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Nigeria marked its one-year anniversary of a return to democracy yesterday, but the mood in the country is hardly celebratory. More than 1,000 Nigerians have been killed in riots over the past year, most of them between Muslims and Christians in the northern part of the country. "The bloodletting has to stop," President Olusugen Obasanjo declared in an anniversary address. "We are going to make sure it stops." Meanwhile, the northern Nigerian state of Sokoto began implementing shari'a law.

"The most popular filtering programs allow their users to freely visit the Web sites of arch-conservative groups like Focus on the Family and Concerned Women for America, which feature strident denunciations of homosexuality," reports Wired News. "But when those identical fulminations against lesbians and gays were duplicated and placed on personal Web pages, Cyberpatrol, Surfwatch, and four other programs quickly added the addresses to their off-limits blacklists." The project was done by Peacefire, an anti-filtering association.

The latest installment of the "Left Behind" series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins was the number one book at Amazon.com on its release day. (It has since fallen from that position; at last check, preorders for the fourth installment of the Harry Potter series were beating it.)

"The Amish in [Middlefield, Ohio] have long struggled to curb underage drinking in their community," reports the Associated Press. "The problem has been serious enough that despite their tradition of avoiding the outside world, Amish leaders have reached out to police and judges in recent years for help breaking up drinking parties and doling out tough sentences to offenders."

Shortly before Sunday services at Memphis's Love Center Ministries Church, a 27-year-old woman asked the pastor to pray for her. Pastor Bennett Dean did, and told her "The Lord loves you." The woman pleaded with him, "Don't leave," but he had to prepare for the service. "Without hesitation, she came out with a gun and fired one shot at the base of her skull," recounts Dean. She is in critical condition at an area hospital.

Dominique Rey runs a bar between a sex shop and a lingerie boutique in Pigalle, the infamous red light district of Paris. Apparently it's been a successful enough ministry to warrant Rey's promotion from parish priest to bishop. "We simply answer questions and people confide their problems to us," says one of the volunteers at Bistrot du Cure (Bar of the Cure). " A lot of people who would never step foot in a church turn up here."

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May (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44