Religion items taken from news wires during my newspaper work.

2000

Late April - Puritanical Taliban religious officials in Afghanistan stoned a woman to death for adultery, before a large crowd in a sports stadium at the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

April 27 - Police squads exhumed bodies of 55 more victims of the Uganda doomsday cult, the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments - raising the death toll to 979, the largest cult massacre in modern history, exceeding the 913 killed at Jonestown in 1978.

March 24 - Two South Carolina preachers - the Rev. Johnny William Cabe and the Rev. Shelton Joel Shirley, both of Hisway Ministries - were charged with bilking believers out of $7 million in an overseas investment fraud.

March 24 - Dismembered bodies of 153 people, including 59 children, were found buried under the dirt floor of a house used by a Uganda doomsday cult, a week after perhaps 400 cult members died in mysterious fire.

March 17 - Hundreds of members of a doomsday cult were burned to death in a gasoline explosion in Uganda, possibly in a mass suicide. They had burned their possessions and told neighbors they would depart on March 17, a day the Virgin Mary had promised to carry them to heaven.

1999

Late December - Renewed fighting between Christians and Muslims in Indonesia's Spice Islands killed another 550 people.

Oct. 6 - When German evangelist Reinhard Bonnke entered a Nigerian sports arena to begin a revival before an estimated 500,000 worshipers, the crowd surged forward, trampling 14 to death. (Bonnke's last visit to Nigeria in 1991 sparked deadly fighting between Muslims and Christians.)

Sept. 16 - Former Catholic monsignor Patrick O'Shea of San Francisco -- previously charged with child-molesting and tax evasion -- was accused of embezzling $252,000 from his diocese.

September - Bombs, presumably planted by Muslim terrorists from strife-torn Dagestan and Chechnya, shattered four Russian apartment towers, killing about 300 sleeping residents.

Aug. 10 - Buford Furrow, a follower of racist Christian Identity and Phineas Priest beliefs, opened fire on Jewish day-care children in Los Angeles, wounding three children, a teen-ager and an aging woman.

July 26 - Christians and Muslims rioted in Ambon, Indonesia, in a revival of religious violence that killed 300 in January.

July 26 - Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem protested that Tarzan wore too few clothes in a new Walt Disney cartoon movie.

July - Federal agents in New York indicted international drug dealers - several of them Orthodox Jews - on charges of recruiting Hasidic students to carry suitcases full of narcotics on flights from Europe. The devout students, in black hats and sidelocks, weren't suspected by airport searchers.

July 24 - Aroused by a religious massacre a week earlier, Christians and Muslims in Kano, Nigeria, attacked each other, killing 30 - including five who were decapitated and two cab driver burned to death in their taxis

July 18 - Christians and Muslims in Sagamu, Nigeria, attacked each other during a religious festival, killing 60.

July 9 - The Rev. David Kingston, a leader of the Latter-Day Church of God, a polygamous Mormon offshoot in Utah, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for marrying his 16-year-old niece against her will as his 15th wife.

July 2-4 - Benjamin Smith, a member of the white supremacist World Church of the Creator, went on a shooting rampage in the Chicago region, killing a black former basketball coach and a Korean doctoral student, and wounding a Taiwanese student, another black and five Orthodox Jews. Smith killed himself as police nabbed him.

June 28 - The Rev. James Ogle of Bull Run Bible Fellowship at Manassas, Va., was convicted of offering to "trade murders" with a parishioner. The minister promised to kill the parishioner's wife, if the parishioner would kill his.

June 16 - The Rev. Anthony Rousonelos of Largo, Fla., was stabbed to death by his wife, because he had engaged in an affair with a woman member of their talking-in-tongues church, the Faith Assembly of God.

June 13 - Florida social workers said they have collected allegations that 200 Hare Krishna monks abused children in the sect's boarding homes.

Mid-May - A Muslim cleric in Bangladesh ordered a teen-age girl buried waist-deep in mud and flogged 101 times with a bamboo cane - causing her death - because she had premarital sex and induced an abortion. Women's rights groups say at least 60 Bangladeshi women have died from Muslim floggings in the past six years.

April 25 - Retired Presbyterian missionary Bill Pruitt of Dallas, Texas, was accused of molesting girls at a Congo religious boarding school, where he served years ago.

March 17 - The Rev. Henry Lyons, president of the National Baptist Convention, pleaded guilty to federal charges of fraud and tax evasion - two weeks after he was convicted on state corruption charges, and one day after he resigned as leader of the large black denomination.

March 17 - Arieh Deri, head of Israel's ultra-Orthodox Sephardic Torah Guardians (Shas) Party, and three of this colleagues were convicted of bribery and fraud.

March 13 - Suspected Muslim militants raided more Algerian villages south of Algiers, killing 13 people, including three babies whose throats were slashed.

March 12 - Federal fraud, conspiracy and money-laundering charges were filed against Florida-based Greater Ministries International, which took money from believers on a promise that each gift would be returned doubled.

March 11 - The Rev. Harvey Crews, the married pastor of Word of Faith Tabernacle at Newport News, Va., was convicted of killing his mistress. He testified that he was drinking with his lover and pulled out a pistol to show his trust, but it went off and killed her. A jury found him guilty of manslaughter and recommended a 10-year prison term.

March 10 - Twelve more Indonesians were killed in Muslim-Christian violence that has claimed 200 lives and caused thousands of homes and shops to be burned.

March 2 - The Rev. James Ogle of Sterling, Va., was charged with asking a parishioner to exchange murders: The minister offered to kill the parishioner's wife, if the parishioner would kill his.

March 2 - The Rev. Dale Robinson of Greater Love Tabernacle in Boston broke the jaw of a high school teacher who gave his daughter a D-minus grade.

March 1 - Christian-Muslim riots in Indonesia killed five more people, bringing the death toll to 150 in two months of religious violence. Hundreds of homes have been burned, and tens of thousands have fled as refugees.

March 1 - A Pennsylvania judge imposed a $6.4 million fine on Greater Ministries International Church of Florida for duping believers into giving money to the church operators on a promise that they would receive a doubled return.

Feb. 27 - The Rev. Henry Lyons, president of the National Baptist Convention, was convicted in Florida of swindling millions from corporations and charities that dealt with the large black denomination.

February - Evangelist Jerry Falwell's magazine alleged that Tinky Winky, a puppet-like character in a children's TV show, secretly fosters homosexuality.

Feb. 9 - The president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, the Rev. Robert Folkenberg, resigned after a lawsuit accused him of business improprieties.

Feb. 2 - Fundamentalist operators of "the Nuremberg Files" - an Internet web site that advocated killing of abortion doctors - were ordered to pay $107 million damages in a civil suit filed by women's rights groups.

Feb. 2 - At a Russian Orthodox monastery in Texas, known for its weeping icon of the Virgin Mary, two monks were charged with child-molesting.

Jan 25 - The Rev. Kenneth Spaulding, who held worship services for children in his Milwaukee home, was sentenced to 80 years in prison for child-molesting.

Jan. 25 - The Vatican reissued Catholic guidelines for exorcising demons from possessed people. Among signs of demonic possession, the guidelines said, is speaking in unknown tongues.

Jan. 24 - A high school physics teacher at Elkins, West Virginia, was fired for refusing to wear a school identification badge containing a bar code. He said the badge violated his religious beliefs, because the bar code is like the "mark of the beast" in Revelation.

Jan. 24 - "Punishment attacks" by rival Protestant and Catholic terror groups wounded two men in Northern Ireland.

Jan. 23 - A Christian missionary and his two young sons were burned alive at Baripada, India, by Hindu radicals outraged over "fraudulent conversions" of Hindus.

Jan. 22 - Sunni Muslim gunmen on motorcycles killed five more Shi'ite leaders in Pakistan, as part of a bitter religious rivalry.

January - Mobs of Christians and Muslims fought each other with machetes, spears and crowbars on the Indonesian island of Ambon, killing at least 50. The collapse of Indonesia's economy has triggered violence between rival religions.

Jan. 14 - Evangelist Jerry Falwell told an assembly at Kingsport, Tenn., that the AntiChrist is alive somewhere on Earth, and he's Jewish.

Jan. 4 - Killers on motorcycles - presumably Sunni Muslim militants - opened fire on a Shi'ite Muslim mosque in Islamabad, Pakistan, killing 16 worshipers and wounding 25 more. Attacks between Sunis and Shi'ites have killed scores in Pakistan in recent months.

Jan. 3 - Eight members of Concerned Christians, a Denver-based sect which went to Jerusalem to await the Second Coming of Christ, were jailed by Israeli police, who said the group planned to open fire on officers to provoke an upheaval that would "bring Jesus back to life."


1998

December - A Boston district attorney began a fraud investigation of "Rev. Ike" Eikerenkoetter, who has collected millions from poor people by selling magical charms and promising wealth of the sort he lavishly displays himself.

Dec. 8 - Controversial evangelist Tony Alamo - who once led a $50 million, cult-like empire of businesses, and preached that the pope is the Anti-Christ - was freed from federal prison after a six-year term for tax evasion.

Nov. 30 - Rival groups of Buddhist monks fought with clubs, rocks and bottles for control of a temple in downtown Seoul, Korea. Forty people were injured.

Nov. 30 - To retaliate for Muslim attacks a week earlier, Christian mobs in Indonesia burned four mosques and attacked Muslim offices.

Nov. 22 - Muslim mobs rampaged against Christians in Indonesia, killing seven and burning or ransacking 22 churches. Bibles and pews were burned. A Catholic girls school was plundered. Muslims also set fire to a gambling parlor, and seven patrons died in the blaze.

November - Pope John Paul II revived the ancient practice of "indulgences," which let dead people escape the torture of purgatory. A papal bull said Catholics who give up smoking or drinking for a day are entitled to an indulgence.

Oct. 23 - Another "pro-life" murder occurred as a hidden sniper fired through a kitchen window and killed Dr. Barnett Slepian of Amherst, NY, who performed abortions.

Oct. 16 - After Wyoming bigots killed gay student Matthew Shepard, religious protesters picketed Shepard's funeral at a Casper Episcopal church, holding "God Hates Fags" signs and shouting anti-homosexual slurs.

Oct. 16 - Leader Monte Miller and 50 members of his Concerned Christians cult vanished from their homes in Colorado. He had prophesied that the Apocalypse would begin with an earthquake in Denver a week earlier. He also taught that he will die in Jerusalem in December 1999 and be resurrected three days later. The cultists later were found in Israel, where police sought to prevent a mass suicide.

Mid-October - An Islamic charity in Iran boosted its bounty offer to $2.8 million for any Muslim who murders "blaspheming" author Salman Rushdie - and a Muslim student group offered $333,000 more. At a rally in Tehran, fervent Muslims vowed to kill the staff of Viking-Penguin, which originally published Rushdie's controversial book, "The Satanic Verses."

Oct. 11 - A religious court in Iran ruled that German businessman Helmut Hofer, a non-Muslim, must be executed for having sex with a Muslim woman. The woman was sentenced to 100 lashes.

Early October - The Rev. John "Punkin" Brown died of a rattlesnake bite during a serpent-handler worship service at Macedonia, Alabama. Brown's wife died of a religious snakebite in 1995. His parents, who also operate a snake-handler church, applied for custody of their five orphaned children, but a judge expressed apprehension about letting children live in such an environment.

Aug. 23 - A leader of a Sikh temple at Fort Lauderdale, FL - embroiled in a dispute over whether worshipers should sit on chairs or on the floor - shot a fellow worshiper to death, wounded two others, then killed himself.

Aug. 20 - President Clinton ordered a cruise missile attack on the Afghanistan mountain camp of millionaire Muslim fanatic Osama bin Laden, accused of sponsoring the Aug. 7 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as other religious massacres.

Aug. 15 - Catholic terrorists detonated a car bomb in Omagh, Northern Ireland, killing 28 people and injuring 220.

August - Evangelist Jerry Falwell began selling a video contending that the approach of the year 2000, and its accompanying Y2K computer problem, may be "God's instrument to shake this nation" and precede the return of Jesus.

Aug. 11 - Pittsburgh police accused Catholic priest Walter Benz and his secretary of stealing as much as $1.5 million from two churches, using the money for luxuries and gambling trips.

Aug. 7 - Muslim terrorist truck bombs shattered the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 263 people and injuring 5,500.

Aug. 3 - A 32-year-old Mormon polygamist, David Kingston, was charged with incest in Utah for marrying his 16-year-old niece as his 15th wife.

July 25 - Catholic residents drove 70 Protestants out of the Mexican village of Icalumtic.

July 22 - The U.S. State Department protested that Shi'ite rulers in Iran hanged a Muslim man, Ruhollah Rowhani, because he converted to the Baha'i faith.

July 21 - A priest and a church cook were charged with murdering Catholic Bishop Juan Gerardi in Guatemala.

July 20 - Muslim zealot Gazi Abu Mezer confessed in court that he plotted a suicide bombing in New York's subway because he wanted to kill as many Jews as possible.

July 19 - Archbishop George Carey, head of the Church of England, declared that no Christian may engage in sex outside of heterosexual marriage.

July 16 - A jury in Stockton, CA, awarded $30 million to two brothers who were molested for 10 years by Catholic priest Oliver O'Grady.

July - Taliban religious rulers banned all television in Afghanistan, to give people more time to pray.

July 12 - Protestant terrorists were suspected of firebombing the Northern Ireland home of a Catholic-Protestant couple. The fire killed three young brothers, age 9, 10 and 11.

July 2 - The Rev. Henry Lyons, head of the National Baptist Convention USA, was indicted on federal charges of swindling corporations out of $5 million and squandering the money on himself and lovers.

July 1 - Protestant arsonists in Northern Ireland set fire to 10 Catholic churches in one night.

July - Church leader Philip Harmon of Washington state began serving an eight-year prison term for swindling 230 fellow worshipers out of $16 million in a Ponzi scheme.

June 19 - Muslim guerrillas with AK-47s killed 25 Hindus in a wedding party, including the groom, in India's Kashmir province.

June 15 - The Rev. Bob Moorehead, dynamic leader of the 6,000-member Overlake Christian Church in Seattle, resigned amid accusations that he molested numerous men during weddings and baptisms.

June 4 - A 17-year-old Mississippi boy who killed his mother and two classmates testified that "demons" forced him into the murder spree.

June 2 - Catholic Bishop Joseph Keith Symons of Palm Beach, FL, resigned after confessing that he molested five young boys early in his career.

May 25 - Ikuo Hayashi, a leader of the Supreme Truth cult that planted nerve gas in Tokyo's subways, was sentenced to life in prison.

May 6 - Catholic Bishop John Joseph shot himself to death in Pakistan to protest a "blasphemy" law that decrees death to anyone who criticizes Islam. A Catholic man had been condemned for urging a Muslim neighbor to read writings of Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses.

May 4 - One of the pope's religious police, the Vatican's Swiss Guards, shot and killed his commander and his wife, then himself.

April 20 - A battle between Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamil forces in Sri Lanka killed 88 and wounded 260.

April 20 - A Chicago jury found that the Pro-Life Action League and Operation Rescue, along with their Catholic and fundamentalist leaders, violated a federal racketeering law by mobbing abortion clinics.

April 13 - Catholic Cardinal Hans Groer of Austria, accused of sexually molesting boys, relinquished his duties.

April 9 - More than 150 Muslims were trampled to death in a stampede as pilgrims rushed to "stone the devil" during the yearly hajj pilgrimage at Mecca. News reports said about 1 million sheep, goats, camels and calves were killed as animal sacrifices during the hajj.

April 8 - Three members of a Utah polygamy church sued their leader, Jim Harmston, saying he took $260,000 from them by promising a face-to-face meeting with Jesus, which never materialized.

April 8 - A Belgian Catholic priest, the Rev. Andre Vanderlyn, was sentenced to six years in prison for molesting children, and his bishop was ordered to pay $12,000 to one victim.

April 7 - The medical journal Pediatrics reported that 172 sick American children were allowed to die since 1975 by religious parents who insisted that they be treated only by prayer.

March 30 - Muhammad Aziz, who served 19 years in prison for murdering Black Muslim leader Malcolm X, was appointed leader of Malcolm's old Nation of Islam mosque in Harlem.

March 26 - Muslim rebels killed 57 villagers in Algeria - one of many such massacres in March by "holy warriors" trying to create a theocracy.

March 25 - An Israeli rabbi, David Ohayon, sitting as a religious judge, jailed a 62-year-old woman for refusing to accept her husband's terms for a divorce.

March 24 - U.S. first lady Hillary Clinton said in her newspaper column that the Lord's Resistance Army, religious guerrillas in Sudan and Uganda, have kidnaped 10,000 children for use as sex slaves or child warriors.

March 24 - God failed to send a global TV message at midnight, as expected by a Taiwanese cult which moved to Garland, TX, because the town's name sounds like "God land."

March 24 - Catholic priest Rudolph Kos of Dallas pleaded guilty to sexual assault on a child, and a jury later convicted him of molesting three others. Several months earlier, a jury awarded $119.6 million to young men who had been molested by Kos.

March 4 - After a shootout, Brussels police captured seven Muslims suspected of terrorism in France and Algeria.

March 3 - At Poyntzpass, Northern Ireland, Protestant killers burst into a pub, ordered patrons to lie down, and opened fire - killing a Catholic and Protestant who were best friends.

Feb. 27 - At Tavares, FL, the 17-year-old leader of an occult "vampire cult," who had confessed to murdering the parents of a cult member, was sentenced to die in the electric chair.

Feb. 26 - Taliban religious rulers in Afghanistan lashed a teen-age girl 100 times for walking with a man who wasn't a relative, and chopped off the hands of two accused thieves.

Feb. 17 - A French court sentenced 36 Islamic militants to prison terms of up to 10 years for involvement in terrorist bombings in 1995.

February - Hauppauge school system in New York removed Teen, Seventeen and YM magazines from a middle school library because a priest protested that they contradict "what we believe is the truth about sex as Catholic Christians."

Feb. 13 - Iran's chief prosecutor reiterated in a mosque sermon that "blasphemous" author Salman Rushdie must be killed by devout Muslims. Listeners shouted "God is great!" and "Rushdie must die!"

Feb. 9 - Florida evangelist George Crossley was sentenced to four years in prison for trying to hire a hit man to kill a rival evangelist, who had publicly humiliated him by revealing that he had an affair with the rival's wife.

Feb. 8 - Fundamentalist Peter Howard was sentenced to 15 years in prison for an attempt to firebomb an abortion clinic at Bakersfield, CA.

Jan. 29 - A bomb presumably planted by "pro-life" killers shattered an abortion clinic at Birmingham, killing its security guard and critically injuring a nurse. It was America's sixth "pro-life" murder since 1993. Letters signed "the Army of God" later took credit.

Jan. 25 - Hindu suicide bombers killed themselves and a dozen others at Sri Lanka's holiest Buddhist shrine, the Temple of the Tooth, which supposedly houses one of Buddha's teeth. The attack was part of a 15-year war between Hindus and Buddhists which has killed 51,000 people on the island south of India.

Jan. 25 - Muslim militants who want to split Kashmir away from India massacred 23 Hindus and burned parts of their village. The eight-year Hindu-Muslim conflict in Kashmir has killed 15,000.

January - German businessman Helmut Hofer, a non-Muslim, was sentenced to death in Iran for having sex with a Muslim woman, a 26-year-old medical student.

Jan. 23 - A devout Hindu in Ventura, CA, sued Taco Bell because the restaurant accidentally served him a burrito with meat in it. He was so traumatized, he said, that he couldn't sleep or work, and had to travel to England to be purified by Hindu masters.

January - Members of a Taiwanese cult who think God will arrive in a UFO moved to Garland, TX, because the name sounds like "God land" - but later relocated to Indiana and declared that Gary will be the site of the miraculous event.

Jan. 18 - In Sayville, NY, a woman suffocated her teen-age daughter with a plastic bag because she believed that a demon had taken possession of the girl.

January - The holy month of Ramadan brought the worst massacres in Algeria's six-year religious war. In almost nightly raids, Muslim terrorists chopped more than 1,000 villagers to death with hatchets and cut the throats of women and children.

January - A month-long binge of Catholic-Protestant murders wracked Ulster after Catholic assassins killed Billy "King Rat" Wright, the imprisoned chief of a Protestant gang. The dozen killings threatened to halt peace talks in Northern Ireland.

Jan. 11 - Violence between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims in Pakistan peaked when two Sunnis on a motorcycle invaded a Shi'ite ritual at a cemetery and opened fire with rifles, killing 28 and wounding 30. In the aftermath, thousands of Shi'ites rioted.

1997

Dec. 23 - The treasurer of St. Joseph's Cathedral at Wheeling, WV, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for stealing $300,000 from the church.

Dec. 22 - Two Orthodox rabbis pleaded guilty to laundering $3 million in drug profits through bank accounts of their Brookyn synagogues.

Dec. 13 - The Rev. George Crossley of Florida was convicted of attempting to hire a "hit man" to kill a rival evangelist. Crossley had engaged in sex with the rival's wife - and the rival ruined him by publicizing it.

Nov. 17 - Islamic zealots who want to create a theocracy in Egypt massacred 58 tourists visiting the ancient tombs of the Nile Valley.

Mid-November - Teen believers at Maranatha Church in St. Albans, WV, suffered uncontrollable twitching and jerking for weeks after a revival.

Nov. 12 - Two more Muslim terrorists were convicted of bombing New York's World Trade Center, an attack which they hoped would topple the twin towers and kill a quarter-million Americans.

Nov. 11 - An abortion doctor at Winnipeg, Canada, was wounded by a sniper bullet fired through a window of his home. Two other Canadian physicians previously were wounded by "pro-life" snipers.

Nov. 3 - Three "Phineas priests" who bombed abortion clinics and robbed banks for their white supremacy cause drew life prison terms in Spokane, WA. One of them read the Bible aloud for 35 minutes in the courtroom, and called the court a "temple of Satan."

Oct. 23 - The Rev. Michael Flippo of West Virginia was convicted of smashing his wife to death with a stick of firewood.

Oct. 22 - Ten Santeria worshipers began performing occult rites over a corpse in a Miami funeral home - but got into a quarrel that turned into a pistol shootout, wounding some of the group.

Oct. 16 - The Rev. Andras Pandy, a Belgian minister and religion teacher, was charged with murdering five family members and sexually molesting his daughters.

Sept. 22 - Born-again businessman John Bennett of Pennsylvania, who created an investment foundation to "do God's work," was sentenced to 12 years in prison for swindling churches and charities out of $135 million.

Sept. 4 - Three more Muslim suicide bombers killed themselves and nearby Jews in a Jerusalem pedestrian mall.

Aug. 29 - Muslim rebels trying to turn Algeria into a theocracy massacred 300 residents of Rais, a village 15 miles south of Algiers. Victims had their throats cut, or were decapitated, or were burned. Some heads were left on doorsteps by the religious insurgents.

August - Evidence continued emerging that the Rev. Henry Lyons, president of the 8-million-member National Baptist Convention, lived like a maharajah on church money, and gave some of it to his lovers.

Aug. 22 - Brendan Smyth - a child-molesting priest who caused the Irish government to fall - died in an Irish prison, where he was serving a 12-year term for sodomizing 20 boys and girls. The former government collapsed in 1994 when it was revealed that the attorney general had scuttled efforts to extradite Smyth to Ulster to face child abuse charges.

August - In a one-week period, mobs in Senegal, Africa, killed eight people, contending that they were witches who touched men and made their penises shrink.

July 31 - New York police shot and captured two Muslim zealots who were making bombs. One confessed that they intended to detonate the bombs in subways.

July 30 - Two Muslim suicide bombers killed themselves and a dozen Jews in a crowded Jerusalem outdoor market.

July 28 - Muslim militants in Algeria killed 50 more people in a town 20 miles south of Algiers. They cornered the townspeople at gunpoint, then cut their throats. More than 60,000 have died in Algeria's five-year jihad (holy war).

July 24 - A Texas jury returned a record $120 million verdict against the Dallas Catholic diocese because priest Rudolph Kos molested many altar boys (one of whom eventually committed suicide) and the church conspired to conceal it.

July 16 - Shi'ite Muslim militants on motorcycles roared through Lahore, Pakistan, gunning down four members of a rival Sunni Muslim group, the Guardians of Friends of the Prophet - bringing to 150 the number of Pakistanis killed in Sunni-Shi'ite clashes this year.

July 15 - An 18-year-old Catholic girl, asleep at the Belfast home of her Protestant boyfriend, was killed by four shots - apparently a Protestant assassination in retaliation for several recent Ulster murders by Catholic militants of the Irish Republican Army.

July 14 - Accused of beating his wife to death with a stick of firewood, the Rev. Michael Flippo of Landmark Church of God in Nitro, West Virginia, was to stand trial -- but collapsed and was rushed to a hospital instead.

July 1 - Armed robber Harold McQueen, who killed a young woman clerk in a convenience store stickup, died in Kentucky's electric chair. Before his execution, he told reporters he's a devout Catholic who welcomed the death chamber as a "gateway to heaven... I can go to the Lord's house."

Late June - In Israel, a Jewish woman artist drew a poster of the prophet Muhammad as a pig, and pasted it on Muslim shops in Hebron. The insult triggered a week of Muslim riots that injured dozens of people.

June 30 - Algerian troops killed 20 Muslim guerrillas in another battle with religious militants who want to turn Algeria into a theocracy.

June 30 - An Israeli court convicted Muslim fanatic Hassan Salameh of arranging three 1996 suicide bombings that killed 46 Israelis.

June 29 - The Living Church magazine reported that an Episcopal Church investigation confirmed allegations, raised in Penthouse magazine, that Episcopal priests in Brooklyn held sex orgies with youths, including young men brought from Brazil.

June 27 - A teen-age girl testified in Provo, Utah, that her father, John Chaney, leader of a Mormon polygamy sect, repeatedly had sex with her and forced her to marry a middle-aged man when she was 13.

June 26 - In Japan, Yasuo Hayashi, a top lieutenant of the Supreme Truth cult, pleaded guilty to helping release nerve gas in Tokyo's subway in 1995, an attack that killed 12 people and sickened 5,000.

June 24 - Muslim terrorists cut the throats of 18 Algerians, including a 6-month-old baby, in the village of Mouzaia, as part of their "jihad" (holy war) to make Algeria a theocracy.

June 24 - A Cairo judge struck down an Egyptian law banning genital mutilation of girls, a custom practiced in several African Muslim nations to deaden women's sexual pleasure and keep them "pure" for husbands.

June 16 - Catholic terrorists killed two Northern Ireland police officers with point-blank shots to the head.

June 11 - Orthodox Jews who think it is sinful for men and women to pray together threw rocks and bags of excrement at mixed groups of people visiting the "Wailing Wall" in Jerusalem.

June 10 - Dennis and Lorie Nixon, members of the Faith Tabernacle Congregation in Altoona, Pa., were sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for letting their teen-age daughter die of treatable diabetes. Instead of getting medical help for the girl, they prayed over her and anointed her with holy oil. Two years earlier, the Nixons similarly let their 8-year-old son die of an ear infection.

June 10 - Federal agents announced that a shadowy group of abortion-fighters called the "Army of God" is suspected of two Atlanta bombings - on Jan. 16 at an abortion clinic and on Feb. 21 at a gay nightclub.

June 6 - Christopher Rowland of Los Angeles was sentenced to 16-years-to-life in prison because he thought his teen-age girlfriend was a vampire, so he stabbed her to death, then placed crystals around her head and draped a black pentagram on her body.

June 6 - A bomb presumably planted by Sikh terrorists killed seven bus riders in northern India. The blast occurred on the 13th anniversary of an Indian army raid on Sikh militants who had barricaded themselves inside their religion's holiest shrine, the Golden Temple at Amritsar.

June 6 - Imam Mohamed Kerzazi, a French Muslim holy man who killed a teen-age girl while trying to "exorcise demons" from her, was sentenced to seven years in prison by a French court. To drive out demons, he had beat the girl with a bamboo stick, dunked her head under water, and forced her to swallow several quarts of salt water. The imam testified that he merely was following exorcism rules he had been taught during clerical training in Saudi Arabia.

June 5 - U.N. war crimes probers found 57 buried bodies in Croatia - presumably Croatian Catholics killed by Orthodox Christian Serbs in former Yugoslavia's tragic Muslim-Catholic-Orthodox war. A week earlier, 39 Serbs were convicted of war crimes in Croatia.

May 31 - Universal Church of God pastor Ellis Butler of Shirley, Arkansas, was sentenced to 60 years in prison for raping three church school girls.

May 29 - China executed eight Muslim fanatics convicted of bus bombings and other violence that killed 18 and wounded 60 in Xinjaing province.

May 29 - A teen-age Canadian Indian boy was acquitted of manslaughter after he testified that he beat a man to death with a ceremonial walrus bone because he thought the man was an evil spirit called the Bearwalker.

May 16 - Ardent Jew Avi Kostner of New Jersey was sentenced to two life terms because he killed his 12-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son, rather than let them be raised as non-Jews.

May - Palestinian Justice Minister Freih Abu Medein announced that any Muslim caught selling land to a Jew would be executed - and three Arabs suspected of such land-selling were found murdered soon afterward.

May 15 - Muslim terrorists armed with hatchets and knives massacred 30 Algerian villagers -- more than half of them children -- in their campaign to impose a religious government on Algeria.

May 13 - Protestant terrorists in Ulster abducted a Catholic social club operator and killed him with a shot in the head.

May - The Rev. Leroy Shanks of Racine, Wisc., pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl while "counseling" her.

May 13 - Two Lebanese newspapers reported that a Muslim terrorist group called "God's army" had acquired 23 surface-to-air rockets and planned to shoot down the aircraft of Pope John Paul II during his visit to Lebanon, but police vigilance prevented the missiles from entering the country.

May 11 - Muslim militants who oppose Turkey's secular government firebombed an American-run high school for girls at Izmir.

May 9 - Roger Katz, a New Mexico junior high school teacher, testified that he made love to one of his 14-year-old students because they both were reincarnated from seventh-century Tibet, where the girl had saved his life by taking an arrow meant for him. The judge doubted his reincarnation explanation, and sentenced Katz to a year and a half in jail.

May 9 - Catholic terrorists shot and killed an off-duty Protestant policeman in a Northern Ireland pub - two weeks after a Protestant mob kicked to death a Catholic man who was walking in a Protestant neighborhood.

May 6 - Two more members of the Heaven's Gate cult in California attempted to "shed their containers" and travel to a different dimension. One suicide succeeded, and the other failed.

May 6 - A Catholic priest, the Rev. Eugene Emo of Bath, N.J., was sentenced to jail for sexually molesting a mentally disabled man.

May 3 - In Indonesia, a "sorcerer" who charged women to cast spells on their husbands and boyfriends confessed to police that he murdered 42 of the women. He showed officers where to dig up 40 bodies.

April - The Rev. Jeffrey Horton of Liberty Christian Center in Michigan was sentenced to jail for planting hidden video cameras in women's restrooms.

April 22 - Taliban religious zealots who rule Afghanistan enforced Islamic law by chopping off the hand and foot of a convicted man.

April - Jenny Gallegos, 16-year-old honor student in Perry County, Pennsylvania, was strangled to death by her religious father because she said a swear word. He told police that Satan made him do it.

March 29 - Hindu Indian troops killed 22 armed Muslim militants holed up in a building outside Kashmir's holiest shrine, the Hazratbal Mosque, which houses a sacred relic, a whisker from Muhammad's beard. About 15,000 Kashmiris have been killed in a six-year Muslim insurrection against Hindu rule.

March 28 - A young Afghan woman was stoned to death for being in company of man who wasn't a relative. Afghanistan's zealous Taliban rulers force women to wear head-to-toe shrouds, and impose other puritanical laws.

March 26 - Thirty-nine adherents of the Heaven's Gate cult were found dead in a San Diego mansion. Their mass suicide was based on the cult's belief that members could "shed their containers" and travel to a UFO behind the Hale-Bopp comet.

March 21 - A Muslim suicide bomber killed himself and three Jewish women at an outdoor cafe in Tel Aviv. The blast injured 46 others.

March - Catholic priest Brendan Smyth of Belfast, Ireland, who already served four years in prison for child molesting, pleaded guilty to 74 new sexual offenses stemming from his long career as a molester.

March 21 - Five more members of the Solar Temple cult -- who think that death transports them to a planet named Sirius (not the star Sirius) -- died in a fiery suicide in Canada, bringing the cult's death toll to 74 in three years.

March 13 - A Jordanian Muslim soldier opened fire on Jewish schoolgirls visiting an island in the Jordan River, killing seven girls and wounding six.

March - The Rev. Aaron LeBaron of the Church of the Lamb of God, a Mormon polygamy sect, was convicted of sending "missionaries" to kill three defectors and one's little girl. He inherited the western cult from his father, Ervil LeBaron, who sired 54 children by 13 wives and committed many murders before dying in Utah state prison in 1981. In mid-June, Aaron was sentenced to 45 years in prison.

March - A North Carolina jury ordered Methodist minister Ed Privette to pay $420,000 damages to two women he sexually molested at his church.

February - Jin Choi, a deacon in Glendale Korean Presbyterian Church in California, pleaded guilty to helping two other exorcists beat "evil spirits" out of a woman for six hours, causing her death.

Feb. 16 - The Indianapolis Star reported that 16 priests in the regional diocese had committed sex offenses in recent years, many of them against children.

February - The Rev. Bryan Buckley of Christ Community Church in St. Charles, Ill., drew a seven-year prison term for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.

Jan. 20 - The Ghanian Times reported that enraged mobs beat 12 "sorcerers" to death in Ghana, because the shamans were suspected of practicing magic that made men's penises shrink.

January - Church of God minister Scott Hogan of New Castle, Pa., was charged with "flashing" women on a store parking lot. Last year he pleaded guilty to burglary and indecent exposure.

Jan. 1 - A Jewish soldier who thinks God gave the Holy Land to Jews opened fire on Muslims in Hebron -- and Islamic terrorists retaliated in subsequent days by planting bombs in Tel Aviv.

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MAJOR EVENTS OF PREVIOUS YEARS

-- September 1996: Afghanistan's Muslim fundamentalist government was overthrown by even stronger extremists of the Taliban militia, an army of former seminary students, who ordered men to grow beards and women to wear shrouds. People were herded at gunpoint into mosques and forced to pray five times a day.

-- September 1996: After Israeli Jews extended an archeological tunnel on Jerusalem's Temple Mount, Palestinian Muslims felt that their sacred shrines were violated, and rebelled in rioting that killed 79 and wounded 1,600.

-- Summer 1996: When militant Protestants tried repeatedly to march through Catholic neighborhoods in Ulster, riots caused $30 million damage.

-- June 1996: A huge truck bomb, presumably planted by Muslim fanatics, destroyed a U.S. military compound in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Americans and injuring 270.

-- April 1996: After Hezbollah (Party of God) guerrillas in southern Lebanon increased their rocket attacks on northern Israeli towns, Israel struck back with fierce raids -- and accidentally killed 90 Muslim civilians sheltered in a U.N. camp in Lebanon.

-- April 1996: At a Cairo hotel, Muslim terrorists screaming "God is great!" opened fire on Greek Christians making an Easter tour of the Holy Land, killing 18 and wounding 21.

-- March 1996: Another suicidal Muslim blew up another bus in Jerusalem, killing 19 more, mostly Jews. The following day, a different suicide bomber killed a dozen Jews in a Tel Aviv shopping center.

-- February 1996: Two more Muslim suicide bombers became "martyrs" by triggering two Jerusalem explosions that killed 23 people, mostly Jews, including two American students.

-- February 1996: Northern Ireland's Catholic-Protestant hate flared again when the terrorist Irish Republican Army detonated more bombs in London, killing three people and causing millions of dollars worth of damage.

-- December 1995: Sixteen more members of the Solar Temple cult died in a murder-suicide on winter solstice day in France. Most of the bodies were arranged in a star formation.

-- November 1995: A militant Jew who said he was acting "on orders from God" assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Several ultra-Orthodox colleagues were charged with him. Israeli writer Amos Oz called them "a loose conglomerate of mad-dog fundamentalists," and remarked: "It is typical of religious fanatics, Christian, Muslim or Jew, that the `orders' they get from God are always essentially one order: Thou shalt kill."

-- November 1995: Muslim terrorists who hope to turn Egypt into a theocracy dispatched a suicide zealot to ram an explosives-laden truck into the Egyptian Embassy in Pakistan, killing 17 and wounding 60.

-- Late 1995: Killings between Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs and Muslim Bosnians finally subsided in the former Yugoslavia, a tragic land wrecked by religious tribalism.

-- All of 1995: Killings between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims continued to plague India, a nation long cursed by religio-ethnic conflict.

-- Summer 1995: Muslim fanatics from Algeria planted several bombs in France, including one in a Paris subway that killed seven and wounded 90.

-- July 1995: An Islamic suicide bomber aboard a Tel Aviv bus killed six Jews and himself.

-- March 1995: Poison gas loosed in Tokyo's subway killed 12 commuters and sickened 5,500. Police charged leaders of the secretive Supreme Truth sect, whose adherents kissed their guru's big toe, paid $2,000 each for a sip of his bathwater, and paid $10,000 for a drink of his blood.

-- January 1995: Two Muslim suicide bombers killed themselves and 21 Jews at Beit Lid, Israel.

-- December 1994: Muslim fanatics who want to turn Algeria into a theocracy hijacked a French airliner, murdered three passengers, and planned to kill 100 more in a firebombing explosion over Paris, but commandos thwarted them.

-- December 1994: A Catholic zealot killed two women at abortion clinics in Massachusetts. Screaming "You should pray the Rosary," he fired 10 bullets into one woman. It was the third fatal clinic attack in America in two years.

-- October 1994: An Islamic suicide bomber blew up a bus full of Jews in Israel, killing at least 22 and wounding multitudes.

-- September 1994: In Switzerland, 48 members of the Solar Temple died in a mass murder-suicide. Many bodies were found in ceremonial robes in a secret underground chapel lined with mirrors. Clusters of dead children were in three ski chalets. In Quebec, four more victims were found at a Solar Temple branch. The Canadian group had been stockpiling guns to prepare for the end of the world.