Not The BBC News: 11 February 2014

The worldwide president of the Mormon church has been issued with a summons by a British magistrate to defend allegations that the church’s teachings are sufficiently “untrue and misleading” that soliciting donations on the basis of these doctrines amounts to fraud. The summons follows a complaint made by a former Mormon bishop under the UK Fraud Act. The summons lists seven teachings which are at issue; most are exclusive to the Mormon church (such as the belief that the Book of Mormon was presented to the church’s founder on golden plates by an angel, or the belief that Native Americans are descended from a lost tribe of Jews), but one is the belief that all humanity is descended from “two individuals who lived about 6,000 years ago”, which is also held by some mainstream Christians.

An undercover investigation into two crisis pregnancy centres in the UK has revealed that some counsellors give incorrect information to pregnant women. Two centres which had been the subject of complaints about incorrect advice, in London and Luton, were visited. The advice received included suggestions that having an abortion increased the woman’s risk of becoming a child abuser; of later developing breast cancer; and of later infertility. Only the last of these claims has any clinical evidence to support it, and the risk is much lower than the statistics quoted by the counsellor (which were apparently based on a single study). The risk of infection from the operation was also mentioned by one counsellor. There are about 100 crisis pregnancy centres in the UK.

In the USA, the abortion rate has fallen to its lowest level for 30 years, according to a study published by a pro-choice group. They note that the decline is not limited to states where abortion restrictions have recently been tightened, but that it is linked to a decline in the pregnancy rate, so they attribute the decline to improved contraceptive usage. However, pro-life groups attribute the drop to increased teaching of the value of abstaining from sex before marriage and also (on the basis of previous studies that show the rate of unintended pregnancies is stable) to increased awareness of pro-life messages across the country.

Sam Childers, the “machine gun preacher” who combines organising aid for African children with conducting armed raids against the bandits who harass them, has been the subject of a big investigation by the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS has recently been criticised for over-zealous investigation of right wing and Christian groups, but Childers believes the raid was connected with his former son-in-law who is now in custody after stealing large amounts of money from Childers’ charity. “He probably told them I was smuggling guns, said anything to try to get reduced jail time” said Childers. Unfortunately, all the officials succeeded in doing was opening a  container of children’s clothing and destroying the contents. N.B. Childers will be doing a speaking tour of the UK from 24 April to 4 May; I’ll publish the list of venues when it is available.

In sport, the Winter Olympics have got under way, Most of the events so far seem to involve competitors twisting their bodies into strange shapes – ski-jumpers trying to kiss their skis; snowboard slopestylers doing mid-air triple twists; curlers skidding on bended knee; speed skaters pretending they only have one arm; luge tobogganers peering over their stomachs to see where they’re going; downhill and mogul skiers twisting and bending; biathletes repeatedly switching from standing up to lying down; and figure skaters doing pretty much all of these things. Norway currently lead the medals table; Britain are 16^th, with one wildly-celebrated bronze medal in women’s snowboarding.

And finally, a man who formerly worked as a janitor at a school in Louisiana has just received the most recent of several promotions – to the post of school principal. In 1985, the then-principal took 39 year old Gabe Sonnier aside and said, “I’d rather you were grading papers than picking them up.” “No-one had ever believed in me that much,” said Mr Sonnier, who took a teaching degree through night classes, became a teacher, then took a Master’s of Science and Education. However, he still cleans his own office.