The city of Detroit, the largest municipality ever to file for
bankruptcy in American history, has been officially declared bankrupt. A judge
ruled that the city had met most of the strict criteria for Chapter 9
bankruptcy protection, and that at least one of the remaining criteria –
negotiating with creditors, including the city’s 21,000 pensioners – was impossible to fulfil. The judge also
ruled that pensioners cannot be treated differently to other unsecured creditors,
despite Michigan’s constitutional guarantee of pensions. The city, which has
three times as many pensioners as employees,
has been investigating increasingly radical methods to save money,
including having its museum’s art collection valued for sale, and turning off
(or not repairing) 60% of street lights.
In my last blog, I reported a
case where a mother had a court-ordered Caesarean section and then had her baby
taken into care by social workers. While these facts are accurate, it turns out
that a lot of the accompanying information was wrong. Here's the story again:
A
woman has had her baby delivered by Caesarean section, and removed from her
care, under court orders. The woman, an Italian who was living in Essex, had
been sectioned under the Mental Health Act while pregnant. Five weeks later,
the Health Trust decided it was in her best interests for the baby to be born
by C-section, and Essex Social Services then obtained an interim care order to
allow them to care for the child. In a statement, Essex Social Services said
that they applied for the order because they judged that the woman was too
unwell to care for the child; that the woman was allowed to see the child on
the day of birth and the day after; that the woman has already had two children
removed from her care by Italian authorities; and that they “liaised extensively with the
extended family before and after the birth of the baby, to establish if
anyone could care for the child.” Nine months later, the mother applied to
the Italian courts for her child to be returned to her, but this application
was turned down, and only then was the child offered for adoption.
An American Christian man who was formerly the chief operating officer of
a large marketing agency founded a non-profit organisation in 2009 that
provides marketing for crisis pregnancy centres. “The vast majority of pregnancy centres are
underfunded,” he says; “most of their clients come from referrals so they’re not
reaching a large proportion of the abortion-minded.” Online for Life uses
Google search optimisation techniques and physical adverts to increase awareness
of crisis pregnancy centres; will only work with pregnancy centres that meet
certain criteria for good practice; and insists that everything it does is
measurable. “We have saved 1,341 babies from abortion,” he says, “and in our
local area [Dallas, Texas], 18% of all abortion-minded women will now contact a
pregnancy centre, up from 3% four years ago.” Online for Life also offers an
app that alerts users to pray every time a woman contacts a pregnancy centre.
There are growing fears for the health of the pastor from Kazakhstan
who was arrested on the pretext of putting hallucinogenic substances in the Communion
wine. He has now been in custody for over 200 days. A campaign has been started
to get people to contact the Kazakh embassy to request his release.
A senior High Court judge in
England is to retire early, partly because of the lack of support from some of
his colleagues for his pro-marriage beliefs. Sir Paul Coleridge says there are
‘hundreds’ in the judiciary who agree with him in private, but are too
frightened to say so publicly. The judge set up the Marriage Foundation in 2012
to combat the culture of broken families, but was attacked for his involvement,
with critics saying a sitting judge should not be so overtly ‘political’.
In sport, Britain’s top Olympic diver, Tom Daley, has revealed that he
is in a relationship with another man. Some newspapers could not resist
describing this as a “watershed” moment.
And finally, a high-speed police chase in Arizona ended in an unusual
way when the suspected drug dealer being chased stopped his car and ran off.
Unfortunately for him, he ran into a dairy farm, where he was tripped by a dairy
worker, landed face first in a pile of manure, and was then stepped on by a
startled cow. Police found 160lbs of marijuana in the car.
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