ROME (SE): A bishop in Spain issued a public apology after a parish priest allowed the local Hindu community to carry an image of the Hindu god with an elephant head, Ganesh, in a procession at the church.
 
The priest who allowed the procession to take place subsequently offered his resignation as the vicar general of the diocese. It was accepted.
 
On August 20, the Hindu community of Ceuta and Melilla, two autonomous Spanish communities located on the coast of North Africa, visited the church of Our Lady of Africa.

DOHA (AsiaNews): Qatar passed a law on August 22 attributing industrial rights to migrant workers, including domestic staff, stipulating a maximum 10-hour day, monthly payment of salary, a whole day off each week and a three-week vacation each year.
 
At the termination of employment or contract, three weeks salary is to be paid for each year of service completed. It also prohibits the employment of anyone over 60 or under 18.
 

MOSCOW (AsiaNews): Patriarch Kirill of Moscow published an encyclical on the occasion of the centenary of the formation of the Moscow Council of 1917 and 1918 which reestablished the Russian Patriarchate 200 years after it had been abolished by the tsar, Peter the Great.
 
He said that it is significant to remember that the Moscow Council restored the patriarchate during the days of the Russian Revolution, which led to its potential never being fully comprehended.
 

AGANA (SE): People in Guam began organising prayer gatherings and vigils for peace in the light of a threat from the leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Kim Jong-un, to launch a nuclear warhead, which in all probability would be aimed at the tiny unincorporated territory of the United States of America (US), before August 15.
 

ALEPPO (SE): The summer months in northern Iraq this year saw a special treat for some 860 young people who took up the offer to take part in two months of activities held by the Church in Aleppo.
 
For many of the younger ones it was not only the first time to have the freedom to join such a camp, but their first summer without the sound of bombs exploding in the background.
 

HIROSHIMA (SE): As the president of the United States of America (US), Donald Trump, and his countepart from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Kim Jong-un, talked big bang theories, the sombre tone of the Peace Bell and the hush of the minute’s silence at the epicentre in the Peace Park in Hiroshima at 8.15am on August 6, exactly 72 years after the first atomic bomb exploded over the city, took on a greater significance.
 

VATICAN (SE): “On both human and Christian levels, love for truth with which the apostles entrusted us prohibits us from accepting the silence which has fallen on the conflict in Ukraine and on the suffering which has befallen tens of thousands of people,” Leonardo Cardinal Sandri, from the Vatican Congregation of Eastern Churches, said during a visit to Kiev on July 7.
 

PARIS (AsiaNews): Thousands Christians were joined by their Muslim brothers and sisters at a gathering held at Saint-Etienne-du Rouvray on July 26 in memory of Father Jacques Hamel, who was murdered while celebrating Mass by two men who proclaimed their act as a victory for the Islamic State.
 
The tribute to the 85-year-old priest on the first anniversary of his death began at 9.00am with a Mass broadcast on national television celebrated by Archbishop Dominique Lebrun, from Rouen, in the very church where Father Hamel had spilled his blood.

BEIRUT (AsiaNews): The World Maronite Youth Day kicked off in Lebanon on July 13 to offer young Maronites born outside the country an immersion experience in an Antiochian-Syriac cultural and human environment out of which the culture of their rite grew.
 
Organised by the Patriarchate Youth Pastoral Office along the model of World Youth Day, the 10-day international gathering of young Maronite Catholics has attracted some 450 overseas enrollments from across the five continents.