Not The BBC News: 1 September 2013

Political news this week has been dominated by the West’s response to the Syrian government’s chemical weapons attack. The US, Britain and France proposed a military response, but this was immediately criticised by left wing groups, for much the same reasons that they criticised the war in Iraq: they distrust their governments’ statements about the atrocities committed by the Syrian government; they suspect the invasion is intended to fulfil wider Western political goals in the Middle East; and they oppose war in almost all cases. Because the case made for the Iraq war was later found to be based on unsound data (and/or deliberately fabricated), the first of these criticisms has been taken up by left wing politicians and (particularly in the USA) some right wing politicians. The results so far have been that the UK parliament have voted against military action in Syria, and the US President has agreed to seek the approval of Congress for military action, even though he is not required to. 

The Bolivian Episcopal church has recommended denying communion to pro-abortion politicians.

In the European Championships of women's hockey, England played Germany in the final. After a 4-4 draw, the Germans won on penalties.

The Girl Guide leaders in Harrogate who proposed to keep the old Girl Guide promise (which includes references to God), and were threatened with expulsion by Girlguiding UK as a result, have backed down and agreed to use the new 'secular' promise. Girlguiding UK admitted that it had received 839 complaints about the new promise. Despite this, they claimed that the response to the new promise had been “overwhelmingly positive”, although the number of messages received in support was not reported. 

A number of high profile football transfers have finally been completed. The most notable was Gareth Bale’s transfer from Tottenham to Real Madrid, for a British record transfer fee. Tottenham have spent the money on five new players.

Two British women have been jailed for ten years each for their part in an online dating scam. The scammers pretended to be a dating site for US troops serving abroad. They targeted married women and asked them to send money for visas, gifts, and other needs; one woman sent $59,000. The British women managed bank accounts to which money was sent.

And finally, an embarrassing error by Swansea council, made five years ago, has recently “gone viral” on the Internet. The council wanted to put up a road sign in both English and Welsh. They e-mailed a Welsh speaker to ask for the translation, and then ordered the e-mailed reply to be added to the sign. The sign that was erected read (in English) “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only” , but the Welsh said: "I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated”

Not The BBC News: 23 August 2013

The violence in Syria escalated sharply this week when government forces apparently used chemical weapons on a rebel-held area, killing 1400 people. It’s been described as the most serious chemical weapons attack since Saddam Hussein used poison gas against the (Kurdish) citizens of his country.

It has been revealed that LinkedIn, the “social network for professionals”, is hosting a lot of profiles relating to the world’s oldest profession, despite such details being officially banned from the site. With LinkedIn planning to reduce its minimum age from 18 to 13, the question of how to enforce its ban on escort agencies and sex services has become more urgent.

The president of Biola University, a Christian university in Southern California has apologised to a female nursing student who was unofficially disciplined for mounting a pro-life demonstration on campus that included graphic images of abortion. A campus security guard threatened the student with arrest, and the student’s Director of Studies  ordered staff not to write letters of recommendation on the student’s behalf. Biola’s president plans to educate staff and students on the importance of showing “the graphic reality of abortion”, and to ensure that all courses are “infused with pro-life teaching”.

The first big-name Premier League footballer to leave his club was, surprisingly, Nicolas Anelka.  Anelka had been with West Bromwich Albion for only two months, and had played only one Premier League game for them.  Sources suggest his departure is connected with a recent personal tragedy, and he may now retire from football. 

An Italian factory owner waved goodbye to his employees for their long summer holiday, then moved the factory lock, stock and barrel to Poland. “If I had told the unions”, he said, “they would have tried to confiscate my property.” He says he took the action because of Italy’s uncompetitive social insurance, health insurance and pensions: “an employee who gets paid 12 000 euros costs the company 30 000 euros. We haven’t made a profit since 2008.”

An argument has developed within Britain’s governing coalition over wind farms. The (Tory) Environment Secretary commissioned a report to see if building wind turbines drives down house prices in adjacent rural areas. The (Liberal Democrat) Energy Secretary is trying to prevent the report from being published. 

The leaders of a Girl Guide troop based at a United Reformed church in Harrogate have said in a letter to the local press that they will not adopt the new Girl Guide promise, which removes references to God. However, another (atheist) leader in the troop has complained that she is being discriminated against, and is being supported by the National Secular Society. The church’s minister has said that Guides at the church will be free to use either the old or the new pledge; the Girl Guide association has said only the new pledge is acceptable, and threatened the Harrogate leaders with expulsion; and the local Anglican bishop has spoken out in favour of keeping the old promise. It has also emerged that the change in the promise was engineered by the former government head of Family Planning, who is now Chief Executive of Girlguiding UK. 

And finally, the oddest  sports headline of the week was “UEFA urged to ban animal sacrifice”, as it emerged that Kazakh side Shakhter Karagandy had ritually slaughtered a sheep before their Champions League match against Celtic. Shakhter won the match 2-0 and plan to sacrifice another sheep when they arrive in Glasgow for the second leg.

Not The BBC News: 21 August 2013

In golf’s Solheim Cup, Europe defeated the USA by a record margin of 18-10. Europe’s team included a 17 year old Englishwoman who won her first national (adult) championship at the age of 9.

A photograph being circulated on the Internet shows that, during last week’s violence in Egypt, one Christian church was protected from attack by a human chain of peace-loving Muslims.

Britain’s first charity-run law firm has been set up in Leicester. It will offer free legal advice to people with housing, debt and welfare issues who cannot afford to pay for it, as well as family and employment law advice at competitive prices.

The train crash in Spain that killed 79 passengers has been blamed on driver error (the driver admitted being distracted by a mobile phone call at the vital moment). However, it also emerged that that section of track has no automatic safety systems installed.

The British Humanist Association, which campaigns against faith schools, has reported to the Government several schools (including 3 Christian academy schools) who have an official policy not to promote homosexuality.  Government guidance is that schools should not promote any sexual orientation, so the complaint is that singling out homosexuality is unacceptable. 

After the first week of the Premiership season, the top two teams in the league are Manchester City and Manchester United.

The law on jury membership is to be revised to make the upper age limit 75 rather than the current limit of 70. This is being done “to reflect the changing face of society”.

As reported a few weeks ago, a gay couple in Essex have launched a legal challenge to the ‘protections’  in the Gay Marriage Bill that prevent them from getting married in their local Church of England. “We feel we have the right as parishioners in our village to utilise the church we attend to get married”, they said.  Meanwhile, on the BBC TV series The Great British Bake-Off, one contestant was described as living with his “husband”, even though gay marriage is not yet legal in the UK.

The top three one-line jokes from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe have been announced. In third place was a comedian who joked: “I’m in a same sex marriage. The sex is always the same.” In second place was a joke about a guy “who worked in a shoe repair shop:  ït was soul-destroying”. The winner was about a rumour that Cadbury’s were “bringing out a new Oriental chocolate bar; could be a Chinese Wispa.”

Not The BBC News: 18 August 2013

In Egypt, on the day of the government crackdown against protesters in Cairo, 52 churches across the country were attacked; some were burned to the ground.

Police are warning drivers about a new insurance scam where fraudsters flash their headlights at cars waiting to pull out across their path, but instead of allowing the other car time to make their manoeuvre, they simply continue driving, cause a crash, and then deny flashing their lights in court.

The Irish government has told a Catholic hospital that it must provide abortions in order to comply with a new law permitting abortions in some cases.

At the World Athletics Championships, Mo Farah of Great Britain won a “double double” – he is now the Olympic and World champion in both the 5,000 and 10,000 metres. However, his achievement was bettered by Jamaica’s Usain Bolt who achieved a “double triple”, winning the 100m, 200m and 4 x 100m relay at both events. A Jamaican woman with a double double-barrelled name, Shelley-Ann Fraser-Pryce, also won three sprint gold medals to add to her one from the Olympics.

The Church of England has sent letters to residents of land where the Church has ancient rights, stating that the Church intends to register the mineral rights beneath their property. This is believed to be connected to fracking.

A woman pensioner and her son have been arrested in Sussex on suspicion of encouraging suicide, by planning to take the woman’s husband to an assisted suicide centre in Switzerland.

A bakery in Oregon is being investigated by state officials because it declined to make a wedding cake for a lesbian couple. The Christian owners have received death threats, hate mail and have lost half of their customers since the incident in January.

A recently released report shows that not only East German athletes were regularly given performance-enhancing steroids and hormones in the 1970s and 1980s; West German athletes too were treated at sports centres that received federal funding to experiment with such drugs. The West Germans even doped under-age athletes.

Stonewall Scotland has been given lottery funding to distribute a DVD celebrating same-sex marriage to every primary school in Scotland.

A pro-life group operating outside an abortion clinic in Brighton have come into conflict with a large charismatic church there, who agree with the group’s aims but not their methods (showing graphic pictures of aborted bodies), and who point to the crisis pregnancy centre that the church runs as an alternative. The group argues that it’s important to warn women about what they are doing, not just to offer counselling. The group is currently displaying its banners outside the church, on the grounds that one of the women they recently met outside the clinic was a Christian; she decided not to go ahead with her abortion.

And finally, the leader of Australia’s  Liberal party this week uttered an unfortunate malapropism when he stated that no political leader can be a  “suppository of wisdom”. Wags have circulated photographs of him captioned “Know your enema” and “Squeezing out a policy”, while others have commented that they are relieved to know how he plans to plug holes in the budget.

Not The BBC News: 15 August 2013

The Court of Session in Edinburgh has fined a Scottish man £40,000 in damages after he sent a message on Twitter calling a lesbian same-sex marriage advocate "a danger to children”, and she sued him for defamation.

A man who disrupted a pro-life rally outside an abortion clinic in London by throwing a banner over a hedge and wrecking posters was fined £500 and made to write a letter of apology (which was six words long, including greeting and signature).

Hemel Hempstead was voted the ugliest town in the UK. Six of the top ten “crap towns” in the survey were within an hour of London.

Marion Bartoli, who won the Wimbledon ladies’ singles championship less than six weeks ago, has retired from tennis at the age of 28 due to a chronic Achilles tendon injury.

A Scottish teenage boy killed himself after footage recorded on Skype, when he thought he was conversing with a  girl of his own age, was used to blackmail him. Meanwhile, there was an unexpected development in the case of Hannah Smith, the teenager who recently killed herself after receiving abuse on the anonymous website Ask.fm; the website's owners say that 98% of the abuse came from Hannah's own IP address, and have suggested that she may have posted much of the abuse herself under various names. Her father has angrily rejected this, and investigations are continuing.

The athletics World Championships in Moscow have been partly overshadowed by international criticism of Russia’s anti-gay laws. Some competitors have painted their fingernails in rainbow colours to show support for gay people; Russian Olympic champion pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva has spoken out in favour of the laws. The IAAF has said that both opinions must be respected.

Military forces in Cairo forcibly cleared two camps of anti-government protesters, resulting in many hundreds of deaths, including some government troops.

A dispute between the UK and Spain over fishing in the seas around Gibraltar has escalated to the point where the UK government sent warships to the area for “routine exercises”.

A football match between Scotland and England was decided by a winning goal from a 31-year-oild Englishman making his first ever touch of the ball as an England player. Other surprising results included Northern Ireland defeating Russia in a World Cup qualifier and Switzerland beating Brazil in a friendly.

A pastor and his colleague went on trial this week after being arrested for reading a Bible aloud in public outside of a California Department of Motor Vehicles. Prosecutors were unable to charge them with "preaching to a captive audience” (the charge for which they were arrested, but which is not in any California penal code) or with “obstructing a lawful business” (because the DMV was closed at the time). They were eventually charged with “conducting a protest on state grounds without a permit”. The judge found them not guilty.

And finally, a billionaire entrepreneur proposed a new magnetic levitation train service between Los Angeles and San Francisco, travelling at speeds of up to 700 mph in an air-cushioned tunnel. The satirical website The Onion suggested that it would be powered entirely by sound energy generated by passengers’ screams.