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...Chinese have recently been arrested for illegally bringing Bibles into the country, Fu points out. On Nov. 28, police raided the house of Beijing bookstore owner Shi Weihan, confiscating Bibles and other religious publications and placing him under detention. And Zhou Heng, a businessman and leader of an underground church in China's western Xinjiang region, was arrested in August for receiving three tons of Bibles from South Korea...
...Amity's millions of Bibles could still be insufficient for China's growing ranks of Christians - depending on how many there are. The number of China's believers is "a hotly contested issue," says Bays. The state-sanctioned Protestant church has 17 million members; Bays believes that membership in unregistered churches is twice that, which would put the total number of Protestants in China at around 50 million - roughly close to the number of Bibles printed. "But of course some people say there are 150 million Christians," Bays says. "Then there aren't enough Bibles...
...interior ministers of Germany's 16 states have launched an investigation into the activities of the Church of Scientology, hoping to assemble evidence to support banning the U.S.-based organization from operating in Germany. But skeptics question whether such a move is politically and legally tenable - or wise. A similar move by state-level interior ministers in 1997 concluded in a report that "the Scientology organization, agenda and activities are marked by objectives that are fundamentally and permanently directed at abolishing the free democratic basic order" but that more time was needed to "conclusively evaluate" the group. In the intervening...
...exercise their political will, the right to equal treatment and guarantees against bodily harm. (The judge ruled, among other things, that the group brainwashes members.) Says Sweden: "For the first time, we had a judge, and not just rumors, stating that the group was dangerous." (Since 1995, the Church of Scientology has not enjoyed the legal protections accorded to religions in Germany, after a judge ruled that it was not a religion but a group "masquerading as a religion in order to make a profit...
...analysts as well as some government officials speaking on condition of anonymity doubt that the new effort will get very far. "It is not only unlikely; it won't happen," says an official familiar with the process. Having been alerted to the state-level investigations now under way, the Church of Scientology is likely to be extra careful not to transgress the law. "If you really want to do this kind of thing, you keep quiet. You don't announce that you are going to do it," says the official. Moreover, even if courts could uncover illegal behavior...