MANDALAY (UCAN): About 1,000 people have fled their homes and taken refuge at religious sites as renewed fighting erupted in Myanmar’s Shan State.
 
Aid workers said that more than 300 people were sheltering at a Catholic church in a village in Hsenwi township on August 19, while 700 people were at Mansu Shan Buddhist monastery in the town of Lashio.
 

JERUSALEM (CNS): “It is time to look for more peace in the region and in Israel and Palestine,” Archbishop Michel Sabbah, retired Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, said in a statement on May 15, a day which the Palestinians commemorate as the Nakba, or disaster, when Israel declared its independence in 1948. Israel celebrates its independence according to the Jewish lunar calendar on the 5th of Iyar, which every year falls on a different secular date.
 

DHAKA (UCAN): Despite repeated promises by the government in India not to shoot people wandering into the country from across the border with Bangladesh, some 28 have been shot dead so far this year by the Indian Border Security Force, Ain-O-Salish Kendra, a Dhaka-based rights group, reported on September 28.

Over the last three years the casualties have numbered 26, 33 and 46.