—Church of the Nazarene medical missionary Ron Farris died along with 126 others in the November 23 crash of a hijacked Ethiopian Airlines flight near the Comoro Islands. Farris, 46, a Nazarene missionary since 1987, was a surgeon managing West Africa medical clinics that treated 40,000 people annually. He was returning to his wife and four children in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, at the time of the crash.
—Abdurraham Wahid, chair of the 30 million-member Nahdlatul Ulama, Indonesia’s largest Muslim organization, apologized to the nation’s Christians following October riots by Muslims that resulted in the deaths of five Christians and damage to 25 churches in Situbondo (ct, Nov. 11, 1996, p. 96). Wahid urged people of all faiths to help rebuild the churches.
—The Fiji Council of Churches condemned the November desecration of two Hindu temples in the South Pacific island nation. Statues of deities were damaged at the Soni Samaj temple in Nadi and at a small community temple in Nadera in continuing religious turbulence (CT, Sept. 16, 1996, p. 112).
—A law easing restrictions on abortion in Poland took effect in November, allowing women to undergo the procedure until the twelfth week of pregnancy if they express financial or emotional reasons for it. The new law replaces one supported by the Roman Catholic hierarchy that for the past three years had limited abortion to reasons of the mother’s health, rape, incest, or an irreparably damaged fetus.
—A recent campaign to distribute 500,000 New Testaments in Copenhagen exceeded the expectations of the Danish Bible Society when 98 percent of the households accepted a copy.
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