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The World Council of Churches (WCC) executive committee has expressed worries about the "deteriorating human rights situation in Ethiopia and Eritrea", while encouraging the establishment of a "joint Christian and Muslim Peace Committee for Somalia".

The World Council of Churches (WCC) executive committee has expressed appreciation for the establishment of the UN Peacebuilding Commission, and urged WCC member churches to encourage and support its efforts.

"Make me a channel of your peace" was the theme for a celebration of common commitment to overcome violence at a gathering of Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican and Protestant church representatives on 17 February in Wittenberg, Germany.

The international community's responsibility to protect endangered populations when their governments fail to do so - if necessary, by the use of force - and church support for such measures was the subject of a lively debate at a World Council of Churches (WCC) workshop at the 20-25 January World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya.

"Robert Bilheimer is well remembered within the WCC as one of the imaginative individuals whose faithful and creative spirit shaped the movement and actions of the Council in its early stage of development," wrote WCC general secretary Rev. Dr Samuel Kobia to Mrs Dorothy Bilheimer on 18 January 2007.

In a message to all the Palestinian people, Jerusalem church leaders alarmed at worsening relations between two main political parties are calling for an end to violence and an urgent return to the "real priorities" of Palestinians. The plan is to work with Jerusalem's top Islamic leaders on a similar Christian-Muslim message as well.

At the execution of Saddam Hussein, the World Council of Churches' General Secretary issued a statement asking God to grant the nation of Iraq "the mercy, justice and compassion that it has long been denied" and "an end to fear and death that marked Saddam Hussein's rule and that continue now".

World Council of Churches (WCC) acting director for international affairs Mr Clement John has today called international attention to three "telling events" in the Middle East, all of which, he says, "involve denial and great danger".

"The cross calls us not to glorify, but to attend to the suffering in the world and to struggle for its elimination," said the participants of a theological consultation on cruelty organized by the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in partnership with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). The conference took place 5-8 December in Puidoux, Switzerland.

The task of the Decade to Overcome Violence (DOV) reference group is to guide work on the Decade over the period between now and 2010. Meeting in Geneva in December, the group islooking at preparations for an event that will culminate the Decade in 2011 - an International Ecumenical Peace Convocation (IEPC) - as well as at plans for the Decade's focus on Europe in 2007.

In a symbolic act of closure of the year that began with the first WCC assembly in Latin America, World Council of Churches central committee moderator Rev. Dr Walter Altmann visited an interactive exhibition on domestic violence in downtown Porto Alegre/Brazil.

Writing to Mrs Adelheid Kistner on 5 December, WCC general secretary Rev. Dr Samuel Kobia characterized her husband, South African pastor Dr Wolfram Kistner, as "a tireless champion for justice, equality and human dignity for all," and "one of the clearest voices, articulating biblically and theologically why we as Christians had to support the struggle against apartheid".

What does cruelty have to do with theology? Some 25 theologians from all over the world will gather on 5-8 December in Crêt-Bérard (near Lausanne, Switzerland), to discuss why and to what extent cruelty can be considered as a new theme for theological reflection.

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The Lutheran World Federation (LWF) and the World Council of Churches (WCC) have reacted together to news of the "despicable" assassination on 4 November of Lutheran Church in El Salvador co-pastors Francisco Carillo and his wife Jesús Calzada de Carillo.

An inter-religious seminar on the "spiritual dimensions underlying the crisis in violence" will be part of a 13-15 November public event in Rochester, New York (USA) focusing on violence and the how faith communities can respond to it. Â

A new group of 25 ecumenical accompaniers have just begun three months of working with the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI). The group includes the first Hindu and the second Muslim to participate in the programme, the former from South Africa and the latter from the UK.

The 11 October killing in Mousel, Iraq, of a Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch priest, Father Boulos Iskander, was a "senseless crime that... neither benefits anyone nor promotes the cause of any religion".

A 10 October World Council of Churches (WCC) pastoral letter to the National Council of Churches and WCC member churches in the Philippines expresses the Council's "deep shock and grief" over the brutal stabbing on 3 October of Philippine Independent Church Bishop Alberto Ramento, and alleges that Philippines government security forces continue "to indulge in victimization, torture and extra judicial killings on the pretext of fighting the terrorist threat in the region" in spite of protests and demonstrations.

The World Council of Churches (WCC) has congratulated the sponsoring states of a draft resolution on conventional arms control currently before the United Nations General Assembly and urged them to include in the text a specific reference to international human rights law.