The Rev. Walter Altmann, a Lutheran theologian from Brazil, has been elected the new moderator of the central committee of the World Council of Churches, a WCC official said on 24 February. Altmann is president of the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil (IECLB), a post he has held since the end of 2002. He was born in the southern Brazil city of Porto Alegre in 1944, and it was in that city on the last day of the WCC's 14-23 February assembly, the first held in Latin America, that he was elected to lead the world's biggest grouping of churches. (Ecumenical News International)