Boko Haram has burned another five churches in Nigeria. It
has also attacked some mosques, perhaps in retaliation for Muslim clerics
publicly condemning their violent approach to establishing an Islamic state. In
a disturbing new tactic, Boko Haram are relying increasingly on suicide bombers
and are starting to use young females in this role; police recently arrested
two suspected Boko Haram members travelling with a 10 year old girl who was
wearing a belt of explosives.
A Polish Jehovah’s Witness was sacked from a fitness centre
in Rochdale for regularly discussing his religious beliefs, including telling
one woman that performing yoga “allowed evil to enter.” A tribunal recently
decided that he was unfairly dismissed on a technical point: he was sacked
after sending an email to senior staff outlining his religious opinions, but
the court decided that his final warning had only prevented him from discussing
his opinions with customers. However, his financial award was reduced by 75%
due to his earlier behaviour.
The two American missionaries who contracted Ebola while
working in a Liberian hospital have apparently been saved by a new experimental
“cocktail of antibodies” drug, which was flown to Liberia and used to treat
them there. Questions are now being asked about why the drug has not been made
available to Africans; the answer, apparently, is that the drug has not
finished its clinical trials yet, so its use requires case-by-case
authorisation according to the rules of the US drug regulator.`
To say that the situation for Christians in northern Iraq
has deteriorated is perhaps the understatement of the year. A leader of the
Chaldean Christian community has told CNN that there is a park in Mosul where
children have been beheaded and their heads put on sticks. The international
community’s first decision is whether and where to offer asylum to the 300,000
Christians who have fled Mosul; the Christian leader is also calling on the UN
and world leaders to recognise that genocide is occurring.
In the UK government, the resignation of Baroness Warsi (over
disagreements about government policy towards Israel and Palestinians) has led
to the promotion of Eric Pickles (formerly Communities Minister) to Faith
Minister. Pickles dismayed secularists earlier this year by saying, “Britain
is a Christian nation. Get over it.”
In technology news, a photographer has repeatedly asked
Wikimedia to stop distributing one of his most famous photographs (of a macaque
monkey which played with his camera and took a smiling selfie) for free.
However, Wikimedia has refused his requests, on the grounds that American
copyright law assigns copyright in a photo to whoever took it – and since
American law doesn’t allow non-humans to have intellectual property rights,
Wikimedia claim the image falls in the public domain. They have, however,
decided to take a vote on whether they should change this policy. The fact that
the images were taken by a British photographer in Indonesia makes the
situation legally complicated.
Also in technology,
researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with
a way to extract sound from completely
silent videos. The technique relies on using high speed cameras to record tiny
fluctuations caused by sound waves in crisp packets, pot plants or other
everyday objects in a room. MIT’s innovation is to make the technique work with
everyday digital cameras which use a “rolling shutter” (i.e., don’t actually
save the whole image in one go).
And finally, an Argentinian woman who has made it her life’s
work to reunite families with snatched babies has just conducted her 114th
reunion – with her own grandson. The right wing dictatorship of the 1970s took
many babies from left wing parents and gave them to government sympathisers for
adoption; many of the parents were arrested, tortured and/or killed. The
organisation Grandmothers of the Plaza del Mayo has called for anyone of the
right age with suspicions about their parentage to take a DNA test; her
grandson did so about a month ago.
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