A draft of official regulations relating to religious structures in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang was publicly released this week, offering a glimpse into the means by which local authorities seek to curb religious expression.

According to the Associated Press, since early 2014, officials in Zhejiang have toppled crosses from some 400 churches deemed of be in violation of building codes. On some occasions, the actions have sparked altercations with local congregations.

The New York Times has more:

In painstaking detail, the 36-page directive sets out strict guidelines for where and how churches in Zhejiang can display crosses. They must be placed on the facades of buildings, not above them. They must be of a color that blends into the building, not one that stands out. And they must be small: no more than one-tenth the height of the building’s facade.

Estimates regarding its Christian population vary between 50 to 100 million people. The prevalence of a large Catholic community has spurred Pope Francis to make overtures to Beijing.

As my colleague William Wan reported a few years ago, long-ingrained fears of foreign infiltration and imperialist plots underlie China's official wariness of religion. Christianity also poses an obvious challenge to a nominally atheist, authoritarian leadership that has a hard time accommodating a plurality of belief systems.

"To continue to forcefully remove and ban the cross on the rooftop of the church buildings demonstrates the Chinese regime’s determination to contain the rapid growth of Christianity in China," says Bob Fu of China Aid, a U.S. based Christian rights group.

And Christianity isn't only the religion worrying China's leaders.

In recent months, my colleague Simon Denyer has been following what some have characterized as Beijing's war on Islam. Out of supposed concern over extremist radicalization and counter-terrorism, Chinese authorities in the restive far western region of Xinjiang have clamped down on the cultural practices of the Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim minority.

Local authorities compelled Muslim shopkeepers to sell alcohol, even though it violates their own traditions. In one instance, a Muslim man was jailed for six years for refusing to shave off his beard.

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Looks like David Cameron pulled a Bibi Netanyahu. #GE2015

As David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, heads into a second term as British prime minister after a truly remarkable election, he keeps being compared to another world leader: Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu.

To some ears, that's not an entirely positive comparison, and it's certainly not an obvious one.

Cameron, just reelected leader of a European nation and uncontroversial U.S. ally with a majority in Parliament, thanks in part to Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system. It will be Cameron's second term and, thanks to term limits, almost certainly his last.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu was elected to his fourth term as leader of a unique Jewish state in the Middle East almost two months ago. However, thanks to the Israeli system of proportional representation, he only just formed his government. Israel may be a U.S. ally, but it is anything but uncontroversial.

Yet there are certainly some similarities in the ways that these two quite different world leaders were, against all odds, reelected in 2015. One is obvious: Both the British prime minister and the Israeli prime minister held onto their offices in elections this year. In fact, both won by comfortable margins, despite numerous polls suggesting they may lose or at least face a tight race.

Some observers couldn't help but notice the similarities between Netanyahu and Cameron as exit polls came out.

Cameron pulled a Bibi if exit polls are right.

In fact, this wasn't a completely analogous situation — the exit polls were wrong in Israel's March election, but they seem to have been fairly accurate in this week's British election.

But looking back further to pre-election polls, there are some similarities. In both cases, these polls seem to have missed the level of support for Cameron and Netanyahu among voters, and it's not entirely clear why.

In the aftermath of the Israeli election, some polling experts criticized a lack of transparency in the methods used to collect data. The post-mortem on the British pre-election polls is still being conducted, but right now people are blaming the so-called "shy Tory" phenomenon (where Conservative voters are often undecided before the election or refuse to respond to polls).

Others, however, have seen a more important similarity in the electoral tactics of the British Conservatives and Israel's Labor:

Tory strategy of fear over SNP strongly influenced by Likud's success in recent Israeli election.

David Cameron is Netanyahu and the Scottish are Arab voters. http://t.co/SuqWgzuet8 #ukelection2015

It isn't hard to see the parallels here. Before the Israeli election, Netanyahu made headlines around the world by apparently revoking any support for a two-state solution with the Palestinians, and warning the Israeli public that Arab citizens of Israel were voting "in droves."

Meanwhile in Britain, Cameron and the pro-Conservative press that followed him spoke often of the threat posed by the newly powerful Scottish National Party, which promotes an independent Scotland and now dominates Scottish politics. Cameron himself had warned that if the major opposition party, Labor, won the British election, it would be "run by" the SNP, which it would need to rely on for a parliamentary majority. The Daily Mail, a right-wing British tabloid, even went so far as to dub the leader of the SNP "the most dangerous woman in Britain."

According to the Times of London and the New Statesman, even senior members of the Conservative team saw the link. As Anshel Pfeffer, a journalist for the left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz put it on Friday, both Netanyahu and Cameron relied on the "fear factor" to win reelection. Pfeffer also writes that Cameron, like Netanyahu, had avoided debating his rival and instead relied on portraying Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labor Party, as incompetent or nefarious.

All but the most ardent Scottish nationalists would probably balk at directly comparing the situation of the Scottish with that of the Palestinians. But in the new political landscape in Britain, a cynic might indeed see some similarities with Israel. Most notably, where some see potential instability in Israel's future due to Netanyahu's inability or unwillingness to find a solution to Palestinian question, Cameron has no real solution to an SNP-dominated Scotland, where many loathe the Conservative government and deeply want independence. Unless a solution can be found by Cameron or his successors, it really does seem like Britain is on the road to a break-up.

Big night for the Tories. I'm pretty sure Benjamin Netanyahu will now offer David Cameron the foreign ministry.

There's another important factor in all of this, however. In a Europe that has become skeptical of Netanyahu's intentions, Cameron had been a steadfast ally of Israel, calling Britain's support for Israel "unbreakable" last year. And in this year's election, he was able to position himself as the pro-Israel candidate (despite the fact that his main rival was Jewish).

"From an Israeli diplomatic perspective, Netanyahu could hardly have wished for a rosier outcome," David Horovitz of the Times of Israel observed. "Cameron is regarded in Jerusalem as firmly supportive." And the Israeli leader was quick to make it known how happy he was with election result.

See also

11 weird memes that help explain the British election

A new political order in Scotland threatens to upend the British election

British election results signal seismic political shift in Scotland

In the Western popular imagination -- particularly the American one -- World War II is a conflict we won. It was fought on the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, through the rubble of recaptured French towns and capped by sepia-toned scenes of joy and young love in New York. It was a victory shaped by the steeliness of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the moral fiber of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the awesome power of an atomic bomb.

[ What V-E Day was like in London for a U.S. airman on leave from the war ]

But that narrative shifts dramatically when you go to Russia, where World War II is called the Great Patriotic War and is remembered in a vastly different light.

On May 9, Russian President Vladimir Putin will play host to one of Moscow's largest ever military parades to mark the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany. More than 16,000 troops will participate, as well 140 aircraft and 190 armored vehicles, including the debut of Russia's brand new next-generation tank.

It's a grand moment, but few of the world's major leaders will be in attendance. The heads of state of India and China will look on, but not many among their Western counterparts. That is a reflection of the tense geopolitical present, with Putin's relations with the West having turned frosty after a year of Russian meddling in Ukraine. When Russia's T-14 Armata tank broke down at a parade rehearsal on Thursday, the snickering could be heard across Western media.

Russian soldiers are pictured next to the Reichstag building in this undated photo taken May 1945 in Berlin. (REUTERS/MHM/Georgiy Samsonov/Handout via Reuters )

Unfairly or not, the current tensions obscure the scale of what's being commemorated: Starting in 1941, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and played perhaps the most important role in the Allies' defeat of Hitler. By one calculation, for every single American soldier killed fighting the Germans, 80 Soviet soldiers died doing the same.

Of course, the start of the war had been shaped by a Nazi-Soviet pact to carve up the lands in between their borders. Then Hitler turned against the U.S.S.R.

[ What one Soviet soldier saw when he entered Auschwitz. ]

The Red Army was "the main engine of Nazism’s destruction," writes British historian and journalist Max Hastings in "Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945." The Soviet Union paid the harshest price: though the numbers are not exact, an estimated 26 million Soviet citizens died during World War II, including as many as 11 million soldiers. At the same time, the Germans suffered three-quarters of their wartime losses fighting the Red Army.

"It was the Western Allies’ extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire ‘butcher’s bill’ for [defeating Nazi Germany], accepting 95 per cent of the military casualties of the three major powers of the Grand Alliance," writes Hastings.

The epic battles that eventually rolled back the Nazi advance -- the brutal winter siege of Stalingrad, the clash of thousands of armored vehicles at Kursk (the biggest tank battle in history) -- had no parallel on the Western Front, where the Nazis committed fewer military assets. The savagery on display was also of a different degree than that experienced farther west.

Hitler viewed much of what's now Eastern Europe as a site for "lebensraum" -- living space for an expanding German empire and race. What that entailed was the horrifying, systematic attempt to depopulate whole swaths of the continent. This included the wholesale massacre of millions of European Jews, the majority of whom lived outside Germany's pre-war borders to the east. But millions of others were also killed, abused, dispossessed of their lands and left to starve.

Russian soldiers are pictured on top of the Reichstag building in this undated photo taken May 1945 in Berlin.(REUTERS/MHM/Georgiy Samsonov/Handout via Reuters)

"The Holocaust overshadows German plans that envisioned even more killing. Hitler wanted not only to eradicate the Jews; he wanted also to destroy Poland and the Soviet Union as states, exterminate their ruling classes, and kill tens of millions of Slavs," writes historian Timothy Snyder in "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin."

By 1943, the Soviet Union had already lost some 5 million soldiers and two-thirds of its industrial capacity to the Nazi advance. That it was yet able to turn back the German invasion is testament to the courage of the Soviet war effort. But it came at a shocking price.

In his memoirs, Eisenhower was appalled by the extent of the carnage:

When we flew into Russia, in 1945, I did not see a house standing between the western borders of the country and the area around Moscow. Through this overrun region, Marshal Zhukov told me, so many numbers of women, children and old men had been killed that the Russian Government would never be able to estimate the total.

To be sure, as Snyder documents, the Soviet Union under Stalin also had the blood of millions on its hands. In the years preceding World War II, Stalinist purges led to the death and starvation of millions. The horrors were compounded by the Nazi invasion.

"In Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Belarus, and the Leningrad district, lands where the Stalinist regime had starved and shot some four million people in the previous eight years, German forces managed to starve and shoot even more in half the time," Snyder writes. He says that between 1933 and 1945 in the "bloodlands" -- the broad sweep of territory on the periphery of the Soviet and Nazi realms -- some 14 million civilians were killed.

By some accounts, 60 percent of Soviet households lost a member of their nuclear family.

For Russia's neighbors, it's hard to separate the Soviet triumph from the decades of Cold War domination that followed. One can also lament the way the sacrifices of the past inform the muscular Russian nationalism now peddled by Putin and his Kremlin allies. But we shouldn't forget how the Soviets won World War II in Europe.

Related on WorldViews

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Britain's election was supposed to be a nail-biter, an inconclusive election that would leave the country's political future unclear. Instead, it's anything but. The results make it remarkably clear who are the winners, and the losers, of this election.

As the dust settles on Friday, it's worth thinking about what this election means for the future of Britain. This was always going to be an important election for Britain, but it didn't exactly turn out important in the ways that many people suspected it would.

Here's how the 2015 British election will change the country.

1. David Cameron's vision of austerity is given a clear mandate.

David Cameron, British prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party, departs Downing Street for Buckingham Palace following the 2015 general election, in London, on Friday, May 8, 2015. (Jason Alden/Bloomberg)

One of the defining visions of David Cameron's center-right Conservative government has been its hope for economic austerity and a less spendthrift British state. It's also been one of his most controversial, dividing the British public and economists alike.

As dramatic as Cameron's austerity plans were after he was elected in 2010, there was always a sense that he didn't necessarily have the political clout to justify them. The Conservatives may have won the most seats in the 2010 election (306 out of 650 seats), but they were shy of a majority and needed to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats (with 57 seats) to govern.

Now, Cameron's austerity plan has a real mandate. The Conservatives have won a majority of seats in Parliament and can quite easily form a government without the Liberal Democrats..

2. Heads are rolling.

Britain's Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg announces his resignation as leader at a news conference in London, May 8, 2015. (Eddie Keogh /Reuters)

Despite the disbelief shown when exit polls first came out (one senior party official said he would publicly eat his own hat if the polls were right), Friday's results confirmed what many had feared: The Liberal Democrats had been decimated, and they will be lucky to have a double-figure seat count. Nick Clegg, the charismatic leader of the party who had prompted high hopes and #CleggMania in 2010, resigned on Friday.

As bad as things were for Clegg, however, they sting worse for Ed Miliband, the leader of left-center Labor Party, long the second party of British politics. There were many who felt that Miliband could overcome the considerable criticism of his public demeanor and win the British election, or at least put up a worthy challenge. Now, with results suggesting Labor may have actually lost seats since 2010, Miliband has resigned.

Another candidate with high hopes, Nigel Farage, of the anti-European Union and anti-immigration United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), was also forced to resign as party leader after he failed to secure a seat in parliament. Farage, a beer-swilling, cigarette-smoking politician who portrayed himself as the voice of average Britons, had been a unique and high-profile face in the British political world. It's unclear if he will be able to make a return, or who could succeed him.

These are just some of the people leaving the British political scene after Thursday night's electoral bloodbath. There are plenty of other smaller names (Vince Cable of the Liberal Democrats and Ed Balls of the Labor Party, for example) that many Britons will be shocked to see go.

3. Scotland's new political order is cemented.

Paisley and Renfrewshire South constituency winner Mhairi Black of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and Labour's Douglas Alexander react at the Lagoon Leisure Center in Paisley, Scotland Friday, May 8, 2015. Black, a 20-year-old student, becomes Britain's youngest lawmaker since the 17th century. (David Cheskin/PA via AP)

The Scottish National Party, a party that promotes independence, is on track to win almost every single parliamentary seat allocated for Scotland. After winning only six seats in 2010, and losing its referendum campaign for an independent Scotland in 2014, the SNP is now quite clearly the dominant force in Scottish politics with more than 50 seats.

While the SNP has denied it will seek a new independence referendum any time soon, and it will not form any part of a British government (a possibility had Labor won the most seats), it's hard to imagine that this won't have repercussions. Even if the SNP does not actively seek independence any time soon, its complete domination of Scotland and its left-wing policies will cause a crisis of legitimacy for the Conservatives, who will likely have just one Scottish MP yet will govern Scotland.

It's also a major loss for Labor, which had long considered Scotland one of its most stable sources of support. Its losses in Scotland were humiliating. Jim Murphy, the leader of the Labor Party in Scotland, lost his seat to the SNP, and the former seat of Gordon Brown, Labor's ex-prime minister who had chosen to retire, was also lost. Douglas Alexander,  ­Labor’s shadow foreign secretary and campaign chief, lost his seat to a 20-year-old student. (That student, Mhairi Black, is now the youngest British MP since 1667.)

The SNP's rise and the Conservatives' win in spite of it certainly seems to add more weight to the idea that Britain cannot remain united forever.

4. Britain may leave the European Union.

Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) stands on stage as the results of the vote are read at Winter Gardens in Margate, southeast England, May 8, 2015. REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett

In 2013, Cameron pledged to hold a referendum on Britain's membership in the European Union. He later clarified that it would be held before 2017.

There's not too much evidence that Cameron or the rest of the Conservative Party elite actually wants Britain to leave the European Union. And he may still try to avoid a vote. But the Conservative Party's Euroskeptic fringe and UKIP voters will likely try to force him to keep his word. There will likely be considerable support from voters for a referendum — UKIP may have struggled to win many seats in the 2015 election, but early suggestions are that it won over 12 percent of the total vote.

How would Britons vote if a referendum is held? It's hard to say — polls seem to suggest that most would vote to stay in the European Union. However, a lot could change after campaigning, and the 2015 election itself should serve as a reminder that polls can be misleading. If Britain does leave the European Union, the repercussions could be dramatic -- both for Britain and the European Union itself.

See also

11 weird memes that help explain the British election

A new political order in Scotland threatens to upend the British election

British election results signal seismic political shift in Scotland

This Sunday is Mother's Day, but in some countries, there is more to celebrate than in others. On average, one woman in 30 is likely to die from pregnancy-related causes, and seven out of 10 women will lose a child in their lifetime.

Despite global improvements in children's and maternal health, inequality between the world's richest and poorest mothers and children is widening, according to this year's mother index released by the NGO Save the Children.

The index shows where mothers and children living in urban areas face the least and the greatest hardships regarding women's and children's health and economic well-being, among other aspects.

The world's best countries for mothers to raise children are less of a surprise: Norway, Finland and Iceland. The United States, however, slipped from the 31st spot last year to the 33rd. You can click on individual countries in our map to see how they rank.

Most countries at the bottom of the ranking are located in sub-Saharan Africa: Out of the 179 countries surveyed, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic perform worst. Nearly all of the bottom-ranked countries are affected by conflict.

Why education matters so much in the ranking

Due to the limited availability of comparable data, the index took into account factors that determine a woman’s as well as a child’s well being. The report's authors focused on five factors in compiling the index: maternal health, children's well being, economic wealth of a country, and the participation of women in national politics in order to be able to shape policies and debates. Also factored into the index were the average years of formal schooling for children. You can search for individual countries and find out how they performed in the tool below.

"Numerous studies show a robust relationship between years of schooling and a number of important life outcomes, including income, health and civic participation,"Kathryn Bolles, the Children’s Director of Health and Nutrition for Save the Children, told The Washington Post.

Educated girls are also more likely to delay early marriage and motherhood which greatly improved the likelihood that they and their children will survive childbirth.

Growing inequality endangers mothers and their children worldwide

In more developed nations, other factors such as the ability of mothers to pursue careers or child benefits would be likely to play a role, as well. "But as the majority of women in most developing countries do not have access to these benefits, it was not the single best indicator of economic status available," said Bolles, explaining the decision to focus on child development indicators.

In the report, Save the Children urges that more resources need to be committed to tackling inequality in urban areas all over the globe. "Increasingly, these preventable deaths are occurring in city slums, where overcrowding and poor sanitation exist alongside skyscrapers and shopping malls," the authors conclude. In the lowest-ranked countries, children growing up in poverty are three to five times more likely to die than those with wealthy parents. 

Among high-income capitals, Washington D.C. has the highest infant death risk

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The finding that Washington D.C. performs worst in terms of infant deaths among 25 high-income global capital cities might surprise some. Whereas on average between 7 and 8 infants in Washington die out of 1,000 children, the number was as low as 2 in Prague, Oslo, Stockholm and Tokyo.

The authors argue that the high level of infant deaths in Washington is rooted in "pervasive poverty, young and uninformed mothers and poor prenatal care." They also consider race to be a factor -- with black mothers and families being over-proportionally affected.

In terms of politics, some developing countries outperform wealthier nations

Another finding of the index that could come unexpected is that Western nations are not as uniquely advanced in terms of women in politics as some might believe. "Countries like Rwanda, Bolivia, and Cuba are doing a much better job of ensuring more equal representation of women in national parliament than many Western nations are, such as the United States, Ireland and Japan," Bolles said.

Why did political representation matter so much to the authors of the mother's index? "When women have a voice in politics, issues that are important to mothers and their children are more likely to surface on the national agenda and emerge as national politics," Bolles said.

The organization's overall conclusion follows her line of argumentation. Even in countries that face conflicts and wars, the situation of mothers and their children could be improved -- if there were a political willingness to do so, according to the study.

"Some African countries, such as Eritrea, Ethiopia and Liberia have reduced their under-5 mortality rate by two-thirds or more since 1990," Bolles said.