Death threats to Nazir-Ali

In an article in this week's Church Times, Church Times - ‘No-go’ bishop gets death threats, we are told of some responses to Michael Nazir-Ali's remarks about no-go areas in Britain. His PA, "Canon Smith said on Tuesday that he had taken the phone calls during Dr Nazir-Ali’s absence in India last month. “The callers said they were going to sort him out, that they were watching his family and, yes, they did threaten his life, effectively.” The thing is that making such comments seems to make his point ...

How the Government tests for faith

This is a bit worrying; how the government assesses whether someone is genuine in a claim of conversion. For example one Afghani; "In court he was required to name Jesus’s 12 disciples to prove his conversion was genuine. He answered this and other questions correctly, but was unable to name 'Advent' as the run up to Christmas."
While I'd be okay on Advent, I'm not sure I could name all twelve apostles off the top of my head: after all a big chunk of them don't really crop up again and so end up not in active recall. There are sensible ideas for tests in the rest of the article, but really: is this an illustration of government education policies: only what's susceptible to a standardised test of pub-quiz is worthy or of value ... ? It's a shame people's lives literally are at stake in some of this.
How the Government tests for faith -Times Online:

Global overview of the persecution of Christians

After taking us through the 'headlines' of what is happening worldwide we are drawn to consider Egypt. An interesting comment is made about the value of greater transparency and publicity, which is worth thinking and praying about.
"At the studios of Aghapy TV, a Coptic Orthodox satellite channel, Bishop Botros is eloquent on the advantages that publicity has brought. It opened two months after a church in Alexandria was burnt in rioting.
“We have not had any big problems with the state since the channel started,” he says. “In the old days, nothing was published about what was going on. We were given just one hour on television, at Easter. With satellite, everything that happens inside gets known outside. Our trend is to be positive. Lots of young people are coming into the priesthood, many of them graduates, with PhDs, master’s degrees. ”
In all these reassuring scenes, though, there is an edge of foreboding. ... They have fled from Sudan and Darfur, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Ethiopia. Nobody is fleeing Egypt. But Christians are leaving, by the hundred thousand. ... Nobody knows how many Christians are in Egypt; 10m is a mid-range guesstimate. But everyone knows, for certain, that each year there are fewer."
The descriptions of how legal low-level bullying, boycotting and bad behaviour conspire to make life difficult, sometimes impossible for Christians in some Muslim majority societies because of increasing 'fundamentalist' presences. Later in the article, we are given a possible explanation of how it works; "“Fundamentalists are very bitter and angry, because they are so severely repressed,” says an evangelical pastor in Egypt. “They rationalise it that Muslim governments repress them because of pressure from the West, and from Christians and Jews.” The same is true in Pakistan.
“There is a big confusion that the West is Christian,” says Dr Mouneer Anis, the Anglican bishop of Cairo. “We keep telling people that the West is secular, that its policies are secular, that the church is more and more being pushed away. They are not convinced.” The result is that local Christians are blamed for events ranging from the invasion of Iraq to the Danish newspaper cartoons, over which they have no control."
An article to pray over.
Praying for a miracle-Comment-Faith-TimesOnline: