Not The BBC News: 25 May 2015

The Republic of Ireland has become the fourth European country to hold a referendum on the legality of gay marriage in the past three years, and the first to obtain a Yes vote. (Slovenia and Croatia rejected it, and Slovakia’s referendum was declared void for a low turnout). However, a report in the Irish Independent newspaper has examined the rhetoric used, particularly by pro-gay-marriage supporters, and has raised two major concerns. Firstly, it swiftly became clear that the Irish Government (who were in favour of gay marriage) were positioning this referendum as a vote on a New Ireland, intended to leave behind the bigotries and hatreds of the Old Ireland, and arguing that a Yes vote would allow Ireland to join “the family of civilised nations.” In other words, a vote against gay marriage was a vote for the old hatreds and against civilisation. Secondly, an analysis of social media showed enormous intolerance amongst Yes supporters; anyone who opposed gay marriage for any reason was labelled “homophobic” and a “bigot”. The newspaper’s conclusion was that the bigotries and hatreds of the Old Ireland have been replaced by the bigotries and hatreds of the New Ireland … only the Old Ireland was honest about it, while the New Ireland is still presenting itself as “stormtroopers of equality”.

Meanwhile, a study published in the journal “Science” in December 2014, which alleged that homosexual activists can change the minds of those who oppose redefining marriage in a twenty-minute conversation, has been retracted as fraudulent. It turned out that the data had multiple statistical irregularities, and the three organisations who were credited with funding the study have denied doing so.

Recent persecution of Christians in China has taken a new turn, with Christians becoming bolder about speaking up for their rights. In Zhejiang province, much of the persecution has focussed on authorities insisting crosses are removed from church buildings, and sometimes carrying out the work themselves (often at night, which is illegal) and severely damaging the church buildings. The order applies equally to the government-linked Three Self Patriotic Church and to other denominations. However, churches have started re-installing the crosses after the authorities leave; one church has had its cross removed three times this month. Also, in the remote Xinjiang province, two Christians who were arrested and held for a week because they were singing Christian songs in a private house have sued the local Public Security Bureau for wrongful arrest.

In Ethiopia, a Christian man reported a sequence of severe persecution to a local Christian ministry representative. Aman Kuni was arrested in a church on April 25th, about 100 miles south of Addis Ababa, by 15 police officers who surrounded the church. He and his friends were charged with “holding illegal meetings in secret locations”, although their real offence appears to have been to hold a baptism service at which ex-Muslims professed faith in Christ. They were released on bail after two weeks in a hugely overcrowded jail and two court appearances – but five days later, Kuni was forced to kneel with a pistol pressed between his teeth, and told that either he had to kill two pastor friends within 3 months, or his children would die. Kuni’s wife and children have already been taken away by his wife’s Muslim family. Kuni, who is still in Ethiopia waiting to see if the charges against him will be dropped (the judge promised to do so if his accusers could not produce any evidence), said, “For the past five and a half years, I was struggling to care for these three kids. Now, I am just praying for God to provide them a safe place.”

In Ukraine, the conflict in the east of the country is heating up after Russian soldiers, who the Kremlin have long denied are fighting in the country, were captured by Ukrainian forces and shown on TV. The Kremlin claimed that the two captured soldiers had previously retired from the armed forces, but few people believe that; and there is growing resentment within Russia itself from the families of soldiers who have gone “missing in action” or whose bodies have been returned for burial after “training accidents”.

The US State Department is being heavily criticised for denying visas to Assyrian Christians from Iraq, because it will not accept them as refugees on the basis of their faith, even though there is clear evidence of ISIS specifically attempting to wipe out Christians. This is despite all costs having been paid for through donations. In contrast, over 4,000 Somalis have been accepted into the US this year, supported by Government funding.

In sports news, there has been criticism of the government of Qatar, and of the international footballing federation FIFA, for refusing Nepalis working on the construction of stadia for the 2022 World Cup permission to fly home after the devastating earthquake in their country. This criticism has come from the Nepali government, but others are also criticising the event: the International TUC has criticised the high death rate amongst migrant workers (around 40 per month), and the BBC have criticised the arrest of one of their cameramen who recently tried to film the conditions that the workers have to endure.

In technology news, a new Android app has been released in South Korea called FakeTalk, that is designed to allow phone users to hold text conversations with celebrities or dead people. It uses artificial intelligence (a mixture of language generation and selecting from ready-made responses) to mimic the language and texting style of a particular person. Clearly users know they are talking to a program, but the goal is to help depressed teens (South Korea has one of the highest teen suicide rates in the world). One woman customised the app so that it resembled her deceased boyfriend; "at first, the app was a little clueless,” she said, “but now, it texts like him with the same syntax and idiosyncrasies. Now I text what I didn’t tell him then, and what I wanted to tell him when he was alive.”

And finally, the head of a software gaming company in Fuzhou, China, has had a new company headquarters built – in the shape of the Starship Enterprise. Liu DeJian, the head of NetDragon Websoft, studied in America for a few years, and became obsessed by Star Trek. He even obtained permission from the CBS broadcasting network to build the  ₤100 million replica, which features automatic sliding doors and 30ft metal slides to allow quick access from the third floor to ground level.

Not The BBC News: 22 May 2015

The legal judgment against Asher’s bakery in Northern Ireland – who were accused of breaking equality law for refusing to bake a cake with a pro-gay-marriage slogan – has been issued, and the judge’s decision has opened up an even bigger legal can of worms than anyone anticipated. The bakers had been prosecuted for breaking equality law by discriminating against the customer who ordered the cake because he was gay. The bakers denied this and argued that it was the slogan, not the customer, that they objected to. Most commentators accepted the bakers’ assertion, but still foresaw a legal case which pitted the right to freedom of conscience (i.e. not to support or promote a cause they disagreed with) against the wording of contract law. Even the prosecuting lawyer spent much of his energy laying down a strict interpretation of contract law that he thought should be applied in this case.

But the judge instead found Asher’s guilty of discriminating against the customer because he was gay, on the grounds (a) that they must have guessed he was gay, and (b) that previous legal cases had decided motive was irrelevant if discrimination took place e.g. if a hospital selected patients for some procedure using a criterion that had nothing to do with the patient’s race, but the net effect of the criterion was to deny that procedure to patients of a particular race, then racial discrimination had occurred. Asher’s may appeal against the judgment, but for now, lawyers across the country are trying to digest the implications of a law that says it’s possible to be guilty of discrimination against a member of a protected minority group without intending to discriminate, or even actually knowing that the person involved belongs to that group. One thing that seems likely is that there will be continued calls to introduce a conscience clause into equality law -- or more precisely, to extend the existing religious exemption from some aspects of equality law to include businesses with a religious ethos, as was recently done in the USA by the “Hobby Lobby” case.

Two church denominations have changed their policies to be more open to gay ministers. The United Methodists in the USA have voted to allow clergy to be practising homosexuals and to perform gay weddings. And the Church of Scotland has voted to allow gays in civil partnerships of gay marriages to be appointed to the ministry. One church immediately left the Church of Scotland in protest – in Stornoway, where about 250 people joined themselves to the Free Church of Scotland instead, leaving about 100 (and none of the governing ‘kirk session’) in the old building.

Meanwhile, two university academics have suggested taking family-related conflicts in equality law to the ultimate extreme – by abolishing the family, so that society offers a level playing field for everyone. Adam Swift, professor of political and legal theory at the University of Warwick, and Harry Brighouse, professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), argue that since kids raised in families clearly have advantages in society, the only fair thing to do is to abolish the family. They propose to start by prohibiting private school, inheritance, summer camp, and other “purely economic means” of conferring advantages on children.

The famous American televangelist Robert Schuller has died. Schuller’s “Hour of Power” was a relentlessly upbeat radio programme that avoided what he called “the glorification of shame” that came from preaching about the unworthiness of sinners, and instead focussed on self-esteem and “possibility thinking”. Despite criticism for how little his sermons touched on the issue of sin, his meetings became so popular that he commissioned the “Crystal Cathedral” in southern Los Angeles; a huge church building with 10,000 panes of glass, seating for 3,000, an enormous pipe organ and doors 90ft high that opened at the touch of a button. Instead of an overflow room, he put a giant screen in the car park, so people could watch the sermon like it was a drive-in movie. He avoided many of the sexual scandals that brought down his high-profile peers in the 1980s, and became a close spiritual advisor to President Clinton in the 1990s. Yet the ministry ended in family disputes and bankruptcy in the past 5-10 years, and the Crystal Cathedral is now owned by the Roman Catholic church.

In the Middle East, there is good news to report for once. A Christian conference with more than 1,000 people was held at New Life church in Amman, Jordan; so many people attended that some had to watch the video link from the lobby. There was also a youth prayer meeting with over 200 youths on Saturday night, which ran for two and a half hours.

Also in North Africa, the attack on Garissa University in Kenya by al-Shabaab terrorists has triggered some members of al-Shabaab to defect. The most senior defector, Zaki Hersi, was so influential in the group that there was once a bounty of $3 million for his death. He said, “Our aim was to liberate the country … but now it has turned to terror and acts of organised crime.” He is living in a safe house because his former colleagues are trying to kill him.

A decision by the UK Supreme Court means that vulnerable homeless people are more likely to be given priority for local council accommodation. A law was passed many years ago that was intended to achieve this, but some of its wording was ambiguous (for example, it made no attempt to define different categories of homelessness) and so it became subject to case law … and the test case decided that ‘vulnerable’ meant ‘more vulnerable than the average homeless person’, a test which was almost impossible for homeless people to fulfil. The Supreme Court has now decided that Southwark council was wrong to use this test to turn away a homeless man with multiple physical and psychotic problems, and that the test should instead be ‘more vulnerable than an ordinary person’. Charities for the homeless have welcomed the news.

In sport, Brazilian international footballer David Luiz has been baptised as a Christian, under the auspices of a Hillsongs church (using team-mate Maxwell’s swimming pool) and has vowed to abstain from sex until he is married. Luiz announced his baptism on social media by quoting 2 Corinthians 5.17: “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away and the new has come.”

And finally, a drug dealer from Colchester has unofficially qualified for the Guinness Book of Records for the longest time spent in police custody without going to the toilet. Sy Allen swallowed his stash of drugs when the police arrested him, then refused all food and drink for 3 days before starting to accept snacks. 23 days after his arrest, having still not been to the toilet, he became unwell and was taken to hospital where doctors recovered 24 wraps of heroin and 20 wraps of cocaine from his body. He was sentenced to 32 months in jail.

Not The BBC News: 17 May 2015

Pope Francis has met with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of Palestine and/or the Palestinian National Authority, while canonising two Palestinian nuns. While  Vatican sources say they have recognised the state of Palestine since the United Nations recognised it in 2012, this was the first time that an official document used the term “State of Palestine”. Some Christians and Jews are outraged at reports that the Pope allegedly called Abbas, who is also the chairman of the sometime terrorist Palestine Liberation Organisation, an “angel of peace”; in fact, Francis’ words were: “May the angel of peace destroy the evil spirit of war. I thought of you: may you be an angel of peace.”

The Republic of Ireland has rejected a Bill that would have removed a clause in Irish abortion law that upholds the unborn child’s right to life. The clause is seen as the ultimate protection for unborn babies after abortion was declared legal in the country in 2013 at any stage if the mother’s life is in danger (though controversially, this includes threats of suicide, and no medical evidence is required to back up such threats). Another Bill to allow abortion in cases of severe life-limiting disability was rejected in February.

Meanwhile, part of a Bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, to ban abortions after 20 weeks’ gestation because medical evidence shows that babies can feel pain after that point, has been described as “disgraceful” by President Obama’s official spokesman. The part at issue is an exception to the Bill which allows abortions past the 20 week limit for rape or incest victims, but only if the rape or incest is reported to a law enforcement agency first, and only if the women undergo counselling or medical treatment for the rape somewhere other than an abortion clinic within 48 hours of the abortion. The exception has already been broadened so that only women under the age of consent are required to report the rape or incest to law enforcement, but this is apparently not enough to satisfy the President.

Also, a pro-life march of 25,000 people to the Canadian parliament was briefly disrupted by a counter-demonstration and four screaming topless female protesters. Although some people argue that abortion is a non-party-political issue, the protesters seemed to disagree because many were flying hammer-and-sickle flags.

The Southern Baptist Church in the USA has (finally) voted to open their ranks to missionaries who speak in tongues. Although “speaking in tongues” ceased to be controversial in most church denominations in the 1970s or 80s, the Southern Baptists banned tongue-speakers from being missionaries only 10 years ago. But their missionaries are facing increasing competition from Pentecostal groups. A statement on their website said they would still “end employment for any missionary who places persistent emphasis on any specific gift of the Spirit as normative for all or to the extent such emphasis becomes disruptive."

In the UK, Aberystwyth University has banned the Bible from being placed in student halls of residence after a poll declared it “inappropriate for a multi-cultural university.” However, the poll (which was conducted by the Student Union) has been criticised for attracting only 5% of eligible voters.

MPs in France are to vote on a proposal to make supermarkets hand over all unsold food to charities. Many supermarkets already do this voluntarily, but neighbouring Belgium has already passed a similar law. There are also proposals by the European Union to scrap “best before" dates on dry foods such as coffee, rice, pasta, jams and pickles to reduce food waste.

In legal news, a driver who was caught doing 101 mph in Wales decided to challenge his conviction legally in any way he could; he questioned whether the police speed camera had indeed registered his car, and also queried the accuracy of the camera. He now wishes he hadn’t done so, because after the police hired an airfield and an Audi R8 to test the accuracy of their camera, the judge found him guilty; fined him ₤675 with six points on his licence; and ordered him to pay the full prosecution costs, including the costs of the test, which came to ₤10,384.

In technology news, a well-known computer hacker has been charged by the FBI with hacking into the flight control systems of a plane, via the at-seat entertainment system. He boasted via Twitter that he had hacked the system enough to cause the oxygen masks to drop down, but the FBI claim (based on interviews with him) that he also monitored air traffic and at one point caused the plane to climb. It’s unclear whether he actually did cause the plane to climb or just believed he had. United Airlines, on which the incident took place, have now set up a “white hat” hacking competition with a prize for the best hack of their corporate network – but no prizes on offer for hacking any in-flight systems.

And finally, the recent refugee crisis, in which boatloads of Muslims fleeing persecution in Myanmar (Burma) are being denied entry to neighbouring countries, has seen at least one major act of generosity. The human traffickers are now demanding ransoms of $200 per person just to return them to Myanmar, and a Muslim businessman in the country has already paid this bounty to rescue several people. He said, “Money is nothing for me in front of human life.”

Not The BBC News: 12 May 2015

A Christian ministry that works to rescue slaves in sex trafficking and other industries has just made the largest rescue that its Bangalore branch has ever attempted. With the help of two state government officials, 260 people were rescued from brick factories just outside the town. The rescued families had been forced to work 12 hours per day, 7 days a week. The rigid rules were enforced with violence and threats. They were hundreds of miles from home and did not speak the local language. After 3 days in a community centre where ministry staff fed them and explained what was happening, all 260 have been returned to their home state of Orissa.

Elsewhere in India, Hindu groups have continued to attack churches and Christians. Worryingly, the national government, which is currently led by the Hindu BJP party, has denied that the attacks on Christians are motivated by politics or religion; a Cabinet minister denied this on national television, and a Hindu MP claimed that the accusations were made by “elements who want to defame the government.” These claims followed an attack in Agra where icons in a Catholic church (including Mary and Jesus) were damaged. Members of the Christ Jesus Witness Prayer Church in Hyderabad were also attacked when they objected to the raising of a saffron flag – which has been used by Hindus to denote a non-Hindu place of worship that has been forcibly converted into a Hindu temple – over the church.

Saeed Abedini is an Iranian-American pastor who has been imprisoned in Iran since 2012 for organising house churches in the country – despite the fact that he was living in America as an American citizen at the time, and was merely visiting Iran. The US Senate has now unanimously passed a motion calling on President Obama to secure the release of him and other “hostages being held in Iran.”

Five Egyptian Christian teenagers, who made a home video that mocked Islamic State, have been arrested and charged with blasphemy. The video wasn’t published, but was found by some local Muslims. Despite the fact that Islamic State are just as violent towards non-compliant Muslims as toward other religions, the police first arrested the Coptic teacher; then, when a Muslim mob started throwing stones at the teenagers’ houses, they arrested them too.

In the USA, a professor from Princeton has spoken out against spending money on health treatments for disabled babies. Peter Singer said, “I don’t want my health insurance premiums to be higher so that infants who experience zero quality of life can have expensive treatments.” Ironically, he was promoting his book which is called, “The Most Good You can Do: Howe Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically.”

Also in the USA, a 16 year old Christian student in Florida is taking legal advice after getting four straight zeroes from a humanist college professor for refusing to answer his questions in the anti-Christian way he wanted. The professor’s assignments included asking the class to outline Martin Luther’s work as a “humanist”; to discuss why Michelangelo’s paintings and sculptures showed that “same-sex relationship is not a sin and will not keep someone out of Heaven”; and also to accept that Christianity was false and oppressive of women.

A new Bill against human trafficking is going through the Scottish Parliament. However, the Bill will not outlaw the buying of sex, despite calls from faith groups and other organisations, and despite a similar provision being passed into law in the Northern Ireland Assembly last year. The committee that examined the Bill decided that this Bill was “not the correct vehicle” to deal with criminalising all purchases of sex (which is still legal as long as it’s not bought on the street, or within a brothel).

Alveda King, the grand-daughter of Martin Luther King Sr. has been speaking about how her grandfather saved her from being aborted – because he saw her in a dream three years before she was born. She quoted a “feminist theologian” who recently wrote, "If you were born before women had access to safe, affordable, accessible abortion, chances are your mother was an angry mother.” Alveda’s reply was, "The Bible says, ‘In your anger, do not sin’.” And she added, “Abortion does not cure anger.”

In film news, Denzel Washington recently gave a speech to graduates at Dillard University in New Orleans at which he urged them to put God first. He said that when his career began to take off, he told his mother of all the things he had accomplished… and she said, “Boy, stop it right there” and told him of all the people who had prayed for him and of her own prayers. His final point was, “You never see a U-Haul trailer behind a hearse! You can’t take it with you … it’s not what you have, it’s what you DO with what you have.”

And finally, a large church in San Diego was struggling financially because the average amount of money given by U.S. Christians is now 2.5% of their income – which is a lower percentage than during the Great Depression. Four years ago, they decided that, rather than lecturing people on the church’s needs, they would draw attention to people’s own relative abundance. They took the opportunity of switching their church to a web-based electronic giving system to add a page called “GivUp”, where people could choose to sacrifice something and give the money to the church, and record what they had sacrificed on the web page. The web page now lists almost 2,000 items that have been given up, ranging from $3.50 for Starbucks to $4,000 for new wooden floors. Some of the more unusual items include $5 for a week’s worth of vending machine snacks; $200 for alcohol; and $25 for marijuana.

Not The BBC News: 10 May 2015

In the UK’s general election, the Conservatives have unexpectedly won a majority of seats, and will therefore form the next Parliament without needing any coalition partners. The primary concern for many Christians is that the current austerity policies are likely to continue, even though many think that the policies are already hitting the poor and needy too severely; there are stories of people being made homeless as a result of the “bedroom tax”; people with severe disabilities being denied the newly restricted disability benefits; and home care visits to the elderly being limited to an infeasibly short 15 minutes per day.

The Government’s wider agenda is also causing some concern. There have been several protests in the past year by staff and parents at Christian schools against the new OFSTED inspection rules instituted under Education Secretary Nicky Morgan, which seemed to discriminate against schools that didn’t teach children about same-sex marriage. And Morgan was accused of ‘railroading’ the closure of a Christian ‘free school’, giving them just two weeks’ notice of closure. But Prime Minister David Cameron has announced that Morgan will retain her post in his new Cabinet, which is effectively a seal of approval on her previous performance.

There is also a manifesto promise to replace the Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights, for which the final authority will be the UK Supreme Court, not the European Court of Justice. However, since the controversial education rules were based on a set of so-called “British Values”, there are concerns that the new Bill of Rights might overly reflect these “British values.”

The controversy over two of the OFSTED inspections has also re-surfaced following a Freedom of Information request that revealed that the head of OFSTED ‘misled’ Parliament over the issue. The chief of OFSTED told MPs that parents’ complaints about “intrusive” questioning of children about same-sex relationships had been “thoroughly investigated”, but the FOI request revealed that not a single pupil, parent or staff member who had complained was interviewed about the issue. The Christian Institute called for the issue to be “revisited urgently” after the election.

In Nigeria, further details have emerged about the rescue of several hundred women from Boko Haram by Nigerian soldiers. The Boko Haram fighters not only murdered a group of women just before the rescue was completed, but also forced the women to shoot at the Nigerian soldiers; seven soldiers and twelve women were killed in these exchanges.
Boko Haram have also carried out an attack on a business college in north-west Nigeria, using a gunman and a suicide bomber. Six students were seriously injured by gunfire; dozens more injured themselves by jumping from windows to escape. The suicide bomber blew himself up in the car park.

In Vietnam, where religious practice is strictly controlled, the government has apparently loosened policy by promising a new Ministry for Religion, and inviting churches to take part. But a bishop of the indigenous church expressed concern that no developed country seemed to need a national committee to manage religious practice.

In Texas, a competition was set up, as a deliberate response to the Charlie Hebdo bombings in Paris, for cartoonists to draw the prophet Mohammed. Two gunmen, apparently from a Muslim group, attacked the event but were shot dead; one security officer was also slightly injured.
Meanwhile, in Niger where many Christian churches were burned by Muslims protesting at the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, Christian aid agencies are helping pastors and believers rebuild their churches and homes.

The legal decision about Asher’s bakery in Northern Ireland, originally scheduled for 7 May, has been put back to 19 May.

In technology news, a Birmingham University student has been jailed for hacking into staff computers and upgrading his exam results. He installed keylogging software to steal staff passwords, and then increased his mark on five final exams, including changing one from 57% to 73%. His offences carried a maximum sentence of two years; he was jailed for four months.

And finally, the requirement in America for registered sex offenders to live a certain distance away from all children has led to a Christian ministry setting up of a village for sex offenders in Florida. Called the City of Refuge, the 61 concrete bungalows were originally used by migrant workers. The offenders, whose offences range from statutory offences with under-age boyfriends or girlfriends to serious offences involving younger children, are vetted by the ministry before being accepted; they support each other through problems and some attend church or even join the choir.

Not The BBC News: 3 May 2015

The new thaw in relations between the US and Cuba has revealed something that surprised many people: under Fidel Castro’s regime, amidst extreme poverty, the Christian church grew very rapidly. Castro banned churches from building any new church buildings in the 1990s, which meant that house churches became the norm. Now there are 10 times as many Baptist churches in Cuba as there were in the 1990s, and more than 100 times as many Assemblies of God churches. A spokesman said that the extreme poverty actually helped the churches to grow, since people could not afford any forms of entertainment apart from talking to their neighbours. Hundreds of Cuban Christians are now reported to be preparing to become missionaries overseas.

The Northern Ireland Assembly has voted against introducing gay marriage in the province, for the fourth time in four years. However, the margin of victory dropped from 8 votes last time to 2, and there were 3 abstentions.

The Nigerian army has finally succeeded in rescuing around 275 girls and women from Boko Haram in northern Nigeria, and over 400 other captives. However, none of the girls or women appear to be among the 200 captured from Chibok around a year ago.

The legal decision about the Christian bakery in Northern Ireland that refused to bake a cake supporting gay marriage will be released on May 7th – the day of the General Election, when newspapers are likely to have other events to focus on. Meanwhile, in a similar case in Kentucky in the USA, a Christian printer has won an appeal that allows him to refuse to print T-shirts supporting gay marriage, because the judge ruled that the refusal was based on the message, not the sexual orientation of the customer.

A report on a proposed assisted suicide bill for the Scottish Parliament says the bill contains “significant flaws.” The authors noted the British Medical Association's observation that "there is no way to guarantee the absence of coercion in the context of assisted suicide"; were concerned that the bill had the potential to undermine suicide prevention messages; and also said there was an "unacceptable" lack of clarity in some of the language used in the bill. However, since the bill is matter of conscience, they decided to let it go forward to a Parliamentary vote.

An American transsexual decided to return to his original gender after becoming a Christian. He said, “You're not born transgender, something happens in your childhood that causes you to not want to be who you are...People who call themselves transgender are individuals suffering from a delusional disorder.”

Three Protestants have received short jail sentences in Uzbekistan for practicing Christianity, and one was also given a very large fine (three years’ minimum wage!) However, Muslims who exercise their religion are often given much longer prison sentences.

In Washington DC, the third annual March for Marriage took place. Between 5,000 and 10,000 people took part; most were black or Hispanic. Meanwhile, in New York, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton gave a speech in which she said that “religious beliefs that condemn reproductive rights” [i.e. abortion] “have to be changed”.

In legal news, a woman who was pursued by a stalker for 12 years has called for closer co-operation between the civil and criminal courts after her stalker tried to get access to her by suing her, despite having a restraining order preventing him from contacting her in any way. The lawsuit was for alleged defamation of him when discussing him and his previous breaches of restraining orders in media interviews. But the criminal courts determined that, in order to support his lawsuit, he had obtained and retained information on her (which he was also banned from doing), and jailed him for 3 ½ years.

And finally, developers who demolished a London pub without the council’s permission have been instructed to rebuild it, brick by brick. The developers bought the pub and applied to redevelop the site; when their proposal was vetoed by Westminster council for blocking light and failing to provide affordable housing, they decided to knock down the pub anyway, after telling the landlady that it was closed for inventory. It appears to be the first time a council has made such an order – and the order also prevents the developers from selling the land until the pub has been rebuilt.