Not The BBC News: 30 Jun 2014

A young Christian in Egypt has reportedly been sentenced to 6 years in prison for ‘blasphemy’ – because he ‘liked’ a Christian page on Facebook. The verdict comes despite the recent election of a president who campaigned for religious freedom for all. The 29 year old man was found guilty of “defaming a divinely revealed religion” and “inciting sectarian violence,” even though he removed his ‘like’ from the Facebook page once he realised that it offended some Muslims. The page in question, called Knights of the Cross, offers Arabic converts to Christianity an anonymous location for mutual encouragement and discussing the Bible.

 A woman stopped at an anti-abortion protest outside a clinic in Brighton and told her story. She had had an abortion at that clinic five years ago, and although she was twelve weeks pregnant, they had told her that her foetus was “just a blob, you won’t be able to see it, no bigger than a speck of dust.” She realised they had lied when she later had a baby and saw the twelve-week scan. She said that if the anti-abortion pictures had been present five years ago, she would never have gone ahead with the abortion. 

Cardiff University’s student union attempted to pass a motion that student-affiliated societies may not take part in “anti-choice protests or rallies.” A majority voted in favour of the motion but it failed on a technicality, and is likely to be re-introduced. Another motion that the union should take a fully pro-choice stance on abortion was defeated, following opposition from Christian, Islamic, pro-life and some pro-choice students.

In the USA, a lawsuit by a pro-traditional-marriage group over the leaking of their confidential donor list has finally been settled – with the US Internal Revenue Service admitting guilt. The sensitivity of donor lists in the USA was highlighted a couple of months ago when the CEO of Mozilla, Brandon Eich, was fired (or forced to resign) because he once made a donation to a political campaign opposing gay marriage.

In Finland, same-sex marriage has been rejected by a Government committee for the second time in less than two years. After the first rejection, a petition was started and it gained enough signatures to force the subject to be discussed again. It is expected that the whole Parliament will discuss the issue in the autumn.

In sport, a piece of selfless sportsmanship from December has recently been circulated. Ivan Fernandez Anaya, a Basque cross-country runner, was lying second in a race when he saw the Kenyan leader mistakenly pull up 10 metres short of the finish line. Instead of speeding past for the win, Anaya guided the leader with gestures to finish the race. He said afterwards, “Unfortunately very little has been said of the gesture. It would be nice to explain to children that sport is not only violent kicks, posh statements, and fingers in the eyes of the enemy.”

In technology news, the vicar at the 11^th century Christchurch Priory in Dorset is perhaps the first to announce his resignation using Twitter. His tweets (subsequently deleted) stated that he was leaving because of “a breakdown of trust between the churchwardens and myself;” the later official announcement of his resignation offered a more anodyne “we appreciate this has been a difficult time for him.”

And finally, an American student in Germany put a new meaning on the phrase “born again” when he climbed inside a giant stone sculpture representing a vagina but got stuck and had to be removed by firefighters. The 32-ton sculpture outside the microbiology department at Tűbingen University is supposed to represent “the gateway into the world.”