Seven Black St. Louis churches burned, racial motive suspected

This past Thursday a predominately black church, the Shrine of St. Joseph, was burned down in St. Louis. This was the seventh burning to strike the general area in about two weeks. It came only hours after community leaders gathered for a service on six arsons at predominantly black churches.

“We are sending a message … that you can burn down the building, but you cannot break our body,” the Rev. David Triggs, whose New Life Missionary Baptist Church was among those targeted, said to CNN. “And we will not lose our voice.”

It is suspected that the motive behind these arsons is racial. The fires have all occurred near Ferguson, the St. Louis suburb that has been the center of many protests against police brutality after the murder of Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson.

“Holy God,” the Rev. Mike Kinman, an Episcopal priest at St. Louis’ Christ Church Cathedral, said, “if we ever needed a wake-up call to believe that racism is alive in St. Louis — if this is not it, I don’t know what it could be.”

Right-wing party wins Poland’s parliamentary vote

Poland moved to the right in its parliamentary election Sunday, throwing out the centrist party that had governed for eight years for a socially conservative party that wants to keep migrants out and spend more on Poland’s own poor. An exit poll showed the conservative Law and Justice party winning with 39 percent of the vote, enough to govern alone without forming a coalition. A victory by Law and Justice gives the party a chance to implement a brand of politics that is strongly pro-NATO but also somewhat Euroskeptic. The party opposes adopting the euro currency and is strongly anti-migrant. Such positions are expected to have a large impact on the European Union, of which Poland is a member.

Hurricane Patricia hits Mexico

Hurricane Patricia was the most intense tropical cyclone ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere in terms of barometric pressure, and the strongest globally in terms of reliably measured maximum sustained winds. Late on October 23, Patricia became only the second Pacific hurricane on record to make landfall as a Category 5 hurricane. However, by Sunday morning, Mexican officials concluded that while a few thousand homes had been damaged by Hurricane Patricia, there had been no reported deaths or catastrophic loss of property. The dangerous storm’s magnitude and wind speeds of as high as 200 mph had the power to be very detrimental, “and that, fortunately, has not occurred,” President Enrique Peña Nieto said according to The Washington Post.