Globe Trot: Winter threatens Syrian refugees

SYRIA: Syrians, including Christians, need warm blankets and other supplies for what’s shaping up to be a record cold, wet winter. Nearly half of all Syrians remaining in the country are depending on aid, according to the United Nations. Barnabas Fund isn’t the only group working inside Syria, but I have seen their work through churches there, and it’s legit.

SOUTH SUDAN: Church leaders in South Sudan are offering to mediate a crisis among leadership of the Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement (SPLM) that threatens to escalate into ethnic and tribal fighting.

It would take a book to unpack opposition leader Riek Machar’s journey from guerrilla to warlord to Khartoum puppet to government vice president and back to opposition and rogue again. Significantly, Rebecca Garang, the widow of former SPLM president and founder John Garang, herself a government minister, is supporting Machar and has said so on Facebook.

MIDDLE EAST: Prince Charles hosted a Christmas reception for religious leaders in Great Britain last night to draw attention to the threat Christians face in the Middle East. He said:

I have for some time now been deeply troubled by the growing difficulties faced by Christian communities in various parts of the Middle East. It seems to me that we cannot ignore the fact that Christians in the Middle East are increasingly being deliberately targeted by fundamentalist Islamist militants.

The church in the region, however, is waiting and singing in the Advent season.

UKRAINE: Russia and Ukraine signed an economic pact yesterday that bails out Ukraine and is a Cold War-like rebuke to the United States and Europe.

BELGIUM: The Senate has approved a law allowing children of all ages to be euthanized. Here are comments from a trusted pro-life activist in Belgium, as we continue to follow this story:

The law will allow children of all ages to be euthanized. Advice will be given case per case by ‘euthanasia’ teams of which the members are all in favor of euthanasia. The checks and balances in the law are flawed. The euthanasia law that is still valid today is very poorly implemented. It is “known” that there are many abuses, no legal prosecutions, and many doctors performing euthanasia do not even report them. So it is to be expected that the new law will be transgressed from the beginning.