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.
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