A 57 year old street preacher from Greater Manchester who
was arrested by police and held for 19 hours has been awarded ₤13,000 as
compensation for wrongful arrest, false imprisonment and breach of his human
rights (the latter because he was not fed for 15 hours and was allegedly denied
access to his medication for rheumatoid arthritis). The arrest followed
complaints by two teenage boys that they felt “insulted” by what he had said;
in fact they had approached him to ask what he thought of homosexuals, and on
receiving a quote from the Bible with the rider that “God hates the sin but
loves the sinner,” they had taunted him with suggestive sexual acts. The
preacher received support from an unexpected quarter; the president of the
National Secular Society spoke out in his favour, saying that street preachers
should be able to make whatever point they want unless they are provoking
violence or mayhem. “Being insulted is not a
good enough reason to have someone thrown in a police cell”, he said.
Fife Council has decided to tackle high teenage pregnancy
rates by introducing “simple, up-front, non-sensational” sex education lessons
in school for six year olds. Parents have been told that they can ‘opt out’
their children from the classes, but were warned that the subject would be
touched on in other classes too. One parent commented, “They’re telling our
kids how to have sex when they’ve only just learned to write their names!”
A “March for Life” in Peru turned into Latin America’s
biggest ever pro-life demonstration, with 250,000 turning out in Lima and
50,000 in one of the other five cities hosting simultaneous marches. The event
was largely ignored by the media, however; some sources reported that only
“hundreds” had turned up, or showed pictures of last year’s march.
A first-ever gathering of Protestant and Catholic leaders
for a conference on Mental Health and the Church was held at Saddleback Church
in California recently. Pastor Rick Warren, who lost his son to suicide last
year after a long struggle with mental illness, summed up the theme of the
conference: “It’s perfectly fine to say, ‘I’m not okay, you’re not okay, but
that’s okay because God’s okay.’”
Two national newspapers have featured prominent gay
commentators criticising the introduction of same-sex marriage in the UK. The
two key criticisms were that “civil partnership already provided the necessary
equality” and that “most homosexuals are happy to respect the deeply held
beliefs of sincere, thoughtful and informed Christians … only a noisy nucleus of
single-issue politicians and protesters actually wanted gay marriage.”
Meanwhile, a new poll commissioned by the Coalition for Marriage in advance of
the European Parliament elections has found that gay marriage is a major vote
loser for the Conservative Party, with more than a quarter of those who backed
the Tories at the last European election saying gay marriage makes them less
likely to vote the same way, against 11% who say the opposite. The Coalition’s
campaign director said, “David Cameron was right when he said that gay marriage
was a vote winner – I just don’t think he meant the beneficiary to be UKIP.”
In technology, the UK government has launched a Cyber
Emergency Response Team to help businesses respond to online attacks. Its brief
includes “coordinating the management of national cyber incidents” and “helping
critical national infrastructure to become more resilient.” No-one has yet
launched a sweepstake on how long it will be until CERT’s own website is
hacked.
And finally, one of the most popular April Fool’s Day pranks
was perpetrated by Netflix, which added two new offerings to its “original
programming” – Rotisserie Chicken, 73 minutes of watching a chicken being
cooked (or rather un-cooked, as it was shown in reverse), and “Sizzling Bacon”,
20 minutes of bacon frying in a pan. The promotional material for the chicken film
described it as “a searing, chronology-defying return to one’s origins, in the
tradition of ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ “; one of the “critical user
reviews” of the film said, “A sophomoric effort. Could use more thyme. Poorly
conceived denouement, with a narrative arc that goes nowhere. Could use more
garlic.”
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