he woman sentenced to death for blasphemy, while her trial is before the Supreme Court, sends a message from prison and calls for continued prayer.

“I cannot wait to feel the sun and the cold again, to see the open sky, the stars and the moon. Please continue to pray for my release from this darkness, so I can be with you in the sunlight.” Dreamy, mournful but full of hope, this is the latest message from Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Christian woman sentenced to death and jailed for six years on false charges of blasphemy towards the Prophet Muhammad.

One year ago, Islamic State militants captured the town of Qaraqosh in Iraq, forcing thousands, many of them Christian,to flee. Kurdish troops withdrew on August 6, 2014, leaving ISIS free to move in overnight and take four Christian-majority towns, less than a month after the group overran nearby Mosul.

The Knights of Columbus has launched an awareness campaign to raise funds for humanitarian aid to Christians in the Middle East, because Christians are more persecuted today than "ever in their history," announced Supreme Knight, Carl Anderson, opening the international convention which takes place from yesterday through Thursday in Philadelphia, in the United States.

A Christian was killed in cold blood and his wife’s life is hanging from a thread because the woman switched from Islam to Christianity.

The director of the Catholic Center for Studies and Media in Jordan advises against religious conversion for commonplace reasons such as marriage, without such a decision arising out of personal conviction. He also stresses that there are more factors that unite Jordan's Christians and Muslims than those which divide them. He suggests focusing efforts on key activities such as changing school curricula -- rather than heralding Jordanian society as the most positive and influential in the region.

In a new report published at the end of July, Caritas Italy reveals that there are somewhere between 50,000-70,000 prison camps in North Korea. 4,344 people have been killed in less than a year. Hostility against religious groups is acutest in Syria.

A year after the expulsion of Christians from the Nineveh Plain, the Pope’s “personal envoy” to Iraq retraces the history of Christianity in Mesopotamia, dispelling misleading stereotypes and recalling the Vatican attempts to stop the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

A long special report in the newspaper’s Sunday Magazine,July 26, addresses this dramatic question. Within a century (1910-2010), the number of Christians in countries such as Egypt, Israel, Palestine and Jordan has plummeted from 14 to 4 per cent of the population.

During the Marian prayer on Sunday, July 26, PopeFrancis called for a “renewed effort from the competent local and international authorities” to make sure these clerics are freed. Commenting on the Gospel passage about the miracle of the five loaves and two fish, the Pope recalled that Jesus replaces the buying mentality with that of giving. Concluding, he invited faithful to register for the World Youth Day in Poland and signed up himself in front of the crowd using a tablet.

The troubling conduct of many of our young people, such as reckless driving, littering and resolving differences on university and school campuses through violence, is an indicator of a lack of proper values in their upbringing.

The recent incident at one of our universities, where a group of female students vowed to use social media to “expose” the “immoral” behaviour of other female students because they simply look, dress and act differently is an indicator of how difference is viewed as alien and devious.