’s more, the gap is widening: The number of people living in extreme poverty in India is falling while the opposite is true in Nigeria, where the population is growing faster than its economy. Extreme poverty rises in Nigeria by six people each minute, according to calculations by the World Poverty Clock. Meanwhile, the number of extreme poor in India drops by 44 people a minute.

“It’s a good news story for India, coupled with some caveats, and it’s a real wake-up call for the African continent,” said Homi Kharas, director of the global economy and development program at the Brookings Institution.

Extreme poverty is increasingly an African phenomenon, the Brookings report noted. Africans make up about two-thirds of the world’s extreme poor, it said. By 2030, that figure could rise to nine-tenths if current trends continue.

Africa’s central place in the battle against poverty comes amid dramatic progress worldwide. Since 1990, the number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen more than 60 percent, according to the World Bank. Much of the reduction has come in Asia, first in places such as China, Indonesia and Vietnam, and more recently in India.

Dennis Edwards: When I went to Mozambique in 2000 I visited the work of the Sisters of Charity outside of Maputo. Travelling over to Mother Teresa's work we noticed it was very close to the city dump. Arriving at the project we delivered the food stuffs we had bought and spent a few hours with the children playing games, singing, and even teaching sight words in English. After a while we helped one of the workers bring the some 50 small babies out of their baby beds onto the patio for some fresh air and sunlight.

The problem was the flies. Being close to the dumpster there were thousand of flies. But the reason the project was close to the dumpster was because the city dump was used to abandom unwanted babies. Those who worked picking through the garbage for valuables would find the abandomed babies and bring them to Mother Teresa's home nearby. I picked up one of the babies in my arms to keep the flies away, but the others just lay there, flies all over their faces. I felt frustrated and helpless. They needed to build some kind of screen to keep the flies out like they had done in the canteen area.

I remember coming back to Portugal and wondering what I could do to help. My friend with money had just spent $10,000 on a project in another African nation, so I couldn't ask him. I didn't know how I could raise the money for the screen project. Instead of getting desparate for an answer and seeking God to supply, I let myself get busy with a little here and a little there until the conviction of heart, that I needed to do something about that situation, went away. That's what I did to help. I forgot about it.

I had arrived in Maputo with $4,000, but had already donated it to a local group of Christian volunteers led by a couple I had met when I was in Japan. It was with them I had come to visit Mother Teresa's home in the outskirts of Maputo. We had also donated clothes and designer sports shoes and food stuffs to the former street children at the local Anglican Church Center for Street Children in downtown Maputo. We took the boys for different activities and a restaurante, also.

But all that, didn't alleviate the feeling of my conscience. Looking back, I'm ashamed at my lethargic attitude, my lack of love and desperation for that sad situation with Mother Teresa's children in Maputo. Hopefully, the Sisters themselves were able to raise the finances they needed and the situation improved. But I lost the opportunity to help. Nevertheless,  we learn from our mistakes. I'm trying to do better. Lord, help me to be a better instrument of your love.

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Corrie Ten Boom on Suffering and Forgiveness

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Why Forgive? by Johann Christoph Arnold

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U.S. Opposition to Breast-Feeding Resolution Stuns World Health Officials

By Andrew Jacobs, NY Times, July 8, 2018

A resolution to encourage breast-feeding was expected to be approved quickly and easily by the hundreds of government delegates who gathered this spring in Geneva for the United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly.

Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes.

Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations.

American officials sought to water down the resolution by removing language that called on governments to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding” and another passage that called on policymakers to restrict the promotion of food products that many experts say can have deleterious effects on young children.

When that failed, they turned to threats, according to diplomats and government officials who took part in the discussions. Ecuador, which had planned to introduce the measure, was the first to find itself in the cross hairs.

The Americans were blunt: If Ecuador refused to drop the resolution, Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid. The Ecuadorean government quickly acquiesced.

The showdown over the issue was recounted by more than a dozen participants from several countries, many of whom requested anonymity because they feared retaliation from the United States.

Health advocates scrambled to find another sponsor for the resolution, but at least a dozen countries, most of them poor nations in Africa and Latin America, backed off, citing fears of retaliation, according to officials from Uruguay, Mexico and the United States.

“We were astonished, appalled and also saddened,” said Patti Rundall, the policy director of the British advocacy group Baby Milk Action, who has attended meetings of the assembly, the decision-making body of the World Health Organization, since the late 1980s.

“What happened was tantamount to blackmail, with the U.S. holding the world hostage and trying to overturn nearly 40 years of consensus on best way to protect infant and young child health,” she said.

In the end, the Americans’ efforts were mostly unsuccessful. It was the Russians who ultimately stepped in to introduce the measure–and the Americans did not threaten them.

The State Department declined to respond to questions, saying it could not discuss private diplomatic conversations. The Department of Health and Human Services, the lead agency in the effort to modify the resolution, explained the decision to contest the resolution’s wording but said H.H.S. was not involved in threatening Ecuador.

“The resolution as originally drafted placed unnecessary hurdles for mothers seeking to provide nutrition to their children,” an H.H.S. spokesman said in an email. “We recognize not all women are able to breast-feed for a variety of reasons. These women should have the choice and access to alternatives for the health of their babies, and not be stigmatized for the ways in which they are able to do so.” The spokesman asked to remain anonymous in order to speak more freely.

Although lobbyists from the baby food industry attended the meetings in Geneva, health advocates said they saw no direct evidence that they played a role in Washington’s strong-arm tactics. The $70 billion industry, which is dominated by a handful of American and European companies, has seen sales flatten in wealthy countries in recent years, as more women embrace breast-feeding. Overall, global sales are expected to rise by 4 percent in 2018, according to Euromonitor, with most of that growth occurring in developing nations.

The intensity of the administration’s opposition to the breast-feeding resolution stunned public health officials and foreign diplomats, who described it as a marked contrast to the Obama administration, which largely supported W.H.O.’s longstanding policy of encouraging breast-feeding.

During the deliberations, some American delegates even suggested the United States might cut its contribution the W.H.O., several negotiators said. Washington is the single largest contributor to the health organization, providing $845 million, or roughly 15 percent of its budget, last year.

The confrontation was the latest example of the Trump administration siding with corporate interests on numerous public health and environmental issues.

In talks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Americans have been pushing for language that would limit the ability of Canada, Mexico and the United States to put warning labels on junk food and sugary beverages, according to a draft of the proposal reviewed by The New York Times.

During the same Geneva meeting where the breast-feeding resolution was debated, the United States succeeded in removing statements supporting soda taxes from a document that advises countries grappling with soaring rates of obesity.

The Americans also sought, unsuccessfully, to thwart a W.H.O. effort aimed at helping poor countries obtain access to lifesaving medicines. Washington, supporting the pharmaceutical industry, has long resisted calls to modify patent laws as a way of increasing drug availability in the developing world, but health advocates say the Trump administration has ratcheted up its opposition to such efforts.

Ilona Kickbusch, director of the Global Health Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, said there was a growing fear that the Trump administration could cause lasting damage to international health institutions like the W.H.O. that have been vital in containing epidemics like Ebola and the rising death toll from diabetes and cardiovascular disease in the developing world.

“It’s making everyone very nervous, because if you can’t agree on health multilateralism, what kind of multilateralism can you agree on?” Ms. Kickbusch asked.

Elisabeth Sterken, director of the Infant Feeding Action Coalition in Canada, said four decades of research have established the importance of breast milk, which provides essential nutrients as well as hormones and antibodies that protect newborns against infectious disease.

A 2016 Lancet study found that universal breast-feeding would prevent 800,000 child deaths a year across the globe and yield $300 billion in savings from reduced health care costs and improved economic outcomes for those reared on breast milk.

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Roiling Markets, U.S. Insists World Must Stop Buying Iranian Oil

By Gardiner Harris and Stanley Reed, NY Times, June 26, 2018

The United States said on Tuesday that it will impose sanctions against all importers of Iranian oil by Nov. 4, a surprisingly tough position that roiled oil markets and is likely to further alienate allies and adversaries alike.

The policy shook financial markets that had become accustomed to waivers for American sanctions that in years past had been granted to companies in countries like India and China as long as they showed steady reductions in their imports of Iranian oil.

But a senior State Department official said Tuesday morning that such routine waivers were not likely to be issued by the Trump administration.

Sanctions experts expressed a mixture of bafflement and scorn at Tuesday’s announcement. They noted that countries like India and China never entirely ended their imports of Iranian crude even before Tehran agreed to the 2015 nuclear accord.

Following Washington’s withdrawal from the deal, European allies vowed to resist reimposing of sanctions. And in the midst of an increasingly bitter trade war with China, the likelihood that Beijing will entirely end its imports of Iranian oil is dubious, analysts said.

“They’re going to go after the Central Bank of China just before the midterms?” said Daniel Fried, a top White House and State Department official in the administration of President George W. Bush. “The next day’s headline will be: ‘Dow Drops 5,000 Points.’”

Peter Harrell, a former sanctions official in the State Department, dismissed the idea outright. “I don’t see China and India going to zero,” he said.

This month, European leaders applied for waivers to the renewed American sanctions against Iran, saying that preserving the agreement was vital to the security of their respective nations. Few expected the waivers to be granted, but Tuesday’s abrupt announcement, which largely ruled them out, could cause further strains.

European diplomats spent months negotiating a side agreement to the Iran deal with Brian Hook, a top State Department official, hoping such an agreement would persuade Mr. Trump to stay in the accord. In April, President Emmanuel Macron of France told Mr. Trump in the Oval Office that negotiations with Mr. Hook were about to yield a strong agreement. “Who’s Brian Hook?” Mr. Trump responded, according to a person with knowledge of the exchange.

The failure of the nuclear negotiations, Mr. Trump’s unusually combative posture at the recent Group of 7 meeting in Canada and his recent imposition of trade tariffs have left European allies weighing how far they can and should go to defy the United States. A growing number of large European companies have announced, however, that they intend to abandon Iran.

Robert A. Pape, director of the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats, said that sanctions only work when a country’s military suppliers participate in the effort. With Russia and China likely to continue to supply Iran with sophisticated hardware despite the sanctions, the Trump administration’s efforts are not likely to succeed, he said.

“This is big stick diplomacy, and that has a long history of failure,” Mr. Pape said.

Katherine Bauer, a former Treasury Department official, said that countries are likely to balk at the Trump administration’s maximalist posture.

“The risk is that you push countries to look for ways around sanctions,” she said.

Dennis Edwards: Is Donald Trump isolating America even from its former allies and in so doing preparing for the fulfillment of Bible Prophecy?

In Revelation chapter 17 we see the 10 nations, which come out of the former Roman Empire, join for a short period with the "Beast" or Antichrist to destroy the great Commercial Prostitute's city in one hour by fire.

Many Bible Eschatalogy students believe New York City could be the present day fulfillment of Babylon the Whore of Revelation chapters 17 and 18. Donald Trump's policies of isolation, "America First," could very well lead to the ten nations of former Roman Empire aligning themselves with Russia. 

Many believe the Antichrist will have something to do with Russia. Some say he will come out of from Russia, others say he will have a close alliance with Russia. In any case, Trump's actions are only isolating America further from the rest of the world. America is closely aligned with Israel. Will the desruction of Babylon the Whore, which could very well be America, occur at the time of the invasion of Israel from the north? 

Is Trump pushing us further along the road to eventual confrontation and world destruction as predicted by Jesus and the book of Revelation? Will it happen in our life time, or that of our children or grandchildren? Be attentive. It may be later than you think.

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Corrie Ten Boom on Forgiveness!

From Kath's blog

Cornelia or Corrie Ten Boom was a Dutch Christian. Born 15th April 1892 Corrie saw the outbreak of World War II and after the occupation of Holland worked along with her father to help Jews escape the Nazi Holocaust. While many quietly kept their heads down to stay alive, Corrie, her father and other family members took great risks to help the Jews of Holland. These risks would eventually lead to many of the family being imprisoned.

After the war Corrie returned to The Netherlands and did much good with her life, travelling the world as a public speaker, appearing in more than sixty countries around the world, and writing many books until her eventual death in 1983, on the day she came into the world, 15th April.

Her most famous book is The Hiding Place, and it’s a personal favourite of mine. Corrie’s resilience and faith during her time in captivity cannot fail to lift the heart, despite the horrors she lived through and so I am honoured today to be the one to collect some of my favourite Corrie Ten Boom quotes and share them with you.









I’d have to confess to not being a very religious person, but through The Hiding Place I learned that faith in anything can get you through hard times, that love is greater than any evil, and in the end forgiveness is the only key to a happy life. Thank you, Corrie.

The Hiding Place US
The Hiding Place UK

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What are these gadgets doing to us?

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Blood in the dust: The plight of South African farmers is far from black or white

By Jewel Topsfield, The Age, 23 June 2018

In the first week of June two farms were attacked in the South African province of Free State. The modus operandi was more or less the same. Armed intruders tied up the victims and stole guns, cash, mobile phones–whatever they could get their hands on–and then fled in the farm vehicles

Attacks on farms, which are particularly vulnerable due to their isolation, are the nightmarish reality for those living and working on the land in South Africa, which is tormented by a level of heinous crime Australians struggle to comprehend.

Dan Kriek, the president of AgriSA, the largest representative body of commercial farmers in South Africa, condemns both attacks “in the strongest possible terms”.

But there is a difference between the two that troubles him.

One of the attacks, on a white farmer and his wife, was reported in the media. But the other attack–where the victims were two black farmers–received no coverage.

“The point I am trying to make is the media is not reporting the true state of affairs–farm attacks and farm murders are shared by all racial groups in this country,” Kriek says.

He believes the media portrayal of the farm murders as an onslaught on white farmers does nothing to help social cohesion in a country still haunted by apartheid.

“The whole narrative, the fact black farmers and farm workers get attacked and murdered, gets lost in the whole conversation. How do we–in a country with our history–then convince the whole of society this is a problem we all need to address?”

Kriek, a mild-mannered white farmer with a prize cattle stud near the town of Tweeling in the Free State, is at the epicentre of an emotive debate around race, rural violence and land reform that is roiling South Africa.

There are few more affected than Kriek–as AgriSA president and a farmer he knows many of the victims of farm attacks.

Far-right extremists, both in South Africa and other countries including Australia, claim white South African farmers are facing a genocide.

Most people don’t accept the hyperbolic claims of a white genocide–it is difficult to equate South Africa with Rwanda or Nazi Germany.

But there is a concern among white farmers (large-scale commercial farms are almost all white-owned) that they are being deliberately targeted.

They are alarmed by farm attacks and murders–in some cases involving gruesome torture–and land reform aimed at addressing racial disparities in land ownership.

“From the farmers’ perspective the political landscape has recently become more hostile, largely as a result of calls by political leaders for more radical land reform,” says Dr Johan Burger from the Institute for Security Studies.

“They point to statements by various political leaders such as those accusing white farmers of having stolen the land and calling for the expropriation of land without compensation.”

The vexed questions of whether white farmers are killed at a higher rate than the rest of the population and whether attacks are a normal part of crime or fuelled by racial animosity are the source of much conjecture in South Africa.

In 2015 the South African Human Rights Commission said most evidence presented to it suggested the criminal element but it did not dispute some farm attacks and murders were motivated by hate or racial hostility.

This debate will be reignited at the end of June when Ernst Roets, the deputy CEO of Afrikaner-rights group AfriForum, launches a book, Kill the Boer, warning a “looming process of ethnic cleansing should be regarded as a serious threat”.

The narrative of a white persecution has gained considerable traction in Australia, where about 163,000 (mostly white) South African-born people now live.

Earlier this year Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton caused a diplomatic furore when he said Australia had “the potential to help some of these people that are being persecuted”.

His comments followed a spate of headlines in Australia including “South Africa’s white farmers attacked, raped and forced from land”, “Whites persecuted, but who cares?” and “White minority ‘targeted’ in South Africa”.

Dutton said these people “need help from a civilised country like ours”.

Dutton has never specifically referred to white farmers. However his comments caused uproar in South Africa.

“Oz minister who wants white SA farmers has history of racist rants,” screamed one headline.

“I was pissed off,” says South African Tourism Minister Derek Hanekom.

“It was reckless, irresponsible and it was just pandering to a right wing group. I think there was a lot of concern about this statement.”

A spokeswoman for Dutton said Australia’s program “doesn’t discriminate on any basis. The minister has never suggested otherwise and therefore I would discount ill informed comment.”

It’s a miracle Johnny Muller is even alive, let alone that he can still see and doesn’t have brain damage.

Muller, a dairy farmer from a property near the town of Frankfort in the Free State, was shot while struggling with an intruder during a farm attack on September 24 last year.

He shows us the scars; the bullet entered above his right eye and came out on the left side of his neck. It dodged an artery.

Someone told the family the barrel of the gun must have been almost touching his head or it would have blown out a bigger hole. “We didn’t google that,” Johnny’s wife Dalene says drily.

The Mullers believe the motive for the attack was theft: ‘I don’t think all farm attacks are for money reasons, I think some are just to hurt and injure people, but in our case they really wanted money,” Dalene says.

Somehow she managed to press a panic button. The intruders escaped in the Muller’s bakkie (small truck) when they heard the alarm.

“I closed the door and I told the children: ‘Daddy has been shot. We don’t know if he is dead or alive, probably dead, but we cannot go out there.”

It’s hard to imagine the agonising wait for help in the Muller’s cheerful kitchen, with its fruit salad tablecloth, and multi-coloured sign that says “Many people have eaten here & survived”. (The sign, Johnny says, smiling, was there before the attack.)

Dalene says although the farm attacks are a problem, they are not the only people suffering in South Africa.

“There are a lot of people being hijacked, there are a lot of people being attacked in their houses, even in the cities.”

The family never considered not coming back to the farm. “This is where we live. We decided we are not going to let some barbarians ruin our lives.”

Do they think many other South Africans farmers would be interested in coming to Australia? “I think there would be some. In this area I don’t think there would be many,” Dalene says.

Earlier this year Tony Abbott claimed that “something like 400 white farmers have been brutally murdered over the last 12 months”.

However South African police say there were 47 farm murders and 561 farm attacks in 2017-18 (they do not identify the race of the victims or their occupations). The highest recorded number of farm murders was in 1997-98 when there were 153.

AfriForum disputes the police figures and says the real toll is higher. It says there were 84 farm murders last calendar year.

AgriSA, which represents about 28,000 farmers, says an increase in farm attacks during the past two financial years is in line with national crime statistics.

The spectre of violence is everywhere in South Africa. A guard with an automatic gun stands outside Wimpy, a fast food chain in a suburban Johannesburg shopping mall. A metre away a child eats his hamburger.

Middle-class houses hide behind towering walls, topped with electric fences and coiled barbed wire. Signs warn of armed security.

Our car windscreen is cracked from an earlier “smash and grab”–a brick through the window at a robot, which is what South Africans call traffic lights, followed by “give me your cell phone or I’ll shoot you”.

The life of almost every South African I meet has been scarred by violence. They tell horrifying stories of brutal home invasions, carjackings and murders with the same tone of sad resignation Australians use to talk about cancer.

In 2016-17 there were more than 19,000 murders in South Africa–an average of 52 every day. Most victims were young black men.

The division of wealth is stark. Just a few kilometres from Johannesburg’s affluent financial hub of Sandton, where tourists pose under a gigantic statue of Nelson Mandela and then have a glass of Chenin Blanc, is the township of Alexandra.

One of the poorest urban areas in South Africa, the township, its population almost entirely black, is crammed with corrugated iron shacks. Most don’t have running water so the people use communal pumps and outdoor toilets.

The World Bank says South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world, with its poverty “a demonstration of the enduring legacy of apartheid”.

When Mandela campaigned ahead of South Africa’s first multiracial elections in 1994, his slogan promised: “A better life for all”.

But democracy has not ended all white privilege.

Almost 25 years after the end of apartheid, two thirds of agricultural land is still in the hands of the white minority. Less than 9 percent of South Africans are white.

The African National Congress failed to achieve its target of a 30 per cent transfer of farmland to blacks by 2014. In December it adopted a policy position that land should be expropriated without compensation to accelerate reform.

The government insists there will be no “smash and grab interventions”, referring to the violent land grabs that occurred in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, and the economy and food security will not be adversely affected.

Farmers have been assured productive agricultural land will not be taken.

Land expropriation without compensation would only occur in limited situations, such as where land was sitting idle for speculation. Cases would be tested in the Constitutional Court.

But still there is uncertainty and fear.

This is exacerbated by militant populist politician Julius Malema, who has urged blacks to occupy white-owned land. He says he is not calling for whites to be killed … “for now”.

Malema, then a member of the ANC, also caused an outcry in 2010 when he sang the apartheid-era song Shoot the Boer, Shoot the Farmer, which a High Court judge ruled constituted hate speech.

Malema was later expelled from the ANC and formed the radical ultra-left Economic Freedom Fighters party, which commands just 6 per cent of the vote, but his inflammatory comments have alarmed white farmers.

“Politicians say ‘Kill the farmer, kill the farmer’ so they get it in their heads,” Johnny Muller says.

In 1998 Nelson Mandela said the government deplored the “cold-blooded killings on farms”.

Farm attacks were made a national security priority alongside other special crimes such as gang violence, cash in transit robberies and taxi violence.

But AfriForum is concerned the government has since de-prioritised it as a crime, including abolishing the commando system, a voluntary part-time force of the South African Army that assisted police.

AfriForum claims farmers are three to four times more likely to be killed than the average South African and the significance of racial and political motives is underplayed.

Despite the backlash from South Africa, Dutton has said he will “not step back” from the necessity of providing support to people who face persecution.

Somewhat ironically, given its advocacy promoting the plight of South African farmers overseas, AfriForum is not especially enthusiastic about Australia’s offer to take farmers.

“We were very grateful that there is recognition of the problem, that there is acknowledgement outside of South Africa that there is a problem in South Africa,” Roets says.

“But we know that exporting people would not solve the problem, at least not the collective problem. We would want to fix the problem here.”

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