I was gone over the weekend, so I apologize if this was posted already. It was in the Friday issue of The Seattle Times.
Jehovah's Witnesses banned from Russian capital
MOSCOW ? Jehovah's Witnesses were banned from Russia's capital yesterday in a court ruling that a lawyer for the Christian group said appeared to have been encouraged by Russia's Orthodox Church.Since the mid-1990s, Jehovah's Witnesses and several other religious groups, including Catholics, have been a target of an aggressive public campaign by the Orthodox Church, which claims the pre-eminent role among Russia's faiths.
During the six-year fight to ban the group, prosecutors argued that Jehovah's Witnesses inflamed religious divisions, broke up families and pushed seriously ill people to refuse medical help on religious grounds. Jehovah's Witnesses claim 11,000 followers in Moscow and 133,000 in Russia.
Defense counsel John Burns said the group would appeal the ruling, under which the group would lose its legal status and be barred from organizing meetings.