Not The BBC News: 29 November 2015

There have been several news items relating to abortion recently:

A legal case is to be brought in Britain’s High Court accusing the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, of deciding not to prosecute two doctors who were caught offering to abort babies solely because they were female for political reasons. The case alleges that the doctors had clearly contravened the Abortion Act 1967 and that the DPP’s decision encouraged ‘abortion on demand’. One of the two doctors has since been struck off, for lying about the reason for the sex-selective abortions on an official form. Keir Starmer is now a Labour MP and the Shadow Cabinet’s spokesman on home affairs.

A man entered a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Colorado with a gun and shot twelve people, three of whom died. One of the dead was a Christian police officer who rushed to the building when he heard what was happening there. The alleged shooter was arrested; he is rumoured to have spoken of the “trade in baby parts” that Planned Parenthood has recently been revealed to be undertaking, although the exact details of the trade are still hotly disputed.

Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood is suing five U.S. states who have reduced its funding from the Medicaid programme.

Two Irish film-makers based in Los Angeles, who decided to make a film about Kermit Gosnell, the abortion doctor who was jailed for murder and other types of malpractice, say that making the film has turned them against abortion. They said, “Anyone who has learned more about the reality of abortion… has come away with only negative feelings about the procedure.”

A Swedish court has ruled against a Christian midwife who was denied employment because she would not perform abortions. In the ruling, the District Court of Jönköping reportedly stated that the issue of freedom of conscience should only be looked at when a person is not religious. The midwife’s lawyer said afterwards that the court had not taken on board the European Convention on Human Rights with regard to freedom of conscience.

A pro-life couple from Kentucky photographed themselves holding a sign saying , “Please don’t Abort… We will Adopt your Baby!” and circulated it on the Internet. Their post went viral, and they say that hundreds of women have got in touch to say that they would prefer to give their baby up for adoption, rather than abort, but are unsure of how to do so.

In other news:

An Assyrian Protestant church has re-opened in Turkey after being in ruins for nearly 60 years. The church, in Mardin near the border with Syria, had been unused due to migration away from the village. Although this church was restored without state assistance, the pastor praised the Turkish government for its efforts to restore churches and to respect the rights of minorities over the past decade.

A BBC radio presenter who called a Christian solicitor a ‘bigot’ has resigned from his job. Iain Lee made the comment during a discussion about a prison worker who was sacked recently for quoting Bible verses about homosexuality. Solicitor Libby Powell said that the Bible is the word of God, and Lee responded by calling her a bigot, and by saying that the prison worker’s views were ‘obnoxious’ and ‘poisonous’.

An advert designed for cinema broadcast, featuring various people reciting the Lord’s Prayer, has been banned from display by the agency that handles cinema advertising. They claim that they have an existing policy against religious or political advertising. The Church of England has made a complaint of discrimination to the Equality and Human rights Commission, who have (infamously) ruled in the past that commercial policies that discriminate against gay people are against the law.

There are strong concerns among the governors of Church schools that the Education and Adoption Bill, which is currently in the House of Lords, requires the Education Secretary to take charge of any school deemed ‘inadequate’ by schools’ regulator Ofsted and to turn it into an academy. The governors are concerned that the religious ethos of their schools could be eroded by academy status; they also fear that their buildings and land would be effectively seized by the Government. Their concerns have been heightened by recent Ofsted inspections that downgraded schools that failed to teach LGBT+ issues in a positive light; as the Director of the Catholic Education Service put it, “there have been examples of inspectors with a personal agenda downgrading schools with implausible judgments at odds with the schools’ exam results.”

Also in education, a UK judge has ruled that humanism should be included in the GCSE curriculum for Religious Studies. Government lawyers argued that neither UK law nor European law require equal weight to be given to religious and non-religious views, and that a school’s curriculum is the responsibility of individual school authorities; but the High Court judge decided that there had been “a breach of the duty to take care that information or knowledge included in the curriculum is conveyed in a pluralistic manner”. A spokesman for the Christian Institute said, “This baffling ruling does not take into account that humanist ideas already dominate the rest of the curriculum.”

In Karachi, Pakistan, the office of a Christian cable TV channel was burned down this week. Employees believe the attack was carefully planned; door locks were cut, computer hard disks were stolen, and a security camera system was destroyed in the fire.

In Vietnam, the number of Protestant Christians has increased hugely in the past 15 years, despite strong Government opposition. Official figure put the number of Christians in the country at 410,000 in 1999 but 1 million today; church leaders say the figure is closer to 2 million. The growth is particularly strong amongst ethnic minorities. This comes despite most forms of evangelism being illegal and the church frequently being banned completely by local authorities, especially in the north of the country.

In sport, the new heavyweight champion of the world, Tyson Fury, is an outspoken (and sometimes controversial) Christian. One of his quotes is: “Jesus was a man’s man. He was a carpenter. He worked every day, he went out and spread the word of God and wasn’t afraid of dying.”

And finally, the happiest music video of the year may well be “Bye Bye Ebola,” made to celebrate the day when the country of Sierra Leone officially became Ebola-free. The video shows schoolchildren, health care workers, faith leaders and people all across the country dancing to a well-known Afrobeat song with new words.

Not The BBC News: 4 November 2015

The Northern Irish Assembly has voted against legalising same-sex marriage in the province, for the fifth time in three years. Nationalist MLAs have repeatedly raised the issue, and the margin of defeat has been narrower each time. On this occasion, the vote was 53 to 52 in favour of same-sex marriage, but a special procedure was invoked that required both main political parties to vote in favour of it, which did not happen. A spokesman for the Christian Institute linked the vote against the motion to the recent legal case against Asher’s Bakery, saying that changing the law “would have a damaging effect on civil liberties in Northern Ireland.”

Meanwhile, Asher’s Bakery have appealed against their conviction for discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation for refusing to bake a cake that said, “Support Gay Marriage” on it. Such an appeal had been widely expected after the judge made her decision on some unexpected applications of legal principles. The appeal will be heard in February.

A doctor from Edgbaston who agreed to perform a sex-selective abortion, despite admitting that it was tantamount to “female infanticide”, has been struck off for three months. Dr Palanniapan Rajmohan was filmed making the offer during an undercover investigation by the Daily Telegraph. A medical tribunal found him guilty of lying about his reasons for offering the termination; he had written “too young for pregnancy” on the form.

China has ended its official one-child policy, as a response to the growing elderly population. The policy was held responsible for forced abortions for people who already had one child; other parents paid large fines. However, the policy has frequently been bypassed in recent years by various methods, such as shipping children off to be raised by childless relatives or grandparents. A two-child rule is still in place, however.

Islamic State militants are disguising themselves as refugees at some UN-operated refugee camps in Jordan where they are killing people and selling girls, according to the charity Christian Aid Mission. However, one such militant, from a strict Salafist region of Jordan, has abandoned jihad and become a Christian after witnessing the love that Christians showed in the camps. The charity’s director said he had to restrain the man from telling so many people about his new faith, because he was receiving death threats from other jihadists.

Archaeologists believe that they have found the remains of the city of Sodom, at Tall el-Hamman in Jordan. One of the most intriguing pieces of evidence is that the city appears to have been destroyed by an extremely hot and powerful catastrophic event; archaeologists found trinitite, which is normally only found at the site of atomic bomb explosions, and a zircon bubble which can only form at extremely high temperatures. They theorise that the city was destroyed by a meteor air burst explosion, similar to the one that occurred in Tunguska, Siberia in 1908. This could have produced a vortex that sucked up and then rained down “brimstone and fire”; and, when the shock wave reached the Dead Sea, it could easily have splashed and then instantly vaporised water over every nearby object, leaving it both dead and encrusted in salt.

A café in Kfar Vitkin, Israel, is offering a discount of 50% to Jews and Arabs who eat at the same table. The Humus Bar also offers free refills of hummus to any customer.

A café in Blackpool has been ordered by the police to stop displaying Bible verses on TV screens in the café because doing so is “insulting or offensive” and therefore breaches Section 5 of the Public Order Act. The owner of Salt and Light coffee house, who played videos that displayed entire books of the Bible with the volume turned down, said “What’s next? The police going into churches and saying you can’t say this or that?” However, the police said that a customer had complained that the verses were homophobic.

Lilian Ladele, the Christian registrar who took her council employers to the European Court of Human Rights over their insistence that she register same-sex civil partnerships against her will, has died of natural causes at the age of 54. Ms Ladele originally won her case at an employment tribunal, but that was overturned on appeal; the ECHR eventually decided that she had been mistreated by her employer, who could have made the requested ‘reasonable accommodation’ for her beliefs, but still ruled against her. A spokesman for the Christian Institute expressed satisfaction that support from the Institute’s Legal Defence Fund enabled Ms Ladele to pursue her case as far as she wished.

There has been a major corruption scandal at a mega-church in Singapore. The pastor and five other leaders of City Harvest Church were convicted of fraudulently spending around ₤23 million to support the pop / gospel singing career of the pastors’ wife, Sun Ho. The church is known for a preaching a “prosperity gospel.”

The first female bishop in the House of Lords, Rachel Treweek, has been quoted by the Observer newspaper as saying that God is neither male nor female. She said, “If I am made in the image of God, then God is not to be seen as male.”

In science news, a 65 year old woman from Perth has demonstrated, to the satisfaction of university researchers, that she can smell Parkinson’s disease. Joy Milne said she first noticed a ‘subtle, musky’ smell on her husband about six years before he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, but she only made the connection when she joined the charity Parkinson’s UK and met other sufferers from the disease. There has been some previous success in training dogs to recognise the odour given off by cancerous cells, but it is highly unusual for a human to have such a sensitive sense of smell.

And finally, the city of Grenoble in France has come up with a (literally) novel way to help people pass the time in public places. Short story dispensers have been introduced where people can freely obtain good quality literature in a choice of three-minute, five-minute, and possibly other sizes. The initiative has been put in place by a publishing company and the city’s Green Party mayor.