Gates of Vienna News Feed 4/4/2011

The Swedish church (Lutheran, formerly the state church) is advising its clergy not to baptize converts to Christianity among the asylum-seekers who reside in Sweden. The rationale is that being baptized could put an asylum-seeker in danger, especially if he subsequently returned to his home country, and would not help him in any case. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of an established church trying not to spread the faith and deliberately avoiding baptism.

Meanwhile, while everyone’s attention has been focused on the deadly Koran-burning protests in Afghanistan, demonstrators in Bangladesh have been violently protesting a new government policy that would give women equal inheritance rights. Besides burning cars and beating people up, the protesters have called a general strike.

In other news, workers at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan were forced to empty more than 11,000 tons of radioactive water into the sea in order to make room in storage structures for much more highly radioactive water that must be drained from the reactors.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to AC, C. Cantoni, Caroline Glick, CSP, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, KGS, Steen, TV, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.