Thursday, 30 July 2009

13 MILLION ABORTION EACH YEAR IN CHINA ; SAYS REPORT

BEIJING - Some 13 million abortions are carried out in China each year, in part because there is little education about contraception or disease for the rising numbers of young people who are having sex, state media said on Thursday.
Fewer than one in three callers to a Shanghai hotline knew how to avoid pregnancy, and only one in five were informed about venereal disease, the official China Daily quoted a survey by the city's 411 Army Hospital saying.

"Sex is no longer considered taboo among young people today, and they believe they can learn everything they need from the Internet. But it doesn't mean they have developed a proper understanding or attitude toward it," the paper quoted hospital gynecologist Yu Dongyan saying.

Until the 1990s, doctors asked for women's marital status at abortion clinics, which were part of the family planning system that limited urban couples to one child.

Now, government data shows that nearly two thirds of women who have abortions are between 20 and 29, and most are single, the paper said.

Birth control information is mainly given to young couples.

Some single women may also be driven to seek abortions because under current laws unmarried mothers cannot get a "hukou" or household registration card for their child.

Without one it is extremely hard for Chinese citizens to get access to education, healthcare and other public services. China also sells about 10 million abortion pills a year, and there are many other abortions performed in unregistered clinics, the paper quoted Wu Shangchun, a division director at the National Population and Family Planning Commission, as saying.

In the United States, by contrast, which has a population less than one-quarter that of China, official figures from the Center for Disease Control show there were 820,000 abortions performed in 2005, excluding California, Louisiana and New Hampshire for which no figures were provided.

Sun Xiaohong from the education department of Shanghai's family planning authority said it was difficult to promote sex education in schools because some teachers and parents thought it would encourage teenagers to become sexually active.

Ordinary web users in China will be banned from surfing sex-related medical and research websites from July, amid an Internet crackdown on pornographic online content, that threatens to make information about sexual health even harder to access.

WORSHIP LEADER TONY LE BROWN FROM BOCA,FLA., CROWNED WINNER OF THE GOSPEL DREAM TALENT COMPETITION

A Virgin Islands-born worship and youth leader was crowned winner of the Gospel Dream talent competition Wednesday, besting the other two remaining contenders in the television series’ finale.
Tony LeBron, 33, of Boca, Fla., emerged victorious after following the advice of last year’s winner, Melinda Watts.

“Melinda just encouraged me to just to sing from my heart, to let everything out on the stage, just to give it my all to the Lord, and that’s what I did. And so she just encouraged me and so I’m grateful for her words before the show,” recalled LeBron.

Watts, in return, said Lebron has “an amazing gift, and it’s so obvious in everything that you do."

“Every step that you took, it was like I could feel your connection with God first and foremost. And it was like He was really using you,” she said. “I believe you’re going to go far.”

Wednesday’s season finale put a cap on fourth seasons of the six-week American Idol-style competition, which has been airing on Gospel Music Channel.

This year’s winner was selected by a panel of judges that included Michelle Williams from the Grammy-winning group Destiny’s Child; J. Moss, one of Gospel music’s most prolific talents; and Mitchell Solarek, one of the music industry’s most respected executives.

The theme for this season was "The Greatest Inspirational Songs of All Time."

REVEREND IKE, PREACHER OF RICHES ,DIES AT 74

The Rev. Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II, the flamboyant minister better known as the Reverend Ike, who preached the blessings of material prosperity to a large congregation in New York and to television and radio audiences nationwide, died Tuesday in Los Angeles, where he had lived since 2007. He was 74.
His death was confirmed Wednesday by E. Bernard Jordan, a family spokesman. Reverend Ike had suffered a stroke in 2007 and never fully recovered, Mr. Jordan said.

“Close your eyes and see green,” Reverend Ike would tell his 5,000 parishioners from a red-carpeted stage at the former Loew’s film palace on 175th Street in Washington Heights, the headquarters of his United Church Science of Living Institute. “Money up to your armpits, a roomful of money and there you are, just tossing around in it like a swimming pool.”

His exhortation, as quoted by The New York Times in 1972, was a vivid sampling of Reverend Ike’s philosophy, which he variously called “Prosperity Now,” “positive self-image psychology” or just plain “Thinkonomics.”

The philosophy held that St. Paul was wrong; that the root of all evil is not the love of money, but rather the lack of it. It was a message that challenged traditional Christian messages about finding salvation through love and the intercession of the divine. The way to prosper and be well, Reverend Ike preached, was to forget about pie in the sky by and by and to look instead within oneself for divine power.

“This is the do-it-yourself church,” he proclaimed. “The only savior in this philosophy is God in you.”

One person who benefited from this philosophy of self-empowerment was Reverend Ike himself. Along with Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart and Pat Robertson, he was one of the first evangelists to grasp the power of television. At the height of his success, in the 1970s, he reached an audience estimated at 2.5 million.

In return for spiritual inspiration, he requested cash donations from his parishioners, from his television and radio audiences, and from the recipients of his extensive mailings — preferably in paper currency, not coins. (“Change makes your minister nervous in the service,” he would tell his congregation.)

He would also, in return, mail his contributors a prayer cloth.

His critics saw the donations as the entire point of his ministry, calling him a con man misleading his flock. His defenders, while acknowledging his love of luxury, argued that his church had roots both in the traditions of African-American evangelism and in the philosophies of mind over matter.

Whether legitimately or not, the money flooded in, making him a multimillionaire and enabling him to flaunt the power of his creed with a show of sumptuous clothes, ostentatious jewelry, luxurious residences and exotic automobiles. “My garages runneth over,” he said.

Frederick Joseph Eikerenkoetter II was born on June 1, 1935, in Ridgeland, S.C. His father was a Baptist minister of Dutch-Indonesian extraction, his mother an elementary school teacher who taught her son in a one-room schoolhouse. The couple divorced when Frederick was 5.

His calling came to him early, he said. “Even when I was a young child, the other kids came to me to solve their problems,” he told the writer Clayton Riley.

At 14 he became assistant pastor for his father’s congregation, the Bible Way Baptist Church in Ridgeland. After high school, he attended the American Bible College in Chicago, receiving a bachelor’s degree in theology in 1956. After two years in the Air Force as a chaplain, he returned to Ridgeland to found the United Church of Jesus Christ for All People.

Finding the traditional Christian message constricting, he moved to Boston in 1964 to found the Miracle Temple and to practice faith-healing, which “was the big thing at the time,” he told Mr. Riley, “and I was just about the best in Boston, snatching people out of wheelchairs and off their crutches, pouring some oil over them while I commanded them to walk or see or hear.”

Two years later, still dissatisfied, he moved to New York City, setting up shop in an old Harlem movie theater, the Sunset, on 125th Street, with a marquee so narrow that it forced him to shorten his name to “Rev. Ike.” There he tinkered with his act, polishing his patter, introducing radio broadcasts and taking his show on the road.

He began to refine his message to attract a more striving, stable, middle-class audience, people who wanted to hear that their hard work should be rewarded here and now. To this end, in 1969, he paid more than half a million dollars for the old Loew’s 175th Street movie theater and made it his headquarters, calling it the Palace Cathedral. In his book “On Broadway: A Journey Uptown Over Time,” David W. Dunlap, a reporter for The New York Times, described the former theater as “Byzantine-Romanesque-Indo-Hindu-Sino-Moorish-Persian-Eclectic-Rococo-Deco style.”

With the move, the Reverend Ike stretched Christian tenets, founding the doctrine he named the Science of Living and thereby relocating the idea of God to the interior of the self, calling it “God in me,” with the power to bring the believer anything he or she desired in the way of health, wealth and peace of mind. He became, as he told Mr. Riley, “the first black man in America to preach positive self-image psychology to the black masses within a church setting.”

By the mid-1970s, Reverend Ike was touring the country and preaching over some 1,770 radio stations. Television stations in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other major markets were telecasting his videotaped sermons. A magazine he founded, Action!, reached more than a million readers.

In 1962, he married Eula May Dent. They had a son, Xavier F. Eikerenkoetter, who also became an ordained minister at the United Church and took over the ministry when his father retired. They both survive him.

Because of his emphasis on material self-fulfillment, Reverend Ike alienated many traditional Christian ministers as well as leaders of the civil rights movement, who believed black churches should further social reform.

His huge income also provoked suspicion. Detractors accused him of preying on the poor, and the Internal Revenue Service and Postal Service investigated his businesses. Though its fortunes have waxed and waned in the last 20 years, the church continues to operate from the former Loew’s theater, which maintains tax-exempt status as a religious property and is occasionally rented to outside promoters to present concerts.

Reverend Ike could be an electric preacher, whether at the old theater or on the road appearing before standing-room-only audiences. And he could make his congregations laugh, drawing on the Bible to drive home his message about the virtues of material rewards. “If it’s that difficult for a rich man to get into heaven,” he would often say, citing Matthew, “think how terrible it must be for a poor man to get in. He doesn’t even have a bribe for the gatekeeper.”

ANGER AFTER BIBLE DEFACED IN BRITISH GALLERY

Christians voiced anger and dismay Tuesday after a Bible, which was part of an exhibition inviting viewers to add their reflections, was defaced with offensive and foul-mouthed scrawl.
Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art has decided to put the Bible in a glass case after the exhibit, called Untitled 2009 and part of a show entitled Made In God's Image, was vandalised.

Artist Jane Clarke, a minister at the Metropolitan Community Church, asked visitors to annotate the Bible with stories and reflections, as a way of making it more inclusive.

But visitors to the gallery took the invitation a bit further than she had anticipated.

"This is all sexist pish, so disregard it all," wrote one person, while another described the Bible as "the biggest lie in human history" and a third wrote: "Mick Jagger and David Bowie belong in here."

On the first page of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, someone had written: "I am Bi, Female and Proud. I want no god who is disappointed in this."

Clarke said: "I had hoped that people would show respect for the Bible, for Christianity and indeed for the Gallery of Modern Art. I am saddened that some people have chosen to write offensive messages.

"Writing our names in the margins of a Bible was to show how we have been marginalised by many Christian churches, and also our desire to be included in God's love.

"As a young Christian I was encouraged by my church to write my own insights in the margins of the Bible I used for my daily devotions -- this was an extension of that idea."

On Tuesday over 100 people gathered outside the gallery to protest at what they said was vandalism.

Letitia Reid, a housewife from Glasgow, said the Bible should not be desecrated.

"As a Christian I am offended by this because Christians hold the Bible to be sacred. For it to be publicly defiled in this way is very offensive," she said.

As well as a glass case, the gallery now has paper and pens, with which they can write down their thoughts, to be inserted into the Bible later by members of staff.

TEXAS WOMAN SPREADS BIBLE LESSONS WORLDWIDE

Spread the Word.

That's simply what she does — and has done for 40 years.

Dorothy Hilton, who will soon be 92, spread Bible-related materials wherever she could after making her first audio recording on a seven-inch reel of tape in 1969.

Some of the Bible teaching tapes, sent around the world, became a perpetual-motion generator for her ministry.

"I would just pick up the phone and it would be England, someone saying, 'I found a reel tape in the attic, and it's fascinating. Do you have more?'"

Hilton primarily published the lessons taught at Lubbock Bible Church by the Rev. Charles Clough in the 1970s, under her ministry of Alpha Omega Tapes. There were 1,550 of the lessons, and she had the entire collection.

For the past 17 years, though, she has become a part of the correspondence work done by the Lubbock-based Exodus Prison Ministry, which sends its study books to thousands of inmates.

She sometimes needs a walker to move to the copy machine after suffering a fall three years ago, but that doesn't seem to limit her portion of the work in producing 55,000 books a year.

The volunteers who staff Exodus get no pay for publishing the Bible lessons, but no one complains, least of all Hilton: "It means putting out God's word, and what a privilege. How much greater privilege could you have than to share his word?"

She said her philosophy is based on the Bible, and recommends it to others.

"It's really sad to be an atheist and not have a hope," she said.

Carla Hilton remembers watching her mother's ministry while growing up.

"She lives for sharing Christ with whoever will hear — that's been her whole goal in life. And her passion is how the prophecies in the Bible are now playing out in history," said Hilton, a nursing teacher in Lubbock.

She added, "Another of her passions is Israel. She knows that history circles around Israel, and that it will culminate with what God is going to do with Israel."

Joyce Hargis, director of Exodus, said Dorothy is the most evangelistic person she has ever met.

"She keeps us busy. When Dorothy gets to heaven, they will no longer call it a 'land of rest,' because she will put everyone to work."

Carla remembers that other work involved Child Evangelism and teaching Sunday School.

"But after the tape ministry was established, she would spend hours and hours counseling people in the tape shop when she wasn't running tapes. She would counsel people who were down and out or discouraged, or were just wanting to know about Christ."

Dorothy thinks the prison ministry is proving effective.

"We get notes that tell us that it's changed their lives," she said. "They always wind up, 'Pray for my family.' They also want their family won to Christ."

She sums up her faith this way: "It means eternal life. It means the only hope that anyone has — to hope for heaven, and to honor and glorify the Lord while you are here."

LEGENDARY CHRISTIAN WRESTLING COACH CANNED AFTER STUDENT CONVERTS : PRINCIPAL ALLEGEDLY IRATE THAT HE LEFT ISLAM TO BE BAPTIZED

A high school hall-of-fame and Christian wrestling coach in Dearborn, Mich., claims he was muscled out of his long-tenured coaching job by the school's principal, a devout Muslim, because the administrator was furious over a student wrestler who had converted to Christianity from Islam.

Gerald Marsazalek has coached wrestling for 35 years at Dearborn Public Schools, amassing more than 450 wins and, in addition to being added to the Michigan High School Athletic Association Hall of Fame, was named "Sportsman of the Year" by the All-American Athletic Association.

Despite Marsazalek's success, however, Principal Imad Fadlallah of Dearborn's Fordson High School ordered the administration not to renew the coach's contract, allegedly in retaliation over the student's conversion and to continue a campaign of flushing Christianity out of the school.

"We are getting a glimpse of what happens when Muslims who refuse to accept American values and principles gain political power in an American community," said Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, which is representing Marsazalek. "Failure to renew coach Marszalek's contract had nothing to do with wrestling and everything to do with religion."

Marsazalek is suing both the principal and the school in the U.S. District Court of Eastern Michigan, seeking back pay, injunctive and declaratory relief, damages, and to be reinstated as coach of the wrestling team.

According to lawsuit documents, Principal Fadlallah's retribution against the Christian coaches serving Fordson High began in 2005, after Marsazalek's volunteer assistant coach, Trey Hancock, led a non-school sanctioned and independent summer wrestling camp. Hancock, who is also pastor of the Dearborn Assembly of God and parent to one of the wrestlers, reportedly shared his beliefs at the camp and baptized a Muslim Fordson student into the Christian faith.

That fall, Fadlallah fired Hancock and ordered the volunteer coach not to have further contact with the student wrestlers.

"Subsequently, in full view of students and faculty," the lawsuit states, "Fadlallah approached the young Fordson student who had chosen to be baptized a Christian at Hancock's summer wrestling camp, punched the student and advised the student he had 'disgraced his family' by converting to Christianity from Islam."

According to a statement from the Thomas More Law Center, Dearborn is one of the most densely populated Muslim communities in the United States. An estimated 30,000 of its 98,000 residents are Muslims, and roughly 80 percent of the student population of Fordson High School is Arabic, many of whom are also Muslims.

Furthermore, the lawsuit alleges, Fadlallah then banned Hancock from entering the school, ordered Marszalek to "keep Hancock out of the building" and even banned the Hancock family from helping out at school concession stands, even though Hancock's son was an All-State wrestler on Fordson's team.

On or about Thanksgiving Day 2007, Hancock came to the school to register his son for an activity, an offense against Fadlallah's orders, the lawsuit claims, which led to a vocal confrontation between the principal and Marszalek, who was allegedly accused of failing to enforce Hancock's banishment.

When the 2007-2008 wrestling season concluded, the lawsuit states, Fadlallah instructed the school's athletic director to be rid of Marszalek too, by refusing to even process the Christian's yearly renewal application for the coaching position, saying, "Gone. I want him gone. No appeal."

Another assistant coach, who had made no application for the head coaching position, was chosen by the school to take Marszalek's place.

According to the lawsuit, however, Marszalek's treatment by Fadlallah isn't isolated, but part of an intentional eradication of Christianity from the school.

"Fadlallah, since assuming duties as Fordsons' principal in 2005, has systematically weeded out Christian teachers, coaches and employees and has terminated, demoted or reassigned them because of their Christian beliefs," the lawsuit continues. "Fadlallah has publicly stated 'he sees Dearborn Fordson High School as a Muslim school, both in students and faculty, and is working to that end.'"

David Mustonen, a spokesman for Dearborn Public Schools, told the Detroit Free Press earlier today that the district had not yet seen the lawsuit and would therefore have to review it before making any comment.

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