A mix of allies and sometimes colliding ideas and goals shared the stage at the International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington this week. Key Trump administration officials pledged to defund international organizations and entities that are no longer effective while arguing for keeping the United Nations charter, before former Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivered a touching message about religious pluralism from the Dalai Lama.

Family members and friends of Jimmy Lai, a businessman and a pro-democracy newspaper owner in Hong Kong, are holding out hope that he can still be released after his guilty verdict on national security and sedition charges, if President Trump and other world leaders put pressure on Xi Jinping to free him.

A key congressional panel focused on China’s impacts on human rights and religious freedom is urging Congress and the Trump administration to do far more to combat Beijing’s transnational intimidation and repression campaigns in the United States and across the globe.

The timing and nature of the attack placed the fate of Nigerian Christians in stark relief. On Monday, in the early hours of the morning, a group of gunmen attacked a girl’s boarding school in northwestern Nigeria, kidnapping 25 girls, many of them Christian. The attack killed the school’s vice principal, Malam Hassan Makaku, who tried to block the door to the girl’s dormitory with his body.

The fertile Middle Belt region in north-central Nigeria became a killing field in June, when more than 200 Christian men, women, and children were slaughtered in an apparent series of coordinated attacks. The massacre was the latest in a string of killings that have taken the lives of an estimated 7,000 Nigerian Christians so far this year.