A couple of Californian youth pastors have taken the concept
of an Internet church to a new audience by setting up XXXChurch, which is
designed to be found by people searching for pornography online. Their website offers testimonies and
confessions from current and former porn users, and a downloadable
“accountability app” called X3Watch which sends periodic reports of the user’s
browsing history to a chosen individual. The church’s ‘edgy’ approach has drawn
criticism from some quarters, but in the church’s eleven years of existence,
the app has been downloaded over a million times.
A multiple shooting at a school in Georgia, USA was averted
because the school bookkeeper, who the gunman took hostage, talked him into
putting down his weapons. The gunman had an AK-47, admitted he hadn’t been
taking his psychiatric medication, and claimed to have nothing to live for. But
after phoning 911, the bookkeeper talked
to him about her divorce and disabled son, and about how she tried to commit
suicide when her husband left her, all the while telling him "I love you.
I'm proud of you. We all go through something in life. You're gonna be OK.”
Eventually, while keeping police at a distance, she persuaded him to give up
his weapons, lie on the floor and give himself up.
The Huddersfield Giants won rugby league’s Super League for
the first time since 1932.
In a village in northern India, a mob of around 1000 people
destroyed a nearly-constructed Christian church and violently attacked the
pastor and other believers. The mob’s actions included lifting and throwing
down a one-ton iron grid that had been placed on the roof to aid construction.
The village has a long history of anti-Christian opposition.
A pastor from Norwich who e-mailed two Christian tracts to
gay rights activists, one entitled ‘Christ Can Cure – Good News for Gays’; and
the other ‘Jesus Christ – the Saviour we all need’, has been referred to the
Crown Prosecution Service to see if he will be charged with a crime following
complaints by the recipients. He says that he sent the e-mails “to report to
the gay-pride people our Christian complaint against the public display of
their homosexual propaganda, which we find offensive.” However, no police
action has been taken on the basis of his complaints.
Several Premier League football transfers were completed on
the last day of the transfer window. Arsenal bought German World Cup winner
Mesut Őzil from Real Madrid, top of the table Liverpool signed three players
including one called Victor, Manchester United bought an attacking midfielder
from Everton and loaned a left back from Real Madrid, and Stephen Ireland roved
to his fourth Premier League team, Stoke City. The strangest incident, however,
came in Spain where a group of men appeared on behalf of Manchester United to
negotiate for an Atletico Madrid player, only for it to be revealed that they
were impostors who had no connection with the club.
The British public are being urged to contact their MPs to
protest that current abortion laws discriminate against disabled babies,
following a Parliamentary inquiry which concluded that the laws are indeed discriminatory.
And finally, the trend for building architecturally unusual
tower blocks in London has had an unexpected side effect. The glass-fronted
tower block at 20 Fenchurch Street, known as the “Walkie Talkie” from the way
it bulges outwards as its height increases, has been accused of reflecting the
sun so intensely that it has melted plastic bottles and damaged bodywork on
cars parked on the street below. Three parking bays have been suspended while
investigations are carried out.
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