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.
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