VINH (UCAN): People’s Court of Nghe An province in north-central Vietnam, has been criticised for upholding the five-year prison sentence of jailed Catholic rights advocate, Nguyen Van Oai, who was arrested in January last year.
 
The appeals court upheld the prison term on January 15, plus four years’ probation on the charge of resisting security officers and violating the terms of probation from an earlier conviction that saw Nguyen imprisoned from 2013-2015 for allegedly attempting to overthrow the government. 
 

MANDALAY (UCAN): Four Kachin bishops met for an hour and 45 minutes with Myanmar’s military chief, Min Aung Hlaing, to discuss prospects for peace in the country’s north, where intense fighting has erupted in recent months between ethnic armed groups and Myanmar’s military in Kachin and Shan states.
 

ISLAMABAD (UCAN): Six Christian churches in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province have been allowed to reopen some two weeks after their forced closure over alleged security threats, minority representatives said.
 
The house churches are located in the city of Abbottabad, where Al Qaeda chief, Osama bin Laden, was found and killed in a raid by United States (US) Navy SEAL commandos in 2011.
 

COLOMBO (UCAN): Hector Welgampola, executive editor of UCAN from 1987 until he retired in December 2001, died on January 6 in Brisbane, Australia. He was 85-years-old.
 
The Sri-Lankan journalist was editor of the country’s two Colombo-based Catholic weeklies, the English-language Messenger and Sinhalese-language Gnanartha Pradeepaya (Lamp of Wisdom). He was also a senior columnist for the Daily Mirror and Sunday Times.
 

DHAKA (UCAN): The military of the Union of Myanmar admitted for the first time that its soldiers, along with Buddhist villagers were responsible for the murder of 10 alleged Muslim terrorists at Inn Din village in Rakhine last September during a counter-insurgency operation.
 
A statement issued on January 10 said, “Villagers and members of the security forces have confessed that they committed murder.”
 

Manila (UCAN): Church leaders in the Philippines warned of more killings after the national police announced the re-launching the government’s controversial anti-narcotics war.
 
Human rights groups say that the deadly drug war of the president, Rodrigo Duterte, has claimed the lives of at least 13,000 people since it began in 2016.
 

Vientiane (UCAN): Attapeu, a province in the southeast of Laos, is not a place that draws much attention. But a recent illegal logging incident in which a convoy of 27 trucks tried to cross into Vietnam, shone a light on the problem.
 
Illegal logging has been a major problem in the country for years so the scheme itself was far from unexpected. But the consequences were. 
 

MADHAYA PRADESH (Agencies): Christians in India are facing more danger than ever before. 
 

DILI (UCAN): Timor-Leste lurched into a constitutional crisis after the minority government of prime minister, Mari Alkatiri, failed to pass key legislation, including a fresh budget, in the week before Christmas.
 
Asia’s most Catholic nation and youngest democracy now faces the prospect of a new government, or a second election inside nine months, as the country’s parliament has been in gridlock since the 22 July 2017 election failed to deliver a workable majority (Sunday Examiner, 24 September 2017).
 

ISLAMABAD (AsiaNews): Christmas celebrations went off without a hitch in Pakistan as people in the cities of Islamabad, Lahore, Peshawar, Karachi and Quetta marked the birth of Jesus under military protection.
 
Following the December 17 attack on a Methodist church in Quetta, authorities beefed up security around all Christian places of worship to prevent other terrorist attacks and allow Christian celebrations to go ahead without any problems.