Not The BBC News: 31 January 2016

Two pastors in Nigeria have been kidnapped by gunmen, and a third was injured. The attacks took place in southern Nigeria, many miles from the northern provinces where the Muslim terrorist group Boko Haram regularly operates. A female US missionary was kidnapped in the same state a year ago, and was held for two weeks before being released.

A grand jury in Texas has given judgment in the case where Planned Parenthood had sued the maker of undercover videos where their executives described ethically questionable practices that Planned Parenthood carry out. The verdict controversially cleared Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing but sent the two film-makers for trial on charges of creating a fake human-tissue company, creating fake Government IDs, and tampering with Government records. While the latter charge is a felony, the general opinion is that the investigators used methods similar to those that undercover journalists have been using for years, and any successful legal case against them would raise major issues in media law.  The investigators are also trying to find out if one of the city’s assistant District Attorneys, who sits on Planned Parenthood’s board, had any influence on the case.

The annual March for Life in Washington D.C. went ahead despite a predicted winter blizzard (which arrived a few hours after the march ended.) The numbers on the march were lower than in previous years but were considerably higher than the “hundreds” reported by the New York Times; around 40-50,000 people completed the entire march, including actor Kelsey Grammar.

There have been further accusations of anti-Israeli bias in the UK media. In Beit Horon (biblical Beth-Horon, north-west of Jerusalem), two Israeli women shopping in the market were stabbed by two Palestinian men. One woman, 24 year old Shlomit Krigman who was visiting her grandparents in the town, died before reaching hospital. The Palestinians were shot dead by a community guard and were later found to be carrying pipe bombs. The headline in the Guardian newspaper reporting this story was, "Two Palestinians shot dead after knife attack in West Bank shop", though they later amended the headline in their website to "Israeli woman dies after Palestinian knife attack." Krigman was the second woman to be stabbed to death in the town within a week; the last was a mother of six.

Three teenage Christian girls in Pakistan rejected the sexual advances of a car-load of Muslim men; but when they walked away, one man shouted, “How dare you run away from us? Christian girls are only meant for one thing. The pleasure of Muslim men.” The men then drove their car into the girls; two suffered broken bones and one, who was thrown up onto the bonnet and then crashed to the ground after an emergency stop, died from internal bleeding within minutes. The girls’ families say the police forced them to pay a bribe even to file a report, and that the men are wealthy and so are unlikely to face trial.

A woman in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, who has worked as a nurse, lost a mentally ill sister in an accident, and suffered an autoimmune disease, has found a new calling in life – adopting babies from hospices who have such low expectancy of life or capability that their families cannot cope. Their first baby, Emmalynn, who was born without either hemisphere of her brain, was adopted at two weeks and lived for 50 days with eight brothers and sisters; their second, Charlie, is coming up to the age of two and has had his breathing resuscitated ten times in the past year. She said, “What a gift it is to be able to ease their suffering, to cherish them and to love them, even though they can’t give anything back.”

Schoolchildren in Brighton have been given a survey by the council that asked them to select their gender from a list of 25 options, including “tri-gender”, “intersex”, “genderqueer”, “gender-fluid” and “non-binary.” The question has been criticised as “profoundly confusing.” A spokesman at the office of the Children’s Commissioner for England, which created the survey, said a clerical error had led to a draft survey being sent out and that the final survey will have the question on gender withdrawn.

Also, the newly installed provincial government in Alberta, Canada, has banned the use of the words “mother” and “father” in school “forms, letters, websites and other communications.” The New Democratic Party  also insists that “self-identification is the sole measure of an individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression”

Meanwhile, a woman in Norway claims that she is a cat trapped in the wrong body. The 20 year old woman says she realised this when she was 16. She hisses at dogs, hates water, and purrs at windows when she wants to go out. She also claims to have superior hearing and night vision.

In film news, “A United Kingdom” is a BBC film charting the cross-racial love and marriage between Seretse Khama, the King of Botswana, and a white office girl from London. They married in 1948, just as South Africa was about to introduce apartheid, and so came under immense political pressure which eventually led to Seretse being exiled from Botswana. When he was invited back by political supporters in 1956, he gave up all rights to the kingship, and instead held the country’s first democratic elections – and was chosen as the country’s first President. He is often referred to warmly in the book series “The Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency.” The film has been completed but no release date is yet available.

And finally, police in Amsterdam were called to a house by a neighbour who heard a man screaming loudly, and thought he was suffering violent domestic abuse. Police arrived and heard what sounded like screams of agony from inside the house; after knocking and getting no reply, they kicked a hole in the door and broke in. They found a solitary man, wearing headphones and singing along to an opera. “I didn’t hear the police at the door because of the headphones,” he said.

Not The BBC News: 22 January 2016

The recent terrorist attack by Muslims against hotels and a cafe in Ougadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso killed seven missionaries among the 29 casualties. Six were Canadians from near Quebec City who were on a three-week mission trip to work at orphanages and schools in remote villages. The seventh was an American long-term missionary; Michael Riddering, a founder of the International House Of Prayer in St. Louis, worked with local women and children alongside his wife, and had counselled families and dug graves during the recent Ebola crisis. Riddering and his wife had two adult daughters in the US, and an adopted teenage daughter and toddler in Burkina Faso.

A Christian couple whose two adopted sons were taken away from them by social workers have been given leave to challenge the ruling. The brothers, who had traumatic backgrounds, lived with the couple and their two natural children for four years until an incident occurred at exam time when the younger boy reached for the car’s steering wheel on the way to school. His mother pushed him back, whereupon the boy told schoolteachers a list of fabrications which led to the case in family court. The court case itself was very troubling because, in the couple’s words, “The opinions of social workers were taken as truth by the judge. Objective evidence is not required in these courts. The social workers exhibited no clear understanding of Christianity, and our parenting methods were criticised. The objective evidence of the boys' progress over years seems to have been dismissed; the primary reason the judge gave for refusing to return the children to their adoptive parents was that a psychologist's report didn't recommend the children's return.” Andrea Williams of the Christian Legal Centre described this case as “the tip of an iceberg of gross injustice that we are unable to expose because of the secrecy surrounding family courts.”

In the USA, a former Catholic altar boy whose graphic testimony of serial rape by priests led to three priests and one senior supervisor being jailed, has been accused of lying by Newsweek after a review of the case. Daniel Gallagher changed his story nine times during cross examination, and when confronted, either refused to answer or blamed his poor memory on drug use in schooldays – even though his mother claimed that he never served as an altar boy at early morning Mass. He also admitted to lying to prosecutors about his medical history. Yet the grand jury report blamed changes in his personality on the alleged abuse rather than on drug use. There has been criticism of the courts for being too ready to believe his story, especially in the light of a lurid article publicising his alleged abuse. Three of the priests remain in jail; the fourth died there after being denied a heart operation.

In the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, twelve people have been arrested for converting from Hinduism to Christianity. Religious conversion in the state is illegal without permission of the (Hindu) government. Seven were released from jail on bail; five remain incarcerated.

Geroge Weidenfeld, the head of the publishing house Weidenfeld & Nicholson, famous for publishing “Lolita”, has died at the age of 96. Weidenfeld, a Jew, escaped from Austria to Britain in 1938 on a ‘Kindertransport’ train and became a British citizen in 1947. He was a tireless worker for Jewish causes, and a Labour peer until he left the Labour Party in 1981. He credited Quakers and Plymouth Brethren with saving his life, and tried to repay that debt last year by setting up a fund to evacuate Syrian Christians from that country. 150 Syrian Christians were flown to Warsaw last July with funding from Weidenfeld, and were also awarded 12-18 months of paid support. The fund aimed to help 20,000 Syrian Christians.

The United Methodist church in the USA has banned a group arguing for Intelligent Design from exhibiting at their annual conference. The denomination’s official website calls on Christians to embrace the theory of evolution rather than creation, but the official reason for refusing the stand was that it “conflicted with our social principles.”

Similarly, the (evangelical) InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s annual conference denied an application from a pro-life student group to exhibit there. The Exhibits Manager said, “It does not align with one of our key criteria, which is to have advancing God’s global mission as the vision and purpose of the organization.”

There has been further activity surrounding the undercover videos which exposed Planned Parenthood’s selling of baby body parts. Planned Parenthood has decided to sue the film makers, claiming that the videos were recorded illegally. Meanwhile, a pro-life group has made Dr Deborah Nucatola of Planned Parenthood their 2015 Pro-Life Person of the Year, saying that her comments in the videos did more for the pro-life cause than anyone else’s words in that year.

The US Stata of Indiana has introduced a Bill to make abortion illegal once the foetus has a detectable heartbeat. Such a Bill appears to be an attempt at defining life as beginning when the heart starts beating. Such a move is controversial because a foetus’ heart usually starts beating at around six weeks’ gestation, which would be a very short time after many women discovered that they were pregnant.

There have also been two medical reports on pregnancy and abortion. One, from Chile, is designed to counter a document that claims that ‘post abortion syndrome does not exist’; it is signed by over 200 psychologists, psychiatrists and doctors and gives case studies of post abortion “damage to mental health of women”. The other showed that unborn babies, at 16 weeks’ gestation or later, respond to music by moving their mouth and tongue in specific ways; it was previously thought that babies could not hear until 26 weeks’ gestation.

There has been widespread condemnation from MPs of several parties of the suggestion by the head of OFSTED that Sunday schools, Scouts and similar organisations should be monitored by OFSTED. The Prime Minister has stepped in and said that such organisations will not be required to register with OFSTED.

In music news, Christian rapper Jahaziel has renounced his Christian faith because of, among other things, "the brutal nature of [the Bible's] God, [the Bible's so-called] second class view of women, [and Christianity's] financial corruption." He claims he has not renounced God, though, just religion.

In film news, “Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus” proposes a new theory regarding the Israelites’ time in Egypt. It has long been thought that the Israelites were in Egypt around the 13th century BC, at the time of Ramses II, because the Bible says that the Hebrews built the city of Ramses. However, the new theory places the Hebrew population some four hundred years earlier, in the Hyksos capital of Avaris – and one of the pyramids in Avaris contains a painting inside of a man in a multi-coloured robe.

And finally, a high-speed police chase in New Zealand was only ended when the suspects found the road blocked by a flock of sheep. The chase had begun near the town of Alexandra and had sped through central Otago, despite the suspects losing one tyre to road spikes, over many miles, until they were stopped by the sheep. Ironically, the sheep belonged to a police officer; none were hurt in the line of duty. Two men aged 19 and 23 were charged with car and petrol theft and reckless driving; two passengers aged 14 were charged with car and petrol theft.

Not The BBC News: 16 January 2016

Pastor Saeed Abedini, an American citizen of Iranian ancestry, has finally been released from prison in Iran after being held for three years. He was released as part of a prisoner swap deal in which the Iranians released four Americans and the US released seven Iranians. He had been instrumental in establishing many house churches in Iran, but when he was arrested in 2012, he was visiting Iran to help with construction of a government-approved orphanage. He was sentenced to eight years in jail for undermining national security.

The Anglican Synod has voted to suspend the US Episcopalian church from the worldwide Anglican community for three years over its support for homosexual practice, gay priests and gay marriage. The US church is the third largest in the Anglican communion, but its stance on these issues is opposed by nearly every other member of the worldwide Episcopal church. The suspension is seen as a partial victory for Archbishop Justin Welby, who faced a strong threat of other churches leaving the Anglican communion if the US church was not disciplined or expelled.

There is confusion about the role of education inspectors OFSTED in implementing the Government’s policies after the head of OFSTED said during a radio phone-in that he wanted Sunday Schools, madrasses and after-school clubs to be registered under its remit. This statement contradicted a previous Government statement that Sunday Schools would be exempt from OFSTED inspections. OFSTED has attracted a lot of criticism in the past year or two for its heavy-handed approach to enforcing teaching in schools of the Government’s views and policies relating to gay marriage and gay rights.

In New York City, a new law imposes huge fines on landlords, employers or businesses who fail to refer to transsexuals by their preferred pronoun. The maximum fine is $125,00, or twice that if the infraction is judged to be wilful, wanton or malicious. Other violations refusing to allow individuals to use single-sex facilities and participate in single-sex activities; enforcing dress codes that impose different requirements based on sex; failing to provide employee health benefits that cover ‘gender-affirming care’; or failing to give reasonable accommodation to individuals undergoing a sex change.

Meanwhile, Princeton University has become the first US university to adopt a statement that promises broad protection for freedom of speech on its campus. The statement was brought before the faculty by a Romanian mathematics professor, who said, “There were articles asking for obligatory courses in some kind of civics of how to behave, or ‘sensitivity training’. There was this notion that people needed to be re-educated. That was very scary to me because obviously they remind me of things that were happening in all communist countries.”

A proposal to make LGBT teaching statutory in Scottish schools has been rejected by the Scottish Parliament. A committee chaired by a Labour MSP found that there was little support for the idea from government, local authorities and other organisations, and that passing such a law would be a departure from the historic non-prescriptive approach taken by Scotland’s education system.

Meanwhile, a new facility offered by the European Union requires the European Commission to debate any issue that attracts more than one million signatures from seven member states, and either to take action or to explain why no action was taken. This facility was recently used to force the Commission to debate a proposal that marriage should be defined as being between a man and a woman.  The head of the Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, appears sufficiently unhappy with this that he has called for the petition system to be reviewed.

Anti-Christian activity by radical Muslims is on the rise in the Philippines. Twenty-five Christians were murdered on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day alone; in one instance, a grenade was thrown at a chapel.

Another case in which doctors misdiagnosed brain death had been reported. A 20 year old student in Nevada fell into a coma following a round of binge drinking, and when the doctors tested her for any responsiveness at all, they found none, so they diagnosed her as brain dead. They also discovered her blood alcohol level was five times the legal limit. Fortunately for her, she woke up 24 hours later.

In legal news, a middle aged woman from Bromley has been jailed for writing scripts to be used by romance fraudsters who con people out of money with sob stories. One note that police discovered claimed that the author had lost her husband in the 9/11 attacks; another suggested she needed money to pay her rent after spending every penny to fix her broken sewing machine.

In technology news, a NGO set up two pages on Facebook. One incited hatred against Palestinians, the other incited hatred against Israel, and the content of both was nearly identical. They then complained about both pages to Facebook’s management. The anti-Palestinian page was taken down immediately, but the anti-Israeli page was left in place, with Facebook claiming that it did not violate Facebook’s “community standards”. This situation persisted until the NGO publicised what it had done, at which point Facebook also took down the anti-Israeli page, claiming it had made a mistake.

And finally, a new church has opened in Taiwan that includes numerous features designed to attract female worshippers — including the fact that the glass-walled building is shaped like a giant stiletto-heeled shoe. The building in Budai Town is 55 feet tall and 36 feet wide, and contains 320 pieces of blue-tinted glass. It is apparently based on a Taiwanese wedding tradition where the bride wears a heeled shoe to smash tiles, symbolising the end of one chapter of life and the beginning of another. It is also expected to provide photo opportunities for weddings.

Not The BBC News: 1 Jan 2016

Bill Subritzky, an evangelist from New Zealand best known for his book “Demons Defeated” and accompanying deliverance ministry, has died at the age of 90. He spent 33 years as partner in an Auckland law firm and also worked as a property developer for 25 years. He was told in early December that he had terminal cancer and had four weeks to live; he posted on his Facebook page, “I’m 90 years old and have had a wonderful life… the chariots are waiting to take me to Heaven.”

A father in Texas who refused to believe his 27 year old comatose son was brain dead, and barricaded himself in the hospital with a gun to prevent his son’s life support being switched off, has been released from prison after serving just under a year. George Pickering’s son had had a massive stroke, and when doctors diagnosed him as brain dead a short while later, the hospital ordered his life support to be shut off. George’s wife and other son agreed, but George felt things were moving too fast and his son needed more time to respond. So he bought his son as much time as he could – and after three hours, his son squeezed his father’s hand three times, on command. George’s son has now fully recovered.

In the USA, the Republican campaign to withdraw government funding from the abortion organisation Planned Parenthood has failed. The campaign was started because Planned Parenthood officials were recorded offering baby body parts for money in undercover videos. The main reason for the campaign’s failure was that the US government funds many organisations through a single Bill, and so the real negotiation is about what gets included in the Bill and what doesn’t. This year, the Bill to fund Planned Parenthood also included funding for oil exploration projects, and so some pro-life Republicans voted for it.

Meanwhile, a lawsuit has been filed in California that alleges that the undercover video of Planned Parenthood was recorded illegally and should be “permanently sealed.” Also, a recent issue of ‘Newsweek’ magazine, showing a scan of an unborn baby on its front cover, has been criticised in another magazine article for looking too much like a baby; the criticisms allege that the foetus has been photoshopped to look more baby-like, and also criticises the fact that the mother is not pictured.

A Christian pastor in Iran, who had been in jail for nearly five years after being arrested for illegal church activities, was released on Boxing Day, despite his sentence recently having been extended. He refused to sign a statement agreeing to refrain from Christian activities in 2011 and so was kept in jail, despite his family paying an enormous sum in bail. His family have since fled the country. However, nine other Christians were arrested on Christmas Day following a raid on a ‘house church’ in the southern city of Shiraz.

ISIS released twenty-five Assyrian Christians, mostly women and children, on Christmas Day. They had been captured as part of a group of 200 captured in Syria in February. 150 or the 200 have now been released.

The BBC has once again been criticised for ignoring Palestinian terrorism against Israel. Fifteen terrorist attacks were made in the first two weeks of December, with more than half causing fatalities, often of Israeli civilians, but the BBC reported only one of the fifteen incidents. There have also been numerous Palestinian deaths in various clashes over the same period, which the BBC may also have under-reported. One of the fifteen incidents – a stabbing of an Israeli couple by two Palestinians who were then killed by security forces – was reported by another media outlet (not the BBC) using the words, “Two Jews Die and Two Palestinians are Killed”; even the New York Times cried out at the obvious bias in this headline.

In film news, Sylvester Stallone has announced that he has “surrendered his life to Jesus Christ.” Although he made the announcement while promoting his latest ‘Rocky’ movie, it is not thought that there is any connection between the announcement and the plot of the film.

Faith has also played a big role in Will Smith’s new film, “Concussion.” It’s a true story of a Nigerian doctor whose research into the effects of concussion met strong opposition from vested interests, but his Christian faith prompted him to keep going.

And finally, a pensioner in Bury St. Edmunds who was caught short while out shopping used a newly installed public toilet, but did not realise that it was not yet officially in use. 82 year old Gladys Phillips was trapped inside for four days until workmen arrived to paint it. She said she was quite happy, though, because she had an overcoat and the hand dryer for warmth, and a large bag of mint imperials. She also had a ball of wool; she used the time to knit a scarf which one of her grandchildren will get for Christmas.