Human Race: Iran’s centrist president

Iranian President-elect Masoud Pezeshkian will take office in August after winning Iran’s snap presidential election in July, according to Iranian officials. The 69-year-old heart surgeon ran as a moderate and won about 54 percent of the vote despite a record-low turnout. Pezeshkian campaigned on promises to loosen Iran’s head-covering law for women and spoke out against its brutal enforcement by morality police. Pezeshkian also says he wants to strengthen relationships with Western countries. The former parliamentarian also supports reviving the 2015 nuclear pact, an agreement that Iran will limit atomic activity if world leaders remove international sanctions.

Washington pulled out of the agreement in 2018, and Iran will have to do more than elect a new president to earn U.S. support for renewed negotiations, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said. Tehran still supports terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, while also supplying drones to Russia to kill innocent Ukrainians, Kirby noted during a July 8 press briefing. Despite Pezeshkian’s title as “reformist,” he still keeps to Iran’s traditional anti-Israel rhetoric, telling reporters he will attempt friendly relations with all countries except Israel. Analysts expect the Islamic theocracy to remain mostly the same, with hard-line Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei having the ultimate decision-making power. Pezeshkian will rank as Iran’s highest diplomat, with power to shape the foreign ministry and hold sway in finding a successor to the 85-year-old supreme leader.

Archbishop cut off

On July 4, the Roman Catholic Church excommunicated Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò for refusing to submit to the authority of the pope. Viganò, 83, is a former papal ambassador to the United States, a theological conservative, and a vocal critic of Pope Francis, whom he has accused of heresy and of representing an inclusive, immigrationist, eco-sustainable, and gay-friendly church. Viganò also holds some erratic views, including that Russia will play a role in the restoration of Christian civilization. He has questioned the legitimacy of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and subsequent liberal reforms, and in 2018, he claimed Francis knew about sexual abuse allegations against former Washington, D.C., Archbishop Theodore McCarrick. A Vatican inquiry cleared Francis but found that the late Pope John Paul II was warned about the allegations. —Lauren Canterberry

Paul Vaughn Courtesy photo/The Vaughn family

Punished pro-lifers

Paul Vaughn was one of four pro-life advocates sentenced in early July for their role in a March 2021 demonstration at an abortion facility in Mount Juliet, Tenn. U.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger sentenced Vaughn to three years of supervised release—a lighter punishment than the one year in prison prosecutors had requested. She sentenced Dennis Green to three years of supervised release, and sentenced Coleman Boyd to five years of probation and ordered him to pay a $10,000 fine. Calvin Zastrow was sentenced to six months in prison and three years of supervised release. In January a federal jury had convicted them of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, a misdemeanor, as well as a felony charge of conspiracy against rights. The demonstrators had prayed and read Scripture outside the abortion facility, and some were peacefully arrested after they refused to leave. Fellow defendants Heather Idoni and Chester Gallagher are scheduled to be sentenced in September as they prepare for a trial on similar charges in an unrelated case. —Travis Kircher

Associated Press/Photo by Fareed Khan

Blasphemy sentence

In Pakistan on July 1, yet another Christian received a death sentence on blasphemy charges—this time for a TikTok post. Police arrested Ehsan Shan in August of last year for sharing photos of defaced pages from the Quran online. Purported desecration of Islam’s holy book led to a wave of anti-Christian protests that included dozens of home raids and church burnings in Punjab. At a July rally on Shan’s behalf, lawyer Khurram Shahzad said his client would appeal the verdict. Pakistan’s laws forbid blasphemy against Islam. Officials have never yet executed someone for blasphemy, though lynchings do occur. —Bekah McCallum

Patriarch Daniil Associated Press/Photo by Valentina Petrova

Patriarch elected

The June 30 election of the new leader of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church is spotlighting divisions within the Orthodox Church over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Patriarch Daniil, 52, narrowly won a second-round ballot by the Patriarchal Electoral Church Council, a body representing the Bulgarian Orthodox clergy and laity. He previously served as Metropolitan of Vidin and has expressed pro-Russian views. When the Ukrainian Orthodox Church formally split away from the Russian Orthodox Church in 2019, Daniil sided with Russian Church leadership who opposed the split. Daniil also criticized the 2023 expulsion from Bulgaria of three clerics who were accused of spying for Moscow. —Emma Freire

Pastor resigns

The board of elders at Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas, one of the largest megachurches in the United States, announced the resignation of founder and senior pastor Robert Morris on June 18 amid a sexual abuse scandal. Cindy Clemishire accused Morris of sexually abusing her on multiple occasions in the late 1980s beginning when she was 12. Morris, 62, acknowledged “inappropriate sexual behavior with a young lady in a home where I was staying” in a June 15 statement to The Christian Post. Gateway’s elders said Morris had previously acknowledged an extramarital relationship decades earlier but said they hadn’t been aware of the victim’s age. They said they have hired a law firm to conduct an independent review. —Mary Jackson

Hezbollah leader killed

After months of border tensions between Israel and the Lebanese-based terror group Hezbollah, Israel’s July 3 assassination of Hezbollah senior commander Muhammad Neamah Nasser on Lebanese soil became a catalyst for increased hostilities. On July 4, Hezbollah said it had fired over 200 projectiles into Israeli territory. Israel’s aerial defense shot down many of the rockets, but one Israeli army reservist was killed in the barrage. The Israel Defense Forces described Nasser as one of the most significant Hezbollah leaders, known for launching missile strikes on Israeli civilians and military. Nasser also orchestrated terror attacks on Israel before the war, the IDF said. Hezbollah’s Executive Council leader, Hashem Safieddine, spoke at Nasser’s funeral and vowed to avenge the death by targeting “new sites that the enemy did not imagine would be hit.” —Christina Grube

Felix Ngole Danny Lawson/PA Images/Alamy

U.K. job hurdle

Christian social worker Felix Ngole said he would appeal a U.K. tribunal’s decision this summer to partially dismiss his religious discrimination claim. In 2022, Ngole beat out 15 other candidates and received a conditional job offer as a hospital mental health worker from Touchstone Leeds, a recruiting agency working for Britain’s National Health Service. But the company rescinded its offer after discovering Ngole’s Biblical stance on same-sex marriage. Employment Judge Jonathan Brain acknowledged Touchstone initially discriminated against Ngole but said the company’s decision was justified after it invited him back for a “second interview” and further probed his beliefs supporting Biblical sexuality. —Grace Snell