The US Supreme Court has struck down a Massachusetts law that banned protests within 35 yards of abortion clinics. A pro-life spokeswoman called the law “a brazen affront to the First Amendment" [i.e. to free speech]; the local branch of Planned Parenthood said the Court had shown “a shocking disregard for the safety of patients and staff.”
Also in the US, the Supreme Court has struck down the Defence Of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman. The main implications are that married gay couples will receive the same benefits as heterosexual married couples (including immigration rights if one ‘spouse’ is non-American). The Court was fiercely divided over the issue, and the final decision was 5-4. President Obama personally telephoned the woman who had originally brought the case (because she was denied inheritance rights when her gay partner died) to congratulate her. The Court also declined to add any ruling to California’s see-sawing law on gay marriage, which means that gay marriage is now legal in California, and likely to remain so.
Victoria Wasteney, a 37 year old Christian NHS occupational therapist has been suspended for her job for 9 months for “bullying” because she prayed with a Muslim colleague and gave her a Christian book. The Muslim woman had showed an interest in talking about God from the beginning of her relationship with Victoria (who was her manager), and was interested in anti-human trafficking work at Victoria’s church. Victoria invited the woman to church events on several occasions; gave her a book to read when she had to take time off work for hospital treatment; and prayed with the Muslim woman (by agreement) in her office on one occasion when the woman came to her in tears. Andrea Minichello Williams of the Christian Legal Centre said, “The NHS is increasingly dominated by a suffocating liberal agenda that chooses to bend over backwards to accommodate certain beliefs but punishes the Christian.”
The Spanish law that restricts most abortions may be weakened to allow abortion of deformed foetuses. The avenue used in the proposed Bill is to say that such pregnancies threaten the life of the mother rather than to refer to deformities; similar dissimulation/partial truth has been used in other countries, especially concerning alleged threats to the mother’s mental health, to permit abortion for a wide range of reasons.
In sport, a Norwegian online bookmaker is counting its losses after offering odds of 175-1 that Luis Suarez would bite somebody during the World Cup. 167 people took out the bet.
In technology news, a group of researchers have revealed that they manipulated people’s Facebook feeds for a week for an experiment. Some people were shown significantly more negative postings than usual, and some were shown more positive postings than usual, and then their own posts were monitored for any emotional changes. The monitoring was done automatically (so no posts were visible to the researchers), but those involved were neither told nor asked for extra consent beyond Facebook’s terms and conditions. (The experiment showed that people’s posts did change, in the direction of the posts they were reading).
In cinema news, a comedy film has been released in which two celebrity journalists are invited to meet Kim Jong-Un and the CIA tries to turn the hapless pair into assassins to kill him. The film has triggered strong protests from the North Korean government, who call it “an act of war.” However, given that a recent statement from the North Korean government referred to President Obama as a “wicked black monkey,” the protest is highly unlikely to produce any action from the US government.
And finally, a burglar in Minnesota was caught because he used his victim’s computer to check his own Facebook news feed, including a profile picture, and forgot to log out. He was spotted on the street by the victim a few hours after the burglary was discovered; when police arrested him they found he was wearing a watch he had stolen.
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