Priest, wife hacked to death in Indonesia: police

[Coventina]

Source: AFP

JAKARTA (AFP) — An elderly Christian priest and his wife were hacked to death with machetes in Indonesia, police said.

Frans Koagow, 64, and his wife, Femy Kumendong, 73, were found in the priest's home in Manado city, North Sulawesi province, Saturday with deep slash wounds to their heads and necks, provincial police spokesman Benny Bella said.

"The priest was cut from behind in the neck while his wife was cut in the head while she lay down sick with a stroke," Bella said.

"The priest had been squatting down to tie his shoes when he was attacked... there was no time for him to fight back."



Read more: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hkEX16Re3kfZOYm2YI7r1-ZilgcQ

[marshall]

1. NOT a country to be spreading a non-approved religion

But it is worse than the Soviet era arrests of people who smuggled Bibles behind the Iron Curtain.

[Igel]

2. Except that for the most part,

we weren't required to profess that the USSR was a bastion of tolerance and enlightenment.

Most of us could call it a repressive, authoritarian state.

Of course, I couldn't, at least not out loud. I was in a Russian program--the faculty were agnostic, wellsprings of moral dubity ("well, they have some problems, but I'm sure they'd say the same about us"). Most disliked being forced, by public opinion, to teach Solzhenitsyn. Most of the majors were of the opinion that the US was wrong and so the USSR had to be right.

When some group invited Robert Conquest to speak, I was one of maybe 20 people in the audience, sort of feeling odd since we were in a room built for 500. At least the protesters were civil enough to be outside and were low-key: They focused on preventing people from going, not from entering or listening.

My attitude was pretty much the reverse of most of the majors' opinion--I was less clear on the moral rectitude of the US, but was clear that the USSR was pretty much wrong. Of course, my mother and I fought about it constantly--equal rights for women, freedom of religion, free health care and education, what wasn't to love? Then, as a family, we visited there and she didn't so much change her mind as simply shut up on the subject and decide that it was *China* that held up the banner of humanity's progress. 'Nuff said.