(Christians, mostly sub-Saharan migrants, take part in a Sunday Mass in a cathedral in Rabat, Morocco, in 2019. The largest share of Christians, an analysis found, can be found in sub-Saharan Africa. (Mosa’ab Elshamy/AP)

WP; While Christians remained the world’s largest religious group at the end of the decade that ended in 2020, Christianity’s growth did not keep up with global population increase. But Islam — the world’s fastest-growing major religion — increased its share of the world population, as did the religiously unaffiliated, the Pew Research Center found in a report released Monday.Even as the overall number of Christians — counted as one group, across denominations — continued to climb to 2.3 billion, the religion’s share of the world’s population decreased by 1.8 percentage points to 28.8 percent, a falloff driven in large part by disaffiliation. The Muslim population, on the other hand, increased by 1.8 percentage points to 25.6 percent, according to the report, which examined changes in religious demographics through an analysis of more than 2,700 censuses and surveys. Muslims grew faster than any other major religion.” The report attributed the growth in Islam to a younger Muslim population — with an average age of about 24, as opposed to a global average age among non-Muslims of about 33 as of 2020 — along with higher fertility rates in some areas and lower rates of disaffiliation as compared with other religions, including Christianity. Nearly a quarter of the world’s population did not identify with a religion in 2020 (24.2 percent), as opposed to 23.3 percent in 2010.The world’s biggest unaffiliated population is estimated to be in China: 1.3 billion people, out of 1.4 billion, followed by the United States, with 101 million disaffiliated out of 331.5 million, and Japan, with 73 million out of 126.3 million. Another group that underwent significant a loss in population were Buddhists, the only religion that had fewer members in 2020 (324 million) than in 2010 (343 million); this was due to disaffiliation and a low birth rate. Those who identified as Hindu and Jewish maintained rates steady with the world’s population, the report found. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/06/09/islam-christianity-global-population-pew-survey/

Loretta Swit, the Emmy-winning actress who made the high-strung and relentlessly militaristic Maj. Margaret Houlihan human, dignified and, against all odds, sympathetic on the acclaimed television series “M*A*S*H,” died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.

Her death was announced by her publicist, Harlan Boll.

In the Oscar-winning 1970 film “M*A*S*H,” directed by Robert Altman, Major Houlihan (whose blatantly sexist nickname was Hot Lips) was played by Sally Kellerman. When the movie became a CBS series, Ms. Swit stepped into the role and made it her own, adding heretofore unseen nuance. She was nominated 10 years in a row for the Emmy Award for best supporting actress in a comedy series, and she won twice, in 1980 and 1982.

“M*A*S*H,” which aired from 1972 through 1983 on CBS, was, like the movie that inspired it, set at a mobile Army hospital during the Korean War. Major Houlihan spent the first five seasons distracted by her open secret of an affair with the sniveling, very married Maj. Frank Burns (Larry Linville).

Around the time Major Burns returned to the United States, she married a handsome officer whom she had met in Tokyo. But he proved unfaithful, and she was soon divorced and newly dedicated to her career as the unit’s head nurse.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/arts/television/mash-50th-anniversary.html

Throughout history, atrocities have usually been committed under cover of darkness. The perpetrators know that what they are doing is wrong. They hide it. They deny it. They speak in euphemisms. But what happens when they no longer feel the need to hide? What happens when they say the quiet part out loud?

This is what is happening in Gaza today. The mask has come off.

Ethnic cleansing has become the official policy of Israel. The nation’s leaders are admitting it, without apology. There was barely a pretense before. But now there’s not even that. And these admissions, combined with mass killing on the ground, point to something even more horrific: genocide.

On May 11, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told lawmakers that Israel’s war on Gaza is intended to render large parts of the territory uninhabitable, forcing Palestinians to flee: “We are destroying more and more homes. They have nowhere to return to.” Even the Trump administration — which is, or at least was, about as pro-Israel as you can get — understands what is happening. As President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff recently said, “Israel is not ready to end the war. Israel is prolonging the war, even though we do not see where further progress can be made.”

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“In the aftermath of the Pahalgam terrorist attack, what has caught the attention of strategic experts and left them perplexed is the U.S. President’s repeated obsession with Kashmir — his fixation on resolving a “1000-year-old dispute” and constant references to mediation have raised many eyebrows. This signals one thing clearly: Kashmir is once again emerging as the geopolitical epicenter of South Asia.

As two nuclear powers in South Asia indulge in military skirmishes, political messaging from the U.S. appears not only ambiguous but also contradictory. On one hand, there is an effort to center the Kashmir dispute as an issue of global relevance by hyphenating India and Pakistan together; on the other, the U.S. is leveraging trade tariffs to extract concessions from India — even discouraging companies like Apple from manufacturing goods there.

In the early days of globalization, the U.S. cultivated India as a key ally and an emerging power to contain China. It was widely believed that China wanted India confined within the subcontinent box — a position the U.S. actively resisted. But what has now transpired to reverse that position? Why is the U.S. attempting to relegate India back into the subcontinent box, even as it leads efforts to internationalize the Kashmir issue?”

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posted by f.sheikh