At least twenty-four people have died when a massive mudslide buried their homes in Oso, Washington. The death toll could go higher as up to 176 people were reported missing among the crumpled homes and tons of mud in Snohomish…

Thought it was the scene of many bloody conflicts and was bombed by NATO in the 1990s, Serbia has begun discussions with the European Union about joining the regional block of nations.  While it will take several years of talks…

Germany is weighing an increase in its military involvement in foreign matters. After a recent meeting between Germany’s foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his French counterpart Laurent Fabius, Steinmeier said, “Germany can’t leave France on its own” in its military…

Ulf Ekman resigned from the board of Yoido Full Gospel Church, one of the world’s largest congregations, and will join the Roman Catholic Church. The Charismatic church was founded in South Korea by David Yonggi Cho.  Ekman, who founded the…

The Sudbury Massachusetts United Methodist Church held a worship service to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first time a Roman Catholic Cardinal spoke at a Protestant church. The service attracted an overflow crowd of more than 500. When Cardinal…

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, is upset with the NSA. He believes it has overstepped its bounds in surveillance. So, Mark called President Obama and told him so. “The U.S. government should be the champion for the Internet, not a…

As expected, Canada has signed an information sharing agreement with the United States to comply with the U.S. law known as FATCA. There are many such agreements, but this one involves sharing information about Americans who have bank accounts in…

House Speaker John Boehner, a Jesuit-trained Roman Catholic, invited Jesuit Pope Francis to speak before a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress. Boehner sent a one-page letter to the pope on the first anniversary of his election to the pontificate. …

Patriarch Bartholomew I, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, who is head of the Eastern Orthodox Churches, will meet with Pope Francis in May in Jerusalem. He said he looks forward to the meeting “with expectant joy and an abiding sense…

Sometimes there is good news. Uwe and Hannelore Romeike, a Christian family, fled to the United States from Germany in 2008 because they believed they should homeschool their children instead of subjecting them to the secular propaganda of German schools….

“Some of the nation’s most conservative states are propelling the same-sex marriage juggernaut back toward the Supreme Court.” Since the Supreme Court struck down the part of the Defense of Marriage Act that banned federal benefits to married same-sex couples,…

Much about Ukraine and its strategic peninsula, Crimea, is in the news these days. George Mason University reported in 2005 that historian researchers in Russia have fingered the Vatican as the cause of the Crimean war in the 1850s.  In…