NEWS

{mosimage}TORONTO - Every night after 2 a.m., Abbas Jahangiri visits Toronto’s “poorest of the poor,” delivering sandwiches, fruit, water and tea out of his Hummer, all packed by volunteers from Serving Charity .

Jahangiri’s non-profit charity is a labour of love, inspired by the live music venue owner’s devotion to Mother Teresa. He created it six years ago after making a personal vow of charity.

{mosimage}TORONTO - The Olympic flame is not the only torch making its way across Canada — the Torch of Life is also being welcomed in cities around the country.

The Torch of Life, which was blessed by the late Pope John Paul II, is part of SOS The America’s seventh annual campaign organized by the charity Step By Step to raise awareness about organ donation.

{mosimage}OTTAWA - The Quebec government’s plan to initiate a public debate on euthanasia and assisted suicide should be a catalyst to energize people to speak out against these “deadly practices,” said pro-life groups.

In a Dec. 3 announcement, provincial health minister Yves Bolduc said Quebec will hold public consultations on the question of euthanasia in the new year.

{mosimage}TORONTO - Whether Canadian officials in Afghanistan knew that Afghan detainees would be tortured once handed over to the Afghan army, or merely suspected that they might be, Canadians may have involved themselves in the intrinsic evil of torture, according to Catholic theologians.

Government denials which claim Canadians had no concrete evidence of specific cases of Canadian detainees being tortured don’t absolve Canadian officials of moral complicity in torture, said Lee Cormie, professor of Christian ethics at Toronto’s University of St. Michael’s College.

{mosimage}TORONTO - An Iraqi peace campaigner, on tour after receiving a Canadian human rights award, claims Christian Iraqi refugees — most of them stuck in Syria and Jordan — could safely return home to live in peace in Iraq.

“Let’s be honest. To get accepted here as a refugee, I have to talk about violence,” Ibrahim Ismaeel, chair of the board of directors of the Iraqi non-violence network La’Onf , told The Catholic Register.

{mosimage}The axe that landed on KAIROS , ending 35 years of Canadian International Development Agency funding, has left Canada’s Catholic development organization and others wondering, who’s next?

“It gives all organizations in the development community... pause right now to wonder what’s going on,” said Michael Casey, executive director of the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace.

{mosimage}WASHINGTON - The underlying tension between the world's largest producers of greenhouse gases and small countries quickly surfaced on the first day of the UN conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark.

In smaller gatherings after Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen opened the conference with the remark that "a deal is within our reach," the Alliance of Small Island States said it would accept nothing less than a legally binding pact to limit greenhouse gases. A much less demanding but politically appealing agreement would do little to protect its countries from rising sea levels, said the alliance, a coalition of 42 small island nations, low-lying coastal countries and territories.

{mosimage}OTTAWA - An ad hoc committee of four bishops has been named to help the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace in a renewal process.

“The focus of the committee is to help Development and Peace to review its mandate and to see how they can adjust to the last encyclical letter of the Pope, Caritas in Veritate,” said Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops president Bishop Pierre Morissette Dec. 3. “We think that there is a lot of very helpful insight in this letter for Development and Peace.”

{mosimage}VATICAN CITY - The Vatican's delegation to the UN climate summit in Copenhagen , Denmark, was being headed by an experienced diplomat and included experts on the environment.

Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Vatican's permanent observer to the United Nations, was to lead the five-person Vatican delegation at the Copenhagen conference, Vatican Radio reported. Migliore is scheduled to speak to the UN during the Dec. 7-18 conference.

{mosimage}World leaders and negotiators participating in the UN Climate Change Conference must remember that the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people will suffer most from environmental factors, church activists say.

“This is a pivotal point for all people of faith and good will,” said Cliona Sharkey, policy and advocacy officer for CIDSE , an international network of Catholic development agencies. “We simply cannot accept the continuation of a situation that is impacting on the people who have contributed least to the problem.”