A group of Syrian Christian refugees has taken shelter in an Istanbul church, returning to Turkey almost 100 years after their ancestors were forced from Anatolia by the Ottoman Empire.
The Meryem Ana (Mother Mary) Church of the local Syriac community in Istanbul’s Samatya neighborhood is also hosting Syrian Armenians and Berbers. Turgay Alınışık, the manager of the foundation for the Syriac community, told Hürriyet that the number of refugees taking shelter in the church was constantly changing. The church provides refuge for all, regardless of their religion or sect, Alınışık added.
The Meryem Ana (Mother Mary) Church of the local Syriac community in Istanbul’s Samatya neighborhood is also hosting Syrian Armenians and Berbers. Turgay Alınışık, the manager of the foundation for the Syriac community, told Hürriyet that the number of refugees taking shelter in the church was constantly changing. The church provides refuge for all, regardless of their religion or sect, Alınışık added.
The church lies on a street in Samatya, a down-at-heel neighborhood in Istanbul's Fatih district. Christian refugees there eat twice a day, while staying in the church’s outhouse and passing the time in the nearby park.
While having his lunch, Syrian lawyer Lahdo spoke of how he had fled his country and taken refuge in Turkey, along with more than 1 million of his compatriots. As a Qamishlo resident who graduated from Aleppo University, his five-year legal career in Syria was ended abruptly by the war, and he fled to Istanbul via Damascus and Beirut.
“They were stopping vehicles while we were going to the city of al-Hasakah, demanding money and killing those who didn’t pay with machine guns. There was no security left. No electricity, no water, no life; everything was gone,” Lahdo said.
“Bashar al-Assad has some share of the guilt, but it was the outsiders who really stirred the country. When other countries got involved, things got out of hand,” he added, stressing that as a minority, Christians became the first target of the rebels.
“They were stopping vehicles while we were going to the city of al-Hasakah, demanding money and killing those who didn’t pay with machine guns. There was no security left. No electricity, no water, no life; everything was gone,” Lahdo said.
“Bashar al-Assad has some share of the guilt, but it was the outsiders who really stirred the country. When other countries got involved, things got out of hand,” he added, stressing that as a minority, Christians became the first target of the rebels.
Georget, 58, is together with her two 38-year-old twin children in Istanbul. “We had no means to live in Syria. Opposition fighters were bombing homes too, and we heard that they were beheading people in their sleep. The al-Assad government was good to us, it was the outsiders ruined everything,” Georget said.
A parish priest and around 20 Christians have been kidnapped from a Syrian village near the border with Turkey, Catholic news agency Fides reported on Tuesday, quoting Bishop Georges Abou Khazen, the Apostolic Vicar of Aleppo.
"Unfortunately I have to confirm news of the kidnapping of Father Hanna Jallouf..., the Syrian priest in the village of Knayeh, who was taken with around 20 Christians," Fides quoted him as saying.
He said the kidnapping took place in the night between Sunday and Monday.
A prominent Nigerian reverend has revealed Islamist terror group Boko Haram destroyed over 180 churches in the West African country following its capture of towns and villages in the north-eastern states of Borno and Adamawa.
Reverend Gideon Obasogie, the director of Catholic Social Communication of Maiduguri Diocese in Borno State, said the group's seizure of territory in both states has seen 185 churchestorched and over 190,000 people displaced by their insurgency.
In his statement, Obasogie said Boko Haram's "ransacking and torching" of churches had forced priests to leave their homes fortwo months while displaced civilians were still unable to returnto their towns and villages.
He added the destruction of churches was "sad, heart-aching and potentially dangerous to the territorial integrity and common good of Nigeria."
"It is over 30 days now that our church communities in Gulak, Shuwa, Michika, Bazza were ransacked by the callous attacks of the Boko Haram terrorists," the statement said.
"Our priests are displaced, while citizens...are counting their losses and regrets as they have been reduced to the status of Internally Displaced Persons [IDP]. Where is the freedom?"
"Life is really terribly difficult. We are waiting eagerly to go back home, even as it is obvious that we are going to [have to] reconstruct our looted and burnt houses and ecclesial structures.
"We have been sleeping in uncompleted buildings, camps and school premises. We have been absorbed into houses of relations and friends in [their] sixties and seventies."
Ebola, Marburg, Enterovirus and Chikungunya - these diseases were not even on the radar of most people coming into 2014, but now each one of them is making headline news. So why is this happening? Why are so many deadly diseases breaking out all over the world right now? Is there some kind of a connection, or is the fact that so many horrible diseases are arising all at once just a giant coincidence? And this could be just the beginning. For example, there are now more than a million cases of Chikungunya in Central and South America, and authorities are projecting that there will be millions more in 2015. The number of Ebola cases continues to grow at an exponential rate, and now an even deadlier virus (Marburg) has broken out in Uganda. We have gone decades without experiencing a major worldwide pandemic, and many people believed that it could never happen in our day and time. But now we could potentially see several absolutely devastating diseases all racing across the planet at the same time.
On Monday, we got news that the first confirmed case of Ebola transmission in Europe has happened. A nurse in Spain that had treated a couple of returning Ebola patients has contracted the disease herself...
Meanwhile, Ebola continues to rage out of control in West Africa. It is being reported that Sierra Leone just added 121 new Ebola deaths to the overall death toll in a single day. If Ebola continues to spread at an exponential rate, it is inevitable that more people will leave West Africa with the virus and take it to other parts of the globe.
In fact, it was being reported on Monday that researchers have concluded that there is "a 50 percent chance" that Ebola could reach the UK by October 24th...
Down in Uganda, a man has just died from a confirmed case of the Marburg Virus...
The Marburg Virus is an absolutely horrible disease, and many consider it to be even more deadly than Ebola. But the fact that it kills victims so quickly may keep it from spreading as widely as Ebola.
We shall see.
Meanwhile, a disease that sounds very similar to Ebola and Marburg has popped up in Venezuela and doctors down there do not know what it is...
"We do not know what it is," admitted Duglas León Natera, president of the Venezuelan Medical Federation.
In its initial stages, the disease presents symptoms of fever and spots on the skin, and then produces large blisters and internal and external bleeding, according to data provided week stop by the College of Physicians of the state of Aragua, where the first cases were reported.
Then, very quickly, patients suffer from respiratory failure, liver failure and kidney failure. Venezuelan doctors have not been able to determine what the disease is, much less how to fight it.
Why aren't we hearing more about this in the mainstream news?
Here in the United States, enterovirus D-68 has sickened hundreds of children all over the country. So far cases have been confirmed in 43 different states, several children have been paralyzed by it, and one New Jersey boy has died...
The CDC seems to have no idea how to contain the spread of enterovirus D-68.
So why should we be confident that they will be able to contain the spread of Ebola?
Last but not least, the Chikungunya virus is at pandemic levels all over Central and South America.
We aren't hearing that much about this disease in the U.S., but at this point more than a million people have already been infected...
Why does Barack Obama refuse to take even the most basic steps to protect Americans from Ebola? Even though it has already been demonstrated that Ebola can be brought over to the United States by a passenger on an airplane, Obama refuses to do anything that would even restrict air travel from nations where Ebola is spiraling out of control. Back in September, Obama said that it was "unlikely" that any individual with Ebola could get through the "extensive screening" at our airports and pose a threat to the general population. But he was wrong. That has already happened. And yet the official White House position is that there is "no consideration of a travel ban" at this point. What possible explanation is there for such gross negligence?
All of this talk about "extensive screening" at our airports is just a smokescreen because it does not exist. As Mike Adams of Natural News has pointed out, Thomas Eric Duncan walked freely through our airports and entered the general population without ever being asked by U.S. security personnel about where he was from or if he had any health conditions...
And nothing changed even after news broke of a confirmed case of Ebola in Dallas. Just consider the following excerpt from a CNN news story that I included in a previous article...
CNN Senior Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen said when she and two colleagues recently returned from reporting in Liberia, they got a mixed bag of responses from Customs and Border Protection officers.
“We all said we were journalists who had just been in Liberia covering Ebola,” Cohen said. “One of my colleagues was told, ‘Oh, OK, welcome back home, sir’ — and (was) just let in — that was it.”
Cohen herself got a different response.
“I was told, ‘Wait a minute, I think I got an email about this,’ and the border patrol officer went and consulted with his colleagues,” Cohen said.
That officer later told her she should check her system for 21 days.
“I said, ‘What should I be checking?’ And he wasn’t sure,” Cohen said.
At this point, a whole host of lawmakers are calling for Obama to restrict air travel from West Africa.
And a petition on Whitehouse.gov to ban all incoming and outgoing flights has more than 10,000 signatures so far.
But the White House is not moving.
In fact, Press Secretary Josh Earnest says that there is "no consideration of a travel ban"...
A total eclipse of the moon on Wednesday will offer stargazers a rare chance to see both an eclipsed moon and a rising sun at the same moment, thanks to an optical trick played by the earth’s atmosphere.
The upcoming eclipse will be the second this year and part of a series of four total lunar eclipses in 2014 and 2015. The hour-long event will be most visible in the Western Pacific, Asian Far East, New Zealand and Australia’s eastern coast.
However, observers east of the Mississippi River in the United States, an area where the moon will only be partially visible when earth’s shadow covers it, will be rewarded for braving the early hours of Wednesday just before sunrise with a rare viewing of a selenation, reports Space.com.
It’s a seemingly impossible occurrence when the eclipsed setting moon, together with a rising sun, are visible in the sky simultaneously. The event happens due to an atmospheric trick that refracts the light coming from the two celestial bodies making them appear just over the horizon when in fact they are just below it.
Depending on the location, there will be an open window of about 2 to 9 minutes when it will be possible to catch the rising sun in the east and the eclipsed moon setting in the west. Seeing them would also require favorable weather conditions and perhaps the use of binoculars or a telescope.
[In this article, Joel Rosenberg gives an excellent summary of the Rapture of the Church]
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