Globe Trot 06.20

Ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is reportedly in a coma and off life support at the military hospital in Maadi, south of Cairo. His pending death comes as Egyptians await final results in a controversial runoff election. The Council on Foreign Relations' Steven A. Cook has a comprehensive profile on Mubarak's legacy, which includes a national GDP that rose from $40 billion to more than $145 billion under his time in office.

Iraq's Kurdish Regional Government passed milestone legislation earlier this month that requires schools in the north to be "religiously neutral." As Stephen Mansfield points out, this is a "stunning break" from Islamic norms across the Arab world and an acknowledgement that Kurds have a diverse-and Christian-past.

At the G-20 summit Mexico President Felipe Calderón praised President Obama for a "valuable decision" on limiting deportations of illegal immigrants in the United States. Obama's shift on deportations puts the issue front and center in the presidential campaign but is likely to give Obama another election year headache by raising the count of unemployed. A group of 140 evangelical leaders working to steer the discussion over illegals along broader concerns will nonetheless run into political trip wires, too. Joe Carter has a helpful summation.

You may rethink your upcoming short-term mission trip after reading Darren Carlson's much-commented-upon post at The Gospel Coalition. Keying on recent books criticizing "toxic charity," he wrote, "If you regularly do something for someone that they can do themselves, you create unhealthy dependence."

When long- and short-term missionaries can be lifesaving: SIM physician Rob Congdon at a medical clinic at Doro in South Sudan's eastern Upper Nile state sent this report in an email today: "The needs are mounting up. The flow of refugees seems destined to continue, with reports of another 30,000 looking for any place to lodge themselves as they come South. We could be as busy as we would allow ourselves … we hand out 120 numbers a day at the clinic and the line begins to form before 5 a.m. now. The MSF [Medicin sans Frontiers] clinic right in the refugee camp (with many staff coming and going on eight-week rotation) sees twice our numbers, and five miles away there is a similar GOAL clinic and Sam's Purse 'hospital' which is overflowing with patients. As it is, many in the camps simply survive 'if God wills'-and allow the sick to die if they become very ill."

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