Faith Matters General

The power struggle behind Thailand’s temple row
February 24, 2017 By Faith Matters

The power struggle behind Thailand’s temple row

A stand-off between security forces and monks at Thailand’s biggest temple has exposed a struggle as much about power as religion in the predominantly Buddhist country, where the junta has shut down dissent since a 2014 coup. For the past week, some 4,000 police and soldiers have surrounded the Dhammakaya temple, which practices a form […]

Continue Reading
Stolen Nazi gate returns to concentration camp
February 23, 2017 By Faith Matters

Stolen Nazi gate returns to concentration camp

A stolen WWII gate bearing the infamous Nazi slogan. Returning after two years to its home in Dachau, a former concentration camp in Germany. It disappeared overnight in 2014 and only resurfaced in Norway in December after police followed an anonymous tip off. The words “work sets you free” cast into this Iron Gate would […]

Continue Reading
Pakistan says kills 100 ‘terrorists’ after suicide shrine attack
February 18, 2017 By Faith Matters

Pakistan says kills 100 ‘terrorists’ after suicide shrine attack

Pakistani security forces killed dozens of suspected militants on Friday, a day after Islamic State claimed a suicide bombing that killed more than 80 worshippers at a Sufi shrine, the biggest in a spate of attacks this week across the country. The bombing at the famed Lal Shahbaz Qalandar shrine in southern Sindh province was […]

Continue Reading
Trump may reinstate secret CIA ‘black site’ prisons – U.S. officials
January 26, 2017 By Faith Matters

Trump may reinstate secret CIA ‘black site’ prisons – U.S. officials

President Donald Trump may order a review that could lead to bringing back a CIA programme for holding terrorism suspects in secret overseas “black site” prisons where interrogation techniques often condemned as torture were used, two U.S. officials said on Wednesday. The black sites were used to detain suspects captured in President George W. Bush’s […]

Continue Reading
Trump says to host India’s Modi for U.S. visit later this year – White House
January 25, 2017 By Faith Matters

Trump says to host India’s Modi for U.S. visit later this year – White House

U.S. President Donald Trump invited Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to visit the United States later this year, during a phone call on Tuesday in which the leaders discussed economic and defence cooperation. In its readout of the conversation, the White House said the two leaders also discussed security in South and Central Asia. The […]

Continue Reading
Foreign powers back Syria truce deal, war erupts among rebels
January 25, 2017 By Faith Matters

Foreign powers back Syria truce deal, war erupts among rebels

Russia and regional powers Turkey and Iran backed a shaky truce between Syria’s warring parties on Tuesday and agreed to monitor its compliance, but on the ground rebels faced continued fighting on two fronts which could undermine the deal. After two days of deliberations in Astana, Kazakhstan’s Foreign Minister Kairat Abdrakhmanov said the powers had […]

Continue Reading
“I lost all hope of going home” – Chibok Schoolgirl
January 24, 2017 By Faith Matters

“I lost all hope of going home” – Chibok Schoolgirl

Nigeria is facing mounting pressure to find some 200 schoolgirls abducted 1,000 days ago in Boko Haram’s most infamous attack after the rescue of 24 girls raised hopes that they are alive. For more than two years there was no sign of the girls who were kidnapped by the Islamist fighters from a school in […]

Continue Reading
Frontline Insight: Lessons on hatred from Bosnia
January 24, 2017 By Faith Matters

Frontline Insight: Lessons on hatred from Bosnia

Kemal Pervanic grew up in a Bosnian Muslim village surrounded by Serbs. “My schoolmates were just my schoolmates and my teachers were my teachers and that’s how it was until the early 1990s,” Pervanic told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at London’s Frontline Club. But in 1992 he was in a concentration camp being interrogated and […]

Continue Reading
Croatian Jews to boycott Holocaust remembrance event over ‘relativisation’ of crimes
January 23, 2017 By Faith Matters

Croatian Jews to boycott Holocaust remembrance event over ‘relativisation’ of crimes

Croatian Jews said on Monday they would boycott the country’s main Holocaust remembrance event this week, accusing the authorities of playing down crimes perpetrated under the Nazi-backed Ustasa regime during World War Two. International Holocaust Remembrance Day is held on Jan. 27 each year, the date in 1945 when the biggest Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz […]

Continue Reading
Wife of Orlando gunman in court, uncle says she’s innocent
January 18, 2017 By Faith Matters

Wife of Orlando gunman in court, uncle says she’s innocent

The wife of the gunman who killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, appeared in court on Tuesday (January 17) accused of committing a crime by assisting her husband ahead of the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Noor Salman, 30, was not present for the June 2016 attack. But she […]

Continue Reading