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Pastor in Nepal sentenced to 2 years in prison for saying
prayer can heal COVID-19
By Anugrah Kumar,
Christian Post Contributor|
Sunday, December 05, 2021
A court in Nepal has sentenced a pastor to two years in prison under the country’s harsh anti-conversion law for merely saying that prayers can heal COVID-19, according to reports.
The District Court in Dolpa this week sentenced Pastor Keshab Raj Acharya to two years in prison and a fine of $165 (20,000 Rupees) for suggesting on social media that prayer could bring healing from the coronavirus, the U.S.-based persecution watchdog International Christian Concern said in a statement.
Pastor Acharya was first arrested on March 23 last year from his home in Pokhara, Gandaki Pradesh Province, on charges of spreading false information regarding COVID-19. Though he was released about a fortnight later, he was rearrested moments later on charges of “outraging religious feelings” and “proselytizing.”
After more than three months in prison, he was released on July 3, 2020, after paying bail equal to about $2,500.
In a viral video published on the internet, Pastor Acharya prayed in front of his congregation, saying, “Hey, corona — you go and die. May all your deeds be destroyed by the power of the Lord Jesus. I rebuke you, corona, in the name of Lord Jesus Christ. By the power or the ruler of this Creation, I rebuke you. … By the power in the name of Lord Jesus Christ, corona, go away and die.”
William Stark, ICC’s regional manager for South Asia, said: “For more than a year, authorities in the Dolpa District have seemed bent on convicting Pastor Acharya of something and punishing him for simply being a Christian pastor. Since the new constitution was adopted in 2015, Nepalese Christians have been concerned that Article 26 and its enacting laws would be used to target their community.”
Stark added that “Nepal’s sweeping anti-conversion law must be repealed if religious freedom is truly a right to be enjoyed by the country’s citizens.”
After his release last July, Acharya had told Morning Star News that it was a “very difficult” time for him.
“I would think of my little children and my wife, and I would cry out to the Lord in prayer. I would look up at Him in hope that if it is in His will that I should be put through this, He would get me out of this,” he said at the time.
Acharya told the outlet he believed government officials and police worked together against him. “They were laying a thorough plan to make sure I would stay in the jail for a longer period.”
Senior Counsel Govinda Bandi, who was defending the pastor, told the U.K.-based Christian Solidarity Worldwide at the time that his repeated arrest was a “very worrying sign of the trajectory of religious freedom in this country.”
“The police are clearly acting outside the scope of the constitution and without any regard to the rules of criminal procedure,” Bandi said. “There seems to be a concerted effort to use the draconian provisions in the Penal Code to target him that will also threaten the wider minority community with penal sanctions for practicing their religion or belief. Furthermore, the whole allegation against him, is forged on unfounded and prejudiced allegations. This is without a doubt a targeted persecution and a travesty of our justice system.”
Christians have been under attack since before the promulgation of the country’s new constitution in September 2015.
Low-intensity blasts occurred in two churches in east Nepal around the time. Pamphlets promoting Hindu nationalism were found at each of the churches and a nationalist group, Hindu Morcha Nepal, issued a press statement calling for Christian leaders to leave the country and for Christian converts to return to Hinduism.
The constitution establishes Nepal as a secular country but also effectively bans evangelism, as it states that no one is allowed to make an attempt to convert people of other religions to his or her own. It also calls for the protection of Hinduism, the majority religion.
Article 26 (3) of the constitution states: “No person shall behave, act or make others act to disturb public law and order situation or convert a person of one religion to another or disturb the religion of other people…such an act shall be punished by law.”
In 2018, Nepal’s government added the controversial portion of the constitution to the country’s criminal code, which states that an individual found guilty of even encouraging religious conversions can be fined up to $670 (50,000 rupees) and imprisoned for up to five years.
Hindu nationalist groups in Nepal allege that Hinduism is under threat as more people could be converted into Christianity. They have been calling for the exclusion of the term “secularism” — which in the South Asian context means equal treatment of all religions by the State — from the charter of Nepal, which was a Hindu monarchy until 2006.
Persecution watchdog Open Doors USA ranks Nepal at No. 34 on its World Watch List of 50 countries where it is most difficult to be a Christian.
John 1:4 > In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. 5 And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.
Dolpa, Nepal
Covid outbreak on cruise ship with over 3,000 passengers
5 Dec, 2021 13:12
© AFP / CARMEN JASPERSEN / DPA / AFP
Ten people have tested positive for Covid on board a Norwegian Cruise Line ship bound for New Orleans, despite the strict rules in place that required that all passengers and crew be vaccinated.
The vessel had departed the same city on November 28, and was scheduled to return there this weekend. On its route, the Norwegian Breakaway called at a number of ports in Belize, Honduras, and Mexico, according to the Louisiana Department of Health. More than 3,200 people are believed to be on board. Officials said in a statement that the cruise line “has been adhering to appropriate quarantine and isolation protocols as new cases and exposures have been identified.”
On arrival in New Orleans, each passenger and crew member will undergo testing. Anyone presenting with Covid will have to immediately go into quarantine, either at home or in accommodation provided by the cruise line.
So far, there is no information on the condition of the 10 passengers who are sick with Covid. The outbreak occurred despite Norwegian’s rules, which require all passengers and crew members to have been vaccinated against the virus at least two weeks prior to any trip.
Cruise ships gained notoriety last year, when the coronavirus began spreading across the globe and passengers were often denied the right to disembark. Forced to quarantine on board, some ended up dying at sea, while others eventually had to be rushed to hospital as their condition dramatically deteriorated. This prompted the US authorities to suspend all cruises for several months.
FDA Says It Now Needs 75 Years to Fully Release
Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Data
What else has the government frozen for 75 years? Oh Yeah, the Kennedy assassination.
What do these have in common?
BY ZACHARY STIEBER
December 8, 2021
The Food and Drug Administration is asking a judge to give it 75 years to produce data concerning the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine, up 20 years from a previous request.
The FDA told the court it can work faster than its previously proposed 500-pages-per-month rate, but it also said there are more than 59,000 more pages than mentioned in an earlier filing.
That discovery, and a desire to make sure it can work on other Freedom of Information Act requests at the same time, prompted the fresh request to the judge to allow production of roughly 12,000 pages by Jan. 31, 2022, and 500 pages per month thereafter.
That timeline would take it until at least 2096, Aaron Siri, a lawyer working on the case, wrote in a blog post.
“If you find what you are reading difficult to believe—that is because it is dystopian for the government to give Pfizer billions, mandate Americans to take its product, prohibit Americans from suing for harms, but yet refuse to let Americans see the data underlying its licensure,” Siri said.
The case was brought on behalf of the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, which stated that the FDA wasn’t complying with its request for data in a timely manner.
The group includes Dr. Carole Browner, a research professor at the University of California–Los Angeles’s David Geffen School of Medicine; Peter Doshi, an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, and Dr. Harvey Risch, a professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health.
The group says the data should be made public quickly because the FDA spent just 108 days reviewing it before granting emergency use authorization to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
The matter is more urgent because millions of Americans are being mandated to take the shot or face repercussions, such as a loss of access to businesses and employment termination.
The Pfizer shot is the only one that has been approved by drug regulators. Approvals mean products have met a higher threshold of safety and effectiveness than those given emergency clearance.
“The entire purpose of FOIA is government transparency. In multiple recent cases, in upholding the FOIA’s requirement to ‘make the records promptly available,’ courts have required agencies, including the FDA, to produce 10,000 or more pages per month, and those cases did not involve a request nearly this important–i.e., the data underlying licensure of a liability-free product that the federal government requires nearly all Americans to receive,” Siri said.
“As the present pandemic rages on, independent review of these documents by outside scientists is urgently needed to assist with addressing the shortcomings and issues with the response to the pandemic to date.”
The FDA said its Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research maintains the records sought by the plaintiff but only has 10 staff members, and two of them are new, leaving them slower in processing pages than the other workers.
Each line of each page must be reviewed to ensure proper redactions are applied, the filing states.
Additionally, a faster rate than that requested would divert “significant resources away from the processing of other FOIA requests that are also in litigation,” and requests that came in before the request in question, the agency stated. “In sum, FDA’s proposed processing schedule is fair to plaintiff.”
NIH: No Documents Available on Removal of ‘Gain-of-Function’
Definition From Website
BY ZACHARY STIEBER
December 9, 2021
No documents exist explaining why officials decided to remove the definition of “gain-of-function research” from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) website, the agency told The Epoch Times.
The NIH site used to include a 232-word definition of the research, but it was removed around the same time the agency disclosed that research it funded in China met the definition.
The alteration took place sometime between Oct. 19 and Oct. 21.
The Epoch Times submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for any communications and other documents from between Oct. 1 and Oct. 25 relating to the change, which had been authorized by the NIH Office of Communications and Public Liaison.
The request was closed this week. The NIH told The Epoch Times that it “does not have documentation” on the change other than the updated page.
The Department of Health and Human Services in 2017 published a document explaining how to deal with proposed research involving “enhanced potential pandemic pathogens,” or gain-of-function research. The document narrowed the definition to pathogens both highly transmissible and likely to cause significant sickness or death in humans.
The page in question “had described the general definition of gain-of-function research that fell outside the scope of the HHS P3CO Framework,” an NIH spokeswoman told The Epoch Times in an email in October.
“However, that information was being misused/used incorrectly (and still is) and creating confusion (and still is),” she said, triggering the change.
The NIH’s FOIA office sent a statement on the change that was nearly identical to the one from the spokeswoman.
Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.), the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, told The Epoch Times via email that the changed definition “has only muddied the waters.”
“Part of understanding what happened in the Wuhan lab is understanding precisely what gain of function means, and NIH has not been helpful in this regard,” he wrote.
The documents released to lawmakers in October showed that the NIH funded,
via the EcoHealth Alliance, research in China that included enhancing the
pathogenicity of a modified bat coronavirus.
Experts told The Epoch Times that the research clearly fit the definition of gain-of-function.
Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, had said in a statement in May that his agency had never approved any grant “that would have supported ‘gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of Collins’s top subordinates, said under oath during a congressional hearing that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
After the October disclosure, Collins and Fauci appeared to admit the research met the general definition of gain-of-function, but argued it didn’t meet the definition laid out in the HHS framework that refers to research requiring special oversight.
Which, at the least means that the HHS framework was woefully inadequate.
Gain-of-function take a harmless virus and turns it into a threat to humankind.
America, and probably Canada, were almost certainly involved in creating the Coronavirus that lead to Covid-19.
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