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After Paris Attacks, French Army Applications Triple

A French soldier near the Eiffel Tower, in Paris, on Nov. 17, 2015.
A French soldier near the Eiffel Tower, in Paris, on Nov. 17, 2015.

PARIS — The number of young French people applying to join the army since the Nov. 13 attacks has tripled. After first refraining from making these figures public during the three-day period of national mourning, the French Defense Ministry told Le Monde Thursday it had received 1,500 applications per day since Friday, compared to 500 before the attacks.

Colonel Eric de Lapresle, a top army marketing and communication official, told Le Monde the current situation was "completely unprecedented" and "staggering."

French land forces had already seen a surge in applications after the Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket killings in January. President François Hollande had also decided to maintain most military positions that had been originally intended to be cut before the January attacks.

After the latest attacks Friday, Hollande announced the creation of 8,500 additional positions, which, as Le Figaro reports, will cost the French government 600 million euros in 2016.

The French army expects to receive some 160,000 applications in 2015, compared to 120,000 last year. Of this figure, about 15,000 are likely to pass all the evaluation tests and declared able to join the military ranks.

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Society

How Brazil's Evangelical Surge Threatens Survival Of Native Afro-Brazilian Faith

Followers of the Afro-Brazilian Umbanda religion in four traditional communities in the country’s northeast are resisting pressure to convert to evangelical Christianity.

image of Abel José, an Umbanda priest

Abel José, an Umbanda priest

Agencia Publica
Géssica Amorim

Among a host of images of saints and Afro-Brazilian divinities known as orixás, Abel José, 42, an Umbanda priest, lights some candles, picks up his protective beads and adjusts the straw hat that sits atop his head. He is preparing to treat four people from neighboring villages who have come to his house in search of spiritual help and treatment for health ailments.

The meeting takes place discreetly, in a small room that has been built in the back of the garage of his house. Abel lives in the quilombo of Sítio Bredos, home to 135 families. The community, located in the municipality of Betânia of Brazil’s northeastern state of Pernambuco, is one of the municipality’s four remaining communities that have been certified as quilombos, the word used to refer to communities formed in the colonial era by enslaved Africans and/or their descendents.

In these villages there are almost no residents who still follow traditional Afro-Brazilian religions. Abel, Seu Joaquim Firmo and Dona Maura Maria da Silva are the sole remaining followers of Umbanda in the communities in which they live. A wave of evangelical missionary activity has taken hold of Betânia’s quilombos ever since the first evangelical church belonging to the Assembleia de Deus group was built in the quilombo of Bredos around 20 years ago. Since then, other evangelical, pentecostal, and neo-pentecostal churches and congregations have established themselves in the area. Today there are now nine temples spread among the four communities, home to roughly 900 families.

The temples belong to the Assembleia de Deus, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and the World Church of God's Power, the latter of which has over 6,000 temples spread across Brazil and was founded by the apostle and televangelist Valdemiro Santiago, who became infamous during the pandemic for trying to sell beans that he had blessed as a Covid-19 cure. Assembleia de Deus alone, who are the largest pentecostal denomination in the world, have built five churches in Betânia’s quilombos.


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