Sunday, 18 August 2013

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.

No comments:

Post a Comment