Asia Bibi, the Pakistani Christian woman who was sentenced to death and jailed 6 years ago on a charge of blasphemy after she proclaimed “My Christ died for me, what has he done for you?”, has finally been granted an appeal date by Pakistan’s Supreme Court. Bibi, who has five children, has been seeking an appeal for years but numerous death threats to any lawyer or some judges involved in the case (some of which were carried out) meant that the case never came to trial. 50 year old Bibi has apparently been kept in isolation for most of her 6 years in jail, and has also been beaten and gang-raped there. Her case has become a worldwide focus for criticism of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.
The Christian bakers in Oregon who were fined $135,000 for refusing to provide a cake for a lesbian wedding, and were forced to close down, have raised $352,000 from crowdfunding. The amount is a record for crowdfunding site Continue To Give, which the bakery started using after its original crowdfunding page on GoFundMe was closed down after pressure from gay activists. The ex-bakers are both currently out of work, but have promised to give any excess monies to charity.
There has been a storm of controversy surrounding the recently reported undercover video of a senior Planned Parenthood staff member apparently offering body parts from foetuses for sale. Planned Parenthood has accused the pro-life reporters of editing the video deceptively; the pro-life organisation has responded by releasing a similar video in which a second Planned Parenthood senior member discusses baby body parts and money, asking at one point “How much would you expect to pay?” The summary of the discussion so far is that the pro-life organisation originally accused Planned Parenthood of (a) harvesting body parts from aborted babies (b) doing so following (illegal) partial birth abortions (c) transferring these body parts to other in exchange for money (d) doing so in a way that broke federal laws on trafficking body parts and (e) making profits from these exchanges. Planned Parenthood have strongly denied that (e) is true, but in doing so they have effectively admitted that (a) and (c) are true. There have been calls for an official Government investigation.
Meanwhile in the UK, there is confusion over the recent report that an abortion clinic in London is to close after pro-life campaigning outside. Local BPAS representatives deny the clinic is closing, and when an enquiry was made to BPAS, the response was that the name of the clinic “would not be in the public domain any time soon”. There are suspicions that the clinic may not exist, and that the story is part of BPAS lobbying to change the law to keep anti-abortion protesters away from their clinics.
There are also stories from the Christian organisation Jubilee Campaign that in Uganda, young children are being kidnapped and having their body parts harvested by witchdoctors who claim the body parts can cure impotence or boost fertility. The campaign has quoted several survivors of the procedures.
A long-running US court case regarding nuns and abortion-inducing drugs has been decided against the nuns. The recent “Obamacare” health policy requires employers to pay for certain medical treatments for employees, including contraceptives and “morning after” pills. A convent objected to such payments on grounds of conscience, but was not granted a religious exemption because they serve and employ people of all religions, not just Catholics. The Government’s solution was to tell the nuns they didn’t have to pay for such drugs, but they had to sign employees up to a Government program that would pay instead. The nuns claimed that even this ‘exemption’ made them complicit in abortion, but a Colorado appeal court today rejected their claim, even though this went against the reasoning behind a Supreme Court decision last year.
Well-known charismatic worship leader Darlene Zschech recently performed at a Catholic charismatic renewal event in Rome, and met the Pope. Zschech received a lot of criticism for her involvement, and responded: “I was not there to judge, I was not there to become a Catholic, I WAS there to lift up the name of Jesus. And I witnessed … a God who is not defined or intimidated by denomination, liturgy, age or preferences.”
In Russia, one of the most senior officials in the country, Nikolai Patrushev, gave an unusual interview to a Russian business newspaper. It was unusual because he quoted (in apparent seriousness) a statement from Madeleine Albright, the former US Secretary of State, that turned out not to be a quote from Albright at all – instead it was from a Russian psychic, Georgy Rogozin, who served as deputy to a KGB general in the 1990s, who claimed to have reached inside Albright’s consciousness and extracted the statement. The BBC Russian service recently verified that Rogozin claimed to be able to communicate with Albright, by tracking down and interviewing one of Rogozin’s former subordinates. There are concerns among some Russians that high-level belief in several such psychic-sourced quotes might lead them into an unnecessary conflict.
A woman in South Carolina ate at a seafood restaurant and sat at her table for nearly four hours before being asked to pay her bill and leave. She explained that she had no money and that she was waiting for Jesus to come and pay her bill. She was arrested, and there has been no word of anyone coming forward to pay bail money for her.
A recent survey has rejected the long-accepted message that the divorce rate in the USA is 50%, and that Christians divorce at the same rate as non-Christians. The actual divorce rate for first-time marriages is between 20% and 25%, and for Christian marriages it’s between 10% and 18%. Also, a commonly accepted statistic that only 30% of marriages are happy also proved to be false; in this survey, it was around 80%.
In sport, Novak Djokovic has credited his marriage and family life for providing the ‘balance’ that allows him to play well. Djokovic won the Wimbledon title on his first wedding anniversary.
In technology news, another major US website has been hacked with the hackers threatening to leak sensitive data from it. This time, the website is an online dating website specifically designed for married people to cheat on their spouse. The website claims to have 37 million members, with the majority in the USA – if this is true, that’s about 10% of all Americans. The website allows members to pay $19 to have every piece of data about them on the website removed, but the hackers claim to have retrieved such ‘deleted’ data. Unusually the hackers are not demanding a ransom; instead they have threatened to release the data unless the website is permanently closed down.
And finally, an Australian schoolteacher who won $20,000 in a game show has decided to spend the money on 200 new pairs of sturdy shoes for all the children in her school. The winters in Ballarat, which is in the old gold fields two hours north of Melbourne, were described as “long and cold”. The teacher said, “The whole school has given me a hug and said ‘thank you’.“
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