The first British clergyman to enter a gay marriage is
taking the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of Nottingham to an employment
tribunal under the Equality Act. The reason is that he was told that he could
no longer officiate at services or act as a hospital chaplain because his
marriage constituted inappropriate conduct for someone in holy orders.
The BBC, which has been criticised in the past for being a
‘cheerleader’ for assisted suicide, has been criticised again for a recent
drama showing an assisted suicide which failed to point out that assisting
suicide is against the law. A TV reviewer said, “Pippa [the assister, who was
pregnant] seemed blithely unbothered by the thought that, by the time she was
eligible for parole, her child would probably have finished university.”
A Chinese human rights lawyer who ‘disappeared’ in 2009 and
was sentenced to three years in prison in 2011 has been released. However, Gao
Zhisheng is under effective house arrest, and his treatment in prison was so
bad that he lost more than a quarter of his body weight and several teeth due
to malnutrition, and is currently only able to speak short and mostly
unintelligible sentences. He has not been permitted to see a doctor since his
release.
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa has now killed almost
1,900 people. Four Assemblies of God pastors from Monrovia in Liberia have
died; so have a considerable number of Christians in Sierra Leone, where all
public gatherings outside worship places are banned. Many people have turned to
the Lord because of fear of Ebola.
In Egypt, there has been an big increase in kidnappings of
Christians, mostly young girls or women, for ransom or to marry and convert.
Many are abducted in plain view, and the authorities rarely act effectively.
One report estimates 550 Coptic Christian schoolgirls have been kidnapped since
2011.
In sport, Arsene Wenger attributes Arsenal’s success in
signing Danny Welbeck from Manchester United on transfer deadline day to the
Pope. However, it was nothing to do with divine intervention against the Red
Devils; it was simply that Wenger had accepted an invitation from the Pope to
manage a charity football team in Rome on deadline day, which meant he was
awake and available to do transfer business a few hours earlier than he otherwise
would have been. Wenger was initially criticised for going to Rome on deadline
day, but he said, “Meeting the Pope was an experience I did not want to miss …
It was a game for peace and multi-religion understanding. I thought today, when
we are a bit in front of an international religious war, it was a very
important game.”
Also in sport, non-league Bungay Town offered a free box of
mushrooms to any supporters who attended their match against Martham last week.
“The former chairman is a mushroom grower,” BBC Sport were told. There was no
comment on whether the chairman was a fun guy to work with.
And finally, the US magazine Veterinary Practice News has
handed out awards in a contest called “They ate WHAT?” In third place was a
Great Dane dog whose stomach was found to contain 43 ½ socks; second place went
to a shorthaired pointer that ate a shish kebab, including the metal skewer;
and the winner was a frog that ate over 30 ornamental rocks. Honourable
mentions went to the bearded dragon that liked to lounge around in Barbie’s
Dream House and ate Barbie’s banana; a kitten that ate a toy alien; a pug that
ate 105 coins; and a rat terrier puppy that ate a whole brassiere, described as
“approximately” 14 inches long.
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