News/International

INDIANAPOLIS — Indiana Republican legislative leaders, under growing pressure from inside and outside the state, said April 2 that lawmakers had reached agreement to amend Indiana’s controversial “religious freedom” law to ensure it does not discriminate against gay and lesbian customers of Indiana businesses.

NAIROBI, Kenya - Somalia's al-Shabab militants shot and killed more than 147 people, wounded dozens of others and held hundreds hostage April 2 at Garissa University College in northeastern Kenya.

CHICAGO - Catholicos Dinkha IV, patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East, died March 26 at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. A virus infection and pneumonia were cited as the cause of death. He was 79.

JERUSALEM - Several pilgrim groups gathered in a sunny courtyard in Jerusalem’s Old City. They were preparing to follow a tradition reaching back at least to the fifth century: walking along the Via Dolorosa, through the cobbled streets of Jerusalem’s Old City.

INDIANAPOLIS - Indiana's Catholic bishops April 1 urged people to show mutual respect for one another and allow "the necessary dialogue" to take place to make sure no one in the state will face discrimination, "whether it is for their sexual orientation or for living their religious beliefs."

GENEVA - The Holy See's permanent observer to the United Nations in Geneva called on the international community to assist Nigeria and neighbouring countries to rid the region of Boko Haram insurgency.

A northern Nigeria Muslim leader who promised to pursue a nonreligious agenda as president will now have to deal with an Islamic terrorist insurgency that has wreaked chaos in the country’s north.

WASHINGTON - Hundreds of Christian religious leaders of various churches signed onto a Holy Week call to end the death penalty in the United States.

BEIRUT - Lebanon's Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim religious leaders affirmed the "essential role" of the Christian presence in the Middle East and called for terrorism in the region to be confronted "culturally, educationally and politically."

ZAATARI CAMP, Jordan - Abu Bilal, a slender man in his 40s, is surrounded by cages of bright yellow canaries merrily twittering.