Globe Trot: Dissident says Chinese president sees Christianity as a threat

CHINA: Under harsh suppression for 70 years, China’s Christian population has grown from half a million to more than 60 million, arguably one of the greatest stories of the century. The current nationwide crackdown on the church is real, argues dissident Yu Jie, because President Xi Jinping “seems rather insecure. He is suspicious of civil society and sees Christianity as a threat: It is the largest force in China outside the Communist party.” Read more of writer Yu’s own story in June Cheng’s WORLD Magazine feature from May.

RUSSIA: Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, made business and political gains—receiving previously unreported payments—with Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs while serving as a paid consultant for the pro-Russian political party of Viktor F. Yanukovych.

“He understood what was happening in Ukraine,” Vitaliy Kasko, a former senior official with the general prosecutor’s office in Kiev, told The New York Times. “It would have to be clear to any reasonable person that the Yanukovych clan, when it came to power, was engaged in corruption.”

Trump’s campaign team “must disclose” its pro-Russian links, said campaign staff for Hillary Clinton—the candidate linked to Nigerian oligarchs, Congolese warlords, Haitian business interests, etc., etc.

NIGERIA: A new video released by extremist group Boko Haram on Sunday purports to show up to 50 of the kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls, while militants in the video say several of them died in recent Nigerian airstrikes. Boko Haram demands the government release detained fighters in exchange for the remaining girls, and the girls, kidnapped to international outrage in 2014, agreed.

“There is no kind of suffering we haven’t seen,” said one of the Chibok girls, Dorcas Yakubu, in the video, as some of the other girls are seen crying behind her.

SWEDEN has one of the most generous policies toward immigrants and refugees, and one of the most expansive social welfare programs in Europe. Yet anti-Semitic attacks in some areas are on the rise, and underreported.

“They don’t write that the perpetrators are Muslims. I simply believe that it’s because the Jewish group is so much smaller than the Muslim,” Fredrik Sieradzski, 47, a Jew from Malmö told the Jewish online magazine Tablet. “Obviously, it’s just a minority of the Muslims in Malmö who threaten us, but we must be able to address the problem.”

The Swedes have a neo-Nazi problem too.

IRAQ: The preparation for the offensive on Mosul is “approaching the final phase,” Brett McGurk, the U.S. envoy to the coalition fighting ISIS, said in Baghdad last Thursday. More than 3.4 million Iraqis—including nearly all its remaining Christian population—have been forced from their homes since the ISIS invasion of Mosul in 2014, and experts estimate another 1 million will be forced to flee with the coming military action.

BANGLADESH: More on that wayward Indian elephant and the difficulty wildlife officials are having figuring out what to do with him.

BELGIUM: Every night at 8 p.m. the buglers stand beneath the Menin Gate to honor the war dead of World War I battlefields in Ypres … part of my reporting from Belgium this month. Reader Ron Lavin wrote to tell me he’s one of the blacksmiths commissioned to forge Flanders poppies from steel for a centennial celebration this September.

“They have asked blacksmiths around the world to make metal poppies to be erected as a memorial to the war,” he told me. “Blacksmiths were a big part in shoeing many horses used to move men and machines in that war.”