Not The BBC News: 31 January 2015

In China, the number of Christians is growing rapidly, despite government opposition which has recently seen many large church buildings damaged or bulldozed. Protestant churches baptised 2.4 million people between 2007 and 2012; if current growth rates continue, there will be more Christians (of all denominations) in China than in any other country by 2030. A young businesswoman from Hangzhou, when asked why she came to church, said “I come because I found a love here that isn't dependent on a person. It is like a river that doesn't go away."

The controversy over the OFSTED inspection of a Christian school in Sunderland has compelled senior political figures to comment. The Education Secretary has expressed support for the so-called “British values” principles on which OFSTED’s inspections are based; and the head of OFTSED has said that, after considering “all available evidence”, the inspectors did their job correctly (though he did not directly address the criticisms that the inspectors asked children what they knew about various sexual practices). However, parents of children at the school have reacted angrily to these comments, calling them “patronising”. One parent said, “How can they have considered all available evidence if they didn’t talk to any staff or parents from the school?” And a parent from a Christian school in nearby Durham, which looks likely to close following a similarly negative OFSTED inspection, said, “My boy has been bullied for being gay at the previous 5 schools he went to. This is the first school where he hasn’t been bullied for being gay.”

President Obama’s visit to the wife of Saeed Abedini, the Iranian-American pastor imprisoned in Iran, was apparently a great success once she revealed that the couple pray for him regularly. Saeed has now written a letter from prison thanking the President for “standing up for the persecuted.”

There has been a marked increase in attacks on Christian women and girls in Pakistan. Attacks typically involve assaults, rapes, kidnappings, forced marriages and/or forced conversions, along with police apathy and threats against those who pursue legal redress. In one such attack in Rana Town, a suburb of Lahore, a pregnant Christian mother who resisted a “ruthless woman’s” attempts to convert her to Islam was attacked by the woman’s brothers; they stripped her, paraded her through the streets naked, then robbed her and beat her to unconsciousness. Local police initially refused to take a report of the incident until pressured to do so by rights activists.

There is disquiet in Scotland over a Bill that is going before the Scottish Parliament to presume consent for organ donation; that is, if the Bill passes, a person’s organs will be donated to others after death unless they have opted out of the register, rather than the current system which requires people to opt in. A former Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland called it a “state-imposed tax on bodies” for anyone who dies without being aware of the opt-out system.

In film news, a documentary film called “Drop Box” has been made about the South Korean pastor who set up a box on the wall of his house in Seoul to help deal with the problem of abandoned babies. Mothers who felt they could not cope with their new born babies could (anonymously) leave their babies, and then ring a bell to notify the pastor that there was a baby in the box. To date, more than 600 babies have been left there. The documentary is showing in cinemas across the USA for three days in early March; no UK release date is yet known. A short preview can be seen at https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=520780904731427

In technology news, the number of times people access online Bibles from different locations has been used to help compile a list of the most (and least) Bible-minded cities in the USA. The so-called “Bible Belt” includes most of the Southern and some of the Midwest states, and the survey supports the view that the Southern states read the Bible most, with Southern states taking 25 of the top 30 positions in the table. In contrast, the bottom 10 cities in the table included New York, Boston, Las Vegas and San Francisco. The overall winner was Birmingham, Alabama; rock bottom was Providence, Rhode Island.

And finally, a Saudi Arabian cleric has been ridiculed even by Arabic Twitter users after issuing a fatwa (prohibition) against the building of snowmen. Following a rare snowfall in the north of the country, someone asked on a website if it was permissible to build snowmen under Sunni Islamic law. However, that law forbids creating any images of people, and the cleric decided that included snowmen. One commenter on the website supported the cleric, saying that building snowmen was “imitating the infidels and promotes lustiness and eroticism”; but one anonymous Twitter user responded by posting an image of a man in formal Arab clothing holding the ‘arm’ of a snow ‘woman’ which was wearing a bra and lipstick.

Not The BBC News: 27 January 2015

Boko Haram has released around 200 hostages in north-eastern Nigeria. No reason was given; the most likely explanation is that after they have mounted several major campaigns and captured whole towns recently, they have more hostages than they can cope with.

In the neighbouring country of Niger, which is a former French colony and is 98% Muslim, there has been anti-Christian rioting in response to the cartoons published by the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. A police station was attacked, nearly every church in the capital city of Niamey has been burned or looted, and schools, orphanages and homes of Christians have been attacked. Five people have died in the violence since Friday and 170 are reported injured. However, Christians have continued to meet to worship in homes; at one prayer meeting just after the attacks, so many people wanted to share stories of God’s faithfulness during the attacks – even while stones were still being thrown on the roof -- that some were asked to wait until Sunday. Prayers are requested as some Christian homes have been marked to facilitate further attacks.

There has been continuing persecution of Egyptian Christians. In the past week, a Christian man was shot dead, possibly because he refused to drop charges against local Islamic militants for the murder of four Christians including his cousin, by relatives of one of the accused; and 20 Egyptian Christian men working in Sirte, Libya to escape persecution and discrimination in their own country have been kidnapped by Libyan militants who have affiliated themselves with Islamic State. A Libyan Christian family in Sirte were also attacked in their flat on Dec 23rd; both parents were killed, and the oldest daughter was abducted and found dead on Christmas Day.

Following the legalisation of gay marriage in several European countries without taking a national referendum on the issue, a pro-family group in Slovakia has gathered enough signatures to force the President to hold a referendum. Slovakia, which is 62% Roman Catholic, already defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, but the referendum aims to enshrine the definition in the country’s constitution. The referendum will take place on February 7.

Following the ongoing controversy over OFSTED trying to judge schools according to how they teach newly defined “British Values”, and claiming that Christian schools do so inadequately because of their Christian ethos, there are major concerns that the Counter Terrorism and Security Bill (currently before Parliament) will have a similar effect in universities. The Bill will require universities and other bodies to “take seriously their responsibility to exclude those promoting extremist views that support or are conducive to terrorism”, where extremism is defined as “being opposed to fundamental British Values” and the values to be promoted include “respect for others, with particular regard to those characteristics protected under the Equality Act 2010”. It is therefore possible that traditional Christian views – particularly on gay marriage -- could be labelled as “extremist” under this Bill. The Bill’s guidance on how universities should implement this requirement is vague, but it is possible that Christian Unions and other student societies could be required to submit names of speakers and their presentations weeks in advance for vetting.

A documentary has been released at the Sundance Film Festival that accuses the Scientology church/cult of major physical and emotional abuse. Based on the testimony of eight former members, including the former second-highest-ranking member of the organisation, it alleges that some members were subjected to hard labour and others were tortured in a prison known as “the hole”; a pregnant woman was forced to do arduous labour and then had her baby daughter taken from her (she and her daughter later escaped); the cult’s leader has physically abused several members; and those who left the organisation have been harassed and their families forced to cut off contact with them. The film also alleges that the church leader insisted that Tom Cruise should split from Nicole Kidman because Kidman’s father is a psychologist, which is anathema to the leader; and suggests that Cruise is so close to the leader that he must be aware of the abuses.

In legal news, a misspelling by a single letter has cost Companies House, the Government registrar of companies, ₤9 million. A company called Taylor & Son Ltd had gone bust, but Companies House mistakenly recorded that Taylor & Sons Ltd, a long-established and successful Welsh engineering firm, had liquidated. By the time the mistake was corrected, Companies House had sold the false information to credit reference agencies, and Taylor & Sons lost all its 3000 suppliers and its credit facilities within three weeks, causing it to collapse into administration. After a four year legal battle, the High Court has found Companies House liable for damages which are estimated at ₤8.8 million, plus costs.

And finally, a Christian labourer at a coal mine is West Virginia refused to participate in a new “clocking in” scheme that used biometric hand-scanning, because he believed the technology was connected to the Mark of the Beast, and so he had religious objections to it. The company that sold the scanner wrote to him and pointed out that the Mark of the Beast described in Revelation only appeared on people’s right hands and foreheads, and suggested that anyone who feared the Mark should use the scanner with their left hand. However, he still refused, and claims he was therefore forced to retire. This week, a jury awarded him $150,000 in compensation, although it’s not clear whether they thought his objections were valid, or merely decided the coal mining company was inconsistent because it allowed two workers with missing fingers to be clocked in by a different method. The company is expected to appeal.

Not The BBC News: 25 January 2015

At a Mass in Calabria, Sicily, the Pope publicly stated that Mafia members will be excommunicated. “Those who in their life have gone along the evil ways, as in the case of the mafia, they are not with God, they are excommunicated,” he said. His statements are likely to have a strong impact in southern Italy, where Mafia members like to portray themselves as devout Catholics to improve their local credibility. Some of the Pope’s advisors are starting to worry that the Mafia will target him for assassination.

There is a ray of hope for Pastor Saaed Abidini, the Iranian-American pastor who has been imprisoned in Iran for more than two years. President Obama has agreed to meet with his wife. The opportunity arose because Obama was making a visit to Boise, Idaho where his wife lives, so she wrote to him and asked for a meeting, which he agreed to. The Obama administration has raised the issue with Iran previously by telephone, but with no result.

In Kachin state in north-east Myanmar, the long-running conflict between the Burmese government and the (ethnically distinct) Kachin people has hit the headlines because the Burmese army tortured, raped and killed two Kachin schoolteachers returning home from a convention organised by the Kachin Baptist community. There have been decades of oppression of the largely Christian Kachins by the Burmese authorities, and some retaliation, but a peace deal was signed in May 2013. However, there was a recent rebel attack, and the army seems to have retaliated by attacking these two teachers. For more than a century, Christians in the region have worked as volunteer teachers to bring education to the remote regions where Government education is unavailable.

The annual March for Life took place in Washington DC, with hundreds of thousands of people marching in support of pro-life causes. They then heard speeches from senior churchmen and politicians, including one Democrat senator. Simultaneously, the House of Representatives passed a bill that aims to prevent abortion clinics receiving any taxpayer funding.

A government-funded conference centre in London has apologised to a Christian group for banning an event they had organised. Christian Concern had organised a debate presenting views for and against gay marriage, but the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre cancelled the event the day before it was due to happen, saying that Christian Concern’s views were “inappropriate” for a Government-owned building. However, Christian Concern took legal action, and an out of court settlement has now been reached, along with the apology.

A former member of the successful Christian rock group The Newsboys has announced that he is now an atheist. He claims that the group got together as a group of friends at a Christian school, and decided to call themselves a Christian rock group because of the strong Christian beliefs of the parents who owned the house they usually met at. He, however, was more interested in playing rock ‘n roll than in being Christian; when the band dissolved, and later when his marriage collapsed, he became interested in cosmology and psychology as he searched for his own beliefs.

In ancient Egypt, Pharaohs were buried with death masks made out of gold, but average Egyptians had death masks made of linen or papyrus. Scientists recently developed a technique of dissolving the glue that holds the masks together without harming the ink, which allows the ancient scraps of paper to be read. One such scrap turned out to be the earliest known document of the New Testament – it is a fragment of the gospel of Mark, dating to around 90 AD. A spokesman said how amazed he was to discover such a document in Egypt.

In sport, football’s FA Cup fourth round weekend produced some major shocks. Seven of the top nine teams from the Premier League played, and none of them won; Manchester United and Liverpool both drew against lower league opposition (Cambridge Utd and Bolton), while the others all lost. The biggest shock was table-toppers Chelsea losing 4-2 at home to Bradford City, after leading 2-0 at half time. Middlesbrough beat Manchester City away, Blackburn beat Swansea, and Southampton and Tottenham both lost at home to Crystal Palace and Leicester respectively. Just to add to the craziness of the weekend, Watford scored seven goals in the second half of their League game against Blackpool to win 7-2, and Cristiano Ronaldo was sent off while playing for Real Madrid. Some folk who like to believe in portents are saying it was a great day for teams whose name begins with B. The remaining two of the top nine Premier League teams play today, against Brighton and Bristol City.

And finally, a senior leader and MEP of Hungary’s far right Jobbik party, which is anti-Semitic among other policies, resigned when he discovered that he himself was a Jew. Csanad Szegedi says he wasn’t especially anti-Semitic himself, but he was indifferent to the issue, and he was inclined to disbelieve stories of the Holocaust. However, after rumours about his heritage began to circulate, he went to visit his 94 year old grandmother, who revealed for the first time that she had survived Auschwitz (but lost her whole family there) and his grandfather had survived labour camps. Szegedi has now left Jobbik (but remains as an independent MEP); apologised for any anti-Jewish comments he has made; and is planning a trip to Auschwitz.

Not The BBC News: 23 January 2015

One of the two Japanese men shown in the latest ISIS hostage is a Christian who risked his life for his friend, who is the other hostage. Kenji Goto, a war correspondent, became a Christian in 1997; he was interviewed in the May 2014 Japanese issue of “Christianity Today”, in which he said, “I have seen horrible places and have risked my life, but I know that somehow God will always save me.” But he told the same publication that he never risked anything dangerous, citing a passage in the Bible, "Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” However, when his friend Haruna Yakawa (who had gone to work in Syria in an attempt to turn his life around after going bankrupt, losing his wife to cancer and attempting suicide) disappeared, Goto decided to go to Syria to meet his local contacts to try to help his friend. He obtained media credentials from the anti-government rebels in Aleppo, and set out for Raqqa, the capital of Islamic State in October; that was the last time he was heard of until the video was released.

The statements made by Nick Clegg in support of free speech following the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks have been challenged by former Conservative minister Lord Tebbitt. Tebbitt praises the statements themselves, but calls for Clegg to apply them also to “Christian preachers being threatened with prosecution for reading the Bible aloud in the street,” and also to support freedom of conscience for those who are prosecuted because of their views on gay marriage. Tebbitt called on Clegg (and others) to “come out as liberals rather than denying to others the right of free speech they demand for themselves.” Clegg’s support for “free speech even if it offends” is likely to remain high profile for a while, since it effectively contradicts UK legislation such as the “hate speech” provisions of the Religious and Racial Hatred Act 2006, and the use of the Equality Act against anyone believed guilty of offending another group; indeed, it is likely that Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons, if published in the UK, would have been prosecuted under such legislation.

The arguments regarding OFSTED and its application of the new guidelines on “spiritual and moral development” in its inspection of schools have become high profile following a controversial inspection of a Christian school in Sunderland. The headmaster made a formal complaint about OFSTED inspectors asking children of 9-11 “do you know what lesbians do?” and “do you know anyone who doesn’t feel comfortable in their own body?” which was backed up by the region’s MEP. The OFSTED report on the school added fuel to the fire; it gave the school the worst possible overall rating and placed the school in “special measures”, despite it having some of the best exam results in the area. The headmaster pointed to a phrase which was in the draft OFSTED report that he received, but was removed from the final report, which said, “The Christian ethos of the school permeates much of the school’s provision. This has restricted the development of a broad and balanced approach to the curriculum.”

The US House of Representatives has decided to drop a bill to ban most abortions past 20 weeks’ gestation. President Obama had already promised to veto the Bill if it was passed by Congress, but the newly Republican-controlled House had planned to pass it anyway. However, the Bill ran into trouble because it only provided exemptions for women who had become pregnant after being raped if they had reported the rape to the police. A number of female Republicans felt that was too restrictive, and so refused to support the Bill; but others in the party refused to accept any amendments on this issue, and so the Bill was dropped. Pro-life groups in the US have circulated several videos and posters recently, whose underlying message is that children born from rape are indistinguishable from those who were not.

In sport, the NFL playoffs have concluded. The Dallas Cowboys survived the first of the three playoffs round with the help of a controversial refereeing decision, but lost their second round match on an even more controversial decision. The Cowboys’ wide receiver Desi Bryant made a spectacular mid-air catch of a ball thrown half the length of the field, clutching it to his chest. But before he landed, he put the ball in one hand and reached for the goal line; the ball was knocked loose when his shoulder hit the ground. The game officials ruled that he had not caught it, because the ball had not been fully in control at the end of the move (when he landed), and it was an incomplete pass. After a storm on Twitter, the final verdict was that the officials had made a correct call of a bad rule. The Cowboys’ conquerors, the Green Bay Packers, lost to the Seattle Seahawks in a thrilling NFC Championship game which featured a last-quarter comeback from the Seahawks and a win in overtime. Russell Wilson, the Seahawks; quarterback, gave conspicuous praise and thanks to God in his emotional post-match interview; however, Aaron Rodgers, the quarterback of the Packers who is also a Christian, said, “I don’t think God cares about football.”

And finally, a court in Dusseldorf has ruled that it is legal for German men to urinate while standing up. The court case had been brought by a landlord who sued his male tenant for damage to the marble floor in the bathroom. However, the court ruled that standing up to pee was “within cultural norms”. The judge added that men who insist on standing "must expect occasional rows with housemates, especially women" but cannot be held to account for collateral damage. This issue has a relatively high profile in Germany; some toilets use prohibition signs to tell men not to stand up, but opponents have coined the derogatory word “Sitzpinkler” for men who do their number ones sitting down.

Not The BBC News: 18 January 2015

The US Supreme Court has finally agreed to make a nationwide judgment on gay marriage. Until now, it has been left to States to decide, but this has led to lawsuits and controversy, notably in several States where a referendum was held and the majority were against it, but the ban was struck down by courts as being unconstitutional. However, some State courts decided that such bans were constitutional (and at least two of those where gay marriage was forced through by the courts are proposing legislation to exempt wedding-related businesses from providing services to gay marriages for reasons of conscience), and the disagreements have forced the Supreme Court to step in.

A man who spent 12 years in a “vegetative state” after being diagnosed with meningitis eventually recovered and has written a book explaining how he was aware of everything after about two years into his condition. His parents cared for him the whole time, turning him in bed every 2 hours so he wouldn’t get bedsores. However, the care home where he spent 8 hours each day used to place him in front of a TV watching re-runs of the same television show, which he now hates with a passion.

An official in the Hindu nationalist government of India has claimed that the government is going to introduce laws to punish “cow slaughter and conversion to other religions” by death. He also called on Hindu women to have at least four children to protect the dominance of Hinduism in India.

Around 60 Exclusive Brethren churches in the UK have gained charitable status following a decision by the Charity Commission. Charity law requires participation in the charity to be open to all, but Exclusive Brethren churches limit Holy Communion to church members only, and the legal case was about whether this process satisfied the participation requirement. A spokesman for the Christian Institute described it as a victory for religious freedom, saying that this decision confirms that the Charity Commission has no power to direct how a church administers Holy Communion.

A youth who wrote a book about visiting Heaven whilst in a coma when he was six years old has claimed that he made the story up. Alex Malarkey was in a car crash that left him paralysed; he now says that he concocted the story to get attention. In an open letter, he wrote, “[Those who sell the book] should read the Bible, which is enough. The Bible is the only source of truth. Anything written by man cannot be infallible.” Alex apparently receives no money from sales of the book, which was co-written with his father, who recently separated from Alex’s mother.

In technology news, the US and UK are to carry out a joint “war game” based on cyber attacks. In an echo of a Tom Clancy book, the scenario will be a cyber attack on the financial sector. The event will mark the first time MI5 has collaborated on cyber issues with security services from another country.

Also in technology news, travellers on one of the metro lines in Beijing are being offered free e-books, available by swiping a barcode. The first ten available are historical Chinese texts. A government official said, “I think we have found a great way to make traditional culture popular.”

And finally, the problem of invasive plants in certain parts of the USA is being tackled by a technology that is notable for being older than America itself. A company called Eco Goats will deliver a herd of goats to chomp on unwanted plants for a week. The goats are a big success because they can access steep and wooded areas; they do not damage the property as much as chemicals or machinery; and plant seeds rarely survive the grinding of goats’ teeth, so the plants do not regrow from droppings. And in the state of Georgia, goats and sheep are used to eat their way through kudzu, a vine introduced in 1876 as an ornamental plant but which is capable of growing a foot a day in the warm south-eastern states; a herd owner said he originally used goats alone, but found that the goats led all the mutinies within the herd.

Not The BBC News: 10 January 2015

In the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in France, Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, has spoken out to warn against “knee-jerk authoritarianism”. He said, “in a free society people have to be free to offend each other.” However, similar sentiments expressed by liberal-leaning news outlets in the USA have been called hypocritical, because several major publications called for free speech and the freedom to offend but refused to published the Charlie Hebdo cartoon that allegedly offended the terrorists, which showed insulting caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed and a Jewish rabbi, to avoid offending Muslims. Publishers singled out for particular blame include the Associated Press, which claimed it did not want to “gratuitously offend” but was simultaneously selling an artwork on its website called “Piss Christ” that was designed to offend Christians; and the New York Daily News, which published the offending cartoon with Mohammed’s face pixellated but the rabbi’s unaltered.

The response of Muslims to the terrorist attacks has been similar to that in the West; even Arab language newspapers have published cartoons condemning the terrorists. And there has been praise for a Muslim worker in the kosher supermarket where hostages were taken, who hid six people in a walk-in freezer, and then calmly left the building to tell police what was going on.

Meanwhile in Canada, a Christian man has been given an 18 month jail sentence for sitting on a subway train and loudly criticising Islam during a debate with a fellow passenger. He claimed in court that he had been carrying out a “social experiment”; he had deliberately dressed in the colours of the Israeli flag, and had a friend video record the debate. He was arrested after another passenger pulled the emergency alarm.

In Pakistan, where a Christian couple accused of ripping pages out of the Koran were burned alive by an angry Muslim mob some months ago, Pakistan’s Supreme Court has called for the arrest of two clerics who allegedly incited the mob, and has taken disciplinary action against five police officers who did nothing to prevent the mob killing. And an American socialite, who briefly found fame when she made a complaint to the police about being cyberstalked which ended with the resignation of CIA Director General David Petraeus in 2012, has bought a house for the murdered couple’s three children to live in, using a Pakistani Dominican priest as a go-between.

The Church of Scotland’s presbyteries have voted by a majority to allow the ordination of gay ministers, including those in civil partnerships (gay marriage was only introduced in Scotland last week). The decision has to be ratified by the Kirk’s General Assembly in May, but this seems likely to happen, after several years of votes which have increasingly opened the Church to gay clergy. However, the inclusion of those in civil partnerships is likely to be divisive, as many traditional Christians make a sharp distinction between those with gay feelings and those who openly practise gay sex.

A former High Court judge has proposed that married couples should receive tax breaks when they reach their fifth, tenth and twentieth wedding anniversaries. He said that the system would publicly recognise the fact that marriage saves the taxpayer money.

Andrae Crouch, famous gospel singer, has died at the age of 72 from a heart attack. Crouch was one of the most famous of all gospel singers for decade or two, and some of his songs are sung in congregational worship today. The chorus of one of his most famous songs was, “Soon and very soon, we are going to see the King”.

In technology news, Volvo are trialling a new app-based system that lets a car driver know when a cyclist is near, and also the cyclist’s speed and trajectory, even if the car driver cannot see the bike. The (somewhat complicated) system requires the cyclist to wear a “smart helmet” which communicates with popular smartphone fitness monitoring apps. The information is then sent to Volvo and is shared with drivers equipped with Volvo’s City Safety system.

And finally, a man from Houston, Texas wanted to propose to his Harry Potter-mad girlfriend in style – so he flew both of them to Britain so that he could propose to her at Surbiton station, which features in one of the Harry Potter films. However, having planned to propose on the last day of their visit, he discovered that the train service was shut down for the weekend for maintenance. He somehow managed to concoct an excuse to get his unwitting girlfriend to take a one-hour bus ride from London to Surbiton station, and then persuaded the station staff to let them onto the platform. She said yes.

Not The BBC News: 7 January 2015

An article entitled “Science Increasingly Makes The Case For God” was published in the Wall Street Journal on Christmas Day. The key point of the article is several (quietly published) revisions to the list of criteria that define a planet capable of sustaining human life, which together make the probability of such a planet appearing by chance vanishingly small. One of the new criteria is that there must be a gravitationally massive planet like Jupiter nearby to prevent large numbers of asteroids hitting the life-sustaining planet – and there are nearly 200 other newly established criteria. The article also points to the failure of the SETI program to find any evidence of life that has evolved on other planets. The article concludes by quoting a collection of high profile scientists saying that the new evidence strongly supports “intelligent design” i.e. the existence of a Creator.

The UK Government is close to passing a Modern Slavery Bill that aims to criminalise human trafficking in England and Wales and provide support for victims. However, Christians are being asked to lobby the Home Secretary to amend the Bill because, unlike the equivalent bills in Northern Ireland and Scotland, it does not guarantee support and assistance for victims, nor do victims have as many legal rights.

The UK Government has offered its support to a private member’s Bill to ensure local councils have the freedom to include prayer in their meetings, if they choose to. The Labour party has also said it will back the Bill.

The Christmas season often produces some confusion in children’s minds between Santa Claus and the (adult) Jesus Christ. However, in Nimule, Sudan, in an orphanage run by the “Machine Gun Preacher” Sam Childers, a number of children met Santa Claus for the first time ever – and kept confusing him with Moses, because of his long white beard.

Elsewhere in the world, persecution of Christians has continued unabated over the Christmas period. A Mexican priest who was kidnapped in the state of Guerrero has been found dead – the fourth to die this year; a suicide bomber attempted to enter an evangelical church in Nigeria, and blew himself up after he was restrained from entering, injuring several people; Pope Francis visited Sri Lanka and used the occasion to highlight persecution of Christians by Buddhists; and a missionary from Northern Ireland is recovering after being shot and wounded in Mulita in the Democratic Republic of Congo. However, there has been at least one item of better news; a senior commander from the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group in Uganda which is Christian in name only, has been captured.

In technology news, recently released documents claim to show that the Russian government has funded a group of hackers/Internet trolls to make positive comments about Russia’s military activities in Ukraine on American social media. The employees were expected to post up to 50 times per day; to maintain six Facebook accounts, publishing at least three posts per day in each; and/or to tweet 50 times per day. However, a foreign-based Russian campaigner for net freedom said that the articles posted were “sketchy, done fast, including copy-pastes … it’s the standard of a regular student’s work from a Russian university.”

And finally, a judge in the state of Massachusetts accepted an unusual bail bond – a pair of trainers. The accused claimed his finances were in a terrible state following a divorce, and that he could not pay $450 to see the case dropped. The judge refused to release him without bail, but told the accused that he could “be creative”, whereupon the accused offered the $85 Nike trainers which he said were a Christmas gift. He can reclaim his shoes by paying $100 or doing 10 hours of community service.