The Chinese birth rate fell last year, two years after the country withdrew its long-standing one-child policy and allowed Chinese couples to have up to two children.

Birth rates rose by 8 percent to 17.9 million children born in 2016. The increase seemed to indicate the success of the new policy: Half of the babies in 2016 were born to couples who already had one child. But the rate dropped in 2017 to 17.2 million births, according to a Chinese National Bureau of Statistics report released last Thursday.

The drop alarms Chinese authorities who are on a mission to increase the size of the country’s younger population to support its fast-growing number of elderly people. With almost 1.4 billion people, China has the world’s largest population but skews elderly, with more aging parents than children to care for them.

And it looks as if a two-child policy is not doing the trick.

One expert is not surprised. Steven W. Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute and author of Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream Is the New Threat to World Order, testified before the Congressional-Executive Committee on China in 2015 that he didn’t expect the two-child amnesty to make a difference in the Chinese birth rate.

“Forty years of anti-natal, anti-child propaganda has left its mark on the Chinese psyche,” said Mosher. “Few Chinese young people, who are themselves only…

“Political police” allegedly beat a Cuban Christian man after his arrest last year for “pre-criminal social dangerousness,” according to a watchdog group’s report.

Watchdog group NGO Christian Solidarity Worldwide says that Misael Diaz Paseiro was arrested on Oct. 22. State security agents confiscated two bibles, crucifixes and five rosaries from his house.

“Misael, in addition to being a counter-revolutionary, you are also a Christian,” CSW quoted a police official as telling Paseiro. “You should look at us, we are revolutionaries and we don’t believe in your God. Our god is Fidel Castro.”

Initially, Paseiro was not allowed access to his bible while in prison. He also was not allowed to have a priest visit.

In response, Paseiro’s wife, Ariana López Roque, went on a 19-day hunger strike.

According to CSW, she ended her hunger strike after being told that her husband would have more rights while in prison.

In a report released this month by CSW, there were some 325 religious freedom violations in Cuba in 2017.

“CSW is deeply concerned by the growing number and severity of [religious freedom] violations reported by a wide variety of denominations and religious groups, which seem to show that the government is attempting to tighten its control over the activities and membership of religious groups,” the CSW report reads.

“It is essential that the…

After opposition shut down a meeting center for Messianic Jews in southern Israel last May, ultra-Orthodox Jews are harassing it again since it re-opened this month, sources said.

 

Ultra-Orthodox Jews protested the presence of the center in Dimona, Israel on Tuesday (Jan. 23) and threatened some of the Messianic Jews, followers of Jesus, according to advocacy group Middle East Concern (MEC).

 

“Protests have taken place the last two weeks after the reopening of the center at the beginning of January,” according to a MEC press statement.

 

The center, where Messianic Jews meet for conversation, coffee and tea, had been temporarily closed last year due to protests by ultra-Orthodox Jews on May 4, 2017, after which they damaged Messianic Jewish leaders’ homes, breaking windows and traumatizing two children inside one home, one of the leaders told Messianic news outlet Kehila News Israel.

 

“Because we bent down at the right moment, we were not hit by stones thrown at us,” Albert Knoester, elder at a Messianic congregation in Beersheba, said of last year’s attacks in an interview published by Kehila News Israel. “Apart from this damage, there was also psychological trauma to one of the families in Dimona, due to the demonstrations and also because their house was damaged by stones. But also through bullying, etc., their two young daughters were traumatized…

In the days after Donald Trump’s surprise election in 2016, conservative evangelical Christians made clear their high expectations for the president they had helped put into office.

Has Trump met those expectations?

“When it comes to his very strong statements on life, on support for Israel, on the Iran nuclear deal, on religious freedom and on judges, we fully expect him to keep his pledge … to the American people,” Faith and Freedom Coalition founder and chairman Ralph Reed said at the time.

Fully 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump.

Here’s a look at how he fared on some of the issues they most care about in his first year of office.

Evangelicals in the White House

Just this week, the Senate narrowly approved Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, a conservative Catholic, as U.S. ambassador for international religious freedom.

Brownback shares conservative evangelicals’ views on same-sex marriage and abortion. And he’s one of many high-ranking evangelicals in the Trump administration: Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Vice President Mike Pence are just a few with evangelical bona fides.

Other evangelical religious leaders have reveled in their “unprecedented” accessto the White…