NEWS IN BRIEF

SOME 1,400 members of the Catholic %Yarnell's League will meet in Bristol this weekend for their 73rd National Council. Topics for discussion include the National Pastoral Congress, the lapsing of young people when they leave school and regional representation. The guest speaker is Miss Gloria Hooper, a Catholic member of the Eurupean Parliament. She will talk and answer questions on the European Parliament on Saturday evening.
ON 1..N. a few of the 25,090 mosques that existed before the Russian Revolution are still in being and even fewer of them are still in operation, says Keston College, the study centre for religion in communist lands. The number of mosques still open is estimated to be 450.
A F1'I.L national debate on abortion and population control has been urged by Portugal's Prime Minister, Miss Maria de Lurdes Pintassiligo, a practising Catholic. Abortions are illegal in Portugal, even for "therapeutic" reasons, hut it is reported that about 2,000 women die each year from the effects of badly executed illegal abortions, Miss Pintassiligo said that she would like to have abortion discussed openly, allowing all shades of opinion to be expressed.
THE FULL session of the meeting of the East African Bishops' Conferences AMECEA held recently at Zomba. Malawi, renewed its commitment to building up small communities to enliven the Church in Africa. It also spoke out against infringements of the rights of children, who make up 45 per cent of the East African population, and re-asserted the Church's teaching against abortion and artificial contraception.
VALERIN A Makeeva, the Russian Orthodox nun sentenced in April to confinement in a psychiatric hospital, has been sent to the special psychiatric hospital in Kazan, east of Moscow, which is one of several prison hospitals for the criminally insane in which political dissidents and religious people have been interned. She is reported to have undergone intensive drug treatment which has paralysed her right arm and caused her health to deteriorate.