Globe Trot: Castro regime cracks down on Cuban dissidents

HAPPY NEW YEAR. I look forward to your input on how to make Globe Trot better and more useful to you in 2015. At WORLD we begin our 30th volume of the magazine, and as we greet the year, we are eager for what the Lord will do in it.

CUBA: The U.S. State Department is protesting a crackdown on Cuban dissidents in the wake of U.S.-Cuba détente, as the Castro regime detained dozens of pro-democracy and free-speech activists this week.

IRAQ: Even Christians who’ve managed to escape Iraq face deprivation and an uncertain future. This family shares one bathroom with 80 others in a church hall in Jordan.

GREAT BRITAIN: In his New Year’s message, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby highlighted the rise in Christian persecution and called on Anglicans to be generous to the displaced and the down and out: “We are a country formed in a Christian heritage, which calls us to sacrifice and self-giving, to open-handedness and hospitality.”

ECONOMY: Alejandro Chafuen, Atlas Economic Research Foundation president and a trustee at Grove City College and the Acton Institute, warns continued threats from abroad increase the chances the U.S. economy will not be able to reap all the benefits of the new energy surplus. There’s good news in the U.S. economy, he acknowledges, but expect brakes ahead as the Fed pulls out of quantitative easing in 2015.

NIGERIA: Seven months after the Chibok girls were kidnapped, U.S. drone flights have dwindled, many of the advisers have gone home, and not one of the girls has been found.

RESOLVED: The resolutions of Jonathan Edwards and the manifesto of Ann Voskamp (not so much a checklist but “fluid, like limbs on a tree, just to reach for thenext one that I need right now,” she writes) are helpful touch points leading in to the new year. WORLD’s continuing year-in-review coverage of 2014 is all here.