—Three Dutch Protestant denominations have agreed to merge into a new denomination, the United Protestant Church in the Netherlands, although the unification project is at least two years from fruition. The groups are the 2.1 million-member Netherlands Reformed Church, the 700,000-member Reformed Churches in the Netherlands, and the 20,000-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
—Pioneer medical missionary Eleanor Solta—died November 4 from injuries suffered when a fire broke out in her apartment in Mafraq, Jordan. Soltau, 80, cofounded the Annoor Sanatorium for Chest Diseases in Mafraq, a Christian outreach to nomadic Bedouins. She was the daughter of American missionary T. Stanley Soltau.
—Christian Sandsdalen, 79, on December 3 became the first Norwegian physician convicted of first-degree murder in connection with assisted suicide. In 1996, Sandsdalen had given a lethal dose of morphine to a 45-year-old woman who had multiple sclerosis. Oslo City Court ruled that the doctor should have found another way to relieve the patient’s pain.
—Backed by Roman Catholic lawmakers, Poland‘s lower house of Parliament on December 17 reinstated a law that prohibits abortion unless the fetus is irreparably damaged, the mother’s life is endangered, or the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest. The legislation replaces a 1996 law that allowed first-trimester abortions for women facing “financial or emotional” hardship.
—The Turkish Supreme Court on December 3 denied an appeal by Soner Onder, ordering that the Syrian Christian finish another six years of his 12-year prison term. Onder has been incarcerated since a Christmas 1991 firebombing by Kurdish terrorists in Istanbul. Police claimed Onder had been one of the attackers; his family says Onder, then 17, had just left a church service with them.
—The 43-year-old Mexican Mission Ministries (MMM) of Pharr, Texas, has become a part of Global Outreach Mission (GOM) of Buffalo. GOM president James Blackwood heads the merged organization, and MMM founder Walter Gomez is vice-president in charge of Mexico. MMM has 70 self-supporting churches and missions in 14 Mexican states. GOM has 330 ministries in 32 countries.
—The Geneva-based international Red Cross has decided to keep its emblem, even though the 135-year-old symbol may have contributed to the deaths of 21 relief workers in the past two years. The cross is intended to protect those in war zones, yet it has provoked radical Muslims to violence in some areas, including the massacre of six workers in Chechnya in December 1996.
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