A long-running US House of Representatives investigation into alleged selling of baby body parts by abortion provider Planned Parenthood has finished and delivered its report. The report concludes that some branches of Planned Parenthood did indeed sell foetal tissue to universities and other research groups. Other apparent violations of the law include breaches of privacy law (passing ion persona information with tissue); failing to keep proper records; failing to monitor compliance with laws; destroying documents; and in one clinic, killing infants born alive when partially outside the birth canal. These allegations were first made by an undercover pro-life researcher, David Daleiden, who was the subject of a lawsuit from Planned Parenthood about unfair information gathering practices; this lawsuit has now been dropped.
Meanwhile, the United Methodist church in the USA which has supported abortion since it was legalised has now officially reversed its position. It has also severed its connection with the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, an interfaith organisation which it co-founded that supports abortion with no restrictions at all.
A controversial element of ‘Obamacare’ which was due to take effect on January 1st has been blocked nationwide by the attorney general of Texas. The law required taxpayers to fund transgender reassignment surgeries and abortions; its rationale for the former was that sex was just a “state of mind”.
President Obama made another controversial decision on his last day in office; he released $227 million in ‘foreign affairs funding’, of which $1.25 million went to the United Nations; $4 million to climate change programmes; and $221 million to the Palestinian Authority. Congress blocked the Palestinian release but the President is allowed to override such a decision; however, with the change of government, the State Department decided to freeze the transfer until the appointment of a new Secretary of State to replace the departing John Kerry.
In the UK, the Government’s “integration tsar”, Dame Louise Casey, has claimed that opposing same-sex marriage is ‘un-British and homophobic.’ She accused opponents of same-sex marriage of using religious conservatism as a cover to hide their ‘anti-equality’ views and compared the support of Roman Catholic schools for traditional marriage to the extremism exposed in 2015 at Muslim schools in Birmingham.
Also in the UK, an investigation by the Care Quality Commission has found that one abortion clinic, BPAS Merseyside, has had 16 serious health incidents in the past 3 years. The investigation revealed numerous health and safety breaches and staff who were unaware of procedures or responsibilities.
A 26 year old Polish Catholic missionary has been stabbed to death in Bolivia. Helena Kmiec was working at a shelter for children which was robbed, and she died from a knife wound inflicted by the robbers.
Lion Hudson, a major Christian publisher of books such as “The Heavenly Man”, “the Lion Handbook to the Bible” and “the Vicar of Baghdad” has filed for administration. Two-thirds of its 53 staff have been made bankrupt. An expert in Christian publishing said that if Lion Hudson went bankrupt, it would be a major blow for the whole Christian community; but the company had struggled with debts for several years and so was unlikely to attract a buy-out.
The election of Donald Trump has dominated newspaper headlines. The fact that there were some Christian prophecies pointing towards his Presidency has also inspired further ‘prophecies’ regarding what will happen next. At least some of these ‘prophecies’ are somewhat wacky; one of the strangest asserts that Donald Trump is the “last trump” referred to in the book of Revelation. A Biblical expert pointed out that the New Testament was written in Greek and that particular play on words does not exist in that language.
A doctor in the Netherlands, where euthanasia is legal, has been investigated after asking a grandmother’s family to hold her down while he administered the injection. He was cleared of wrongdoing by the panel who concluded that he had ‘acted in good faith’.
A pastor in Florida who recently authored a book on godly manhood was forced to flee naked from a parishioner’s house after he was discovered in bed with the parishioner’s wife. The man threatened to kill Jermaine Simmons and went to another room to find his gun, but decided against shooting him because his 6 year old son had arrived at the house with him. Simmons has recently announced that he won’t resign because God has already forgiven him.
A Christian former barrister has admitted administering violent beatings to boys in the 1970s and 80s, some of whom he met through the highly-regarded summer camps run by the Iwerne Trust. John Smyth told the boys that it wasn’t enough to repent of their sins; they had to be purged by beatings, some of which were repeated many times over. The beatings came to light when one of the boys later attempted suicide. Smyth said in his defence that he was addicted to sleeping pills at the time.
An Irish psalter dated to around 800 AD, discovered in a bog at Faddon More, has been revealed to have papyrus inside its leather cover that probably came from Egypt. Some scholars believe this shows evidence of links between Irish Christianity and the Middle Eastern Coptic church.
In technology news, a hacking group affiliated to Anonymous recently managed to hack into a server of the ‘dark Web’ that hosted child pornography websites. The “.onion” server was disabled, taking around 10,000 websites offline; email addresses of more than 380,000 users were obtained; and around 74Gb of files were copied.
And finally, an elderly man from Saskatoon, Canada, built a machine using sewer tubing that could knit a tube of wool at over 90 stitches per second after a dare from a friend. When Bob Rutherford’s wife died, he took to knitting every week (some wool was donated, his son fundraises for the rest); then he and three retired friends cut the tubes into short lengths and stitch one end to make socks. Bob is now 88 and the team have made 10,000 socks which they send to shelters across Canada.
