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In the News

  • A Northern Irish woman who was prosecuted for obtaining abortion pills for her underage pregnant daughter was reported to police by a GP, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service has revealed.

    Launching an information campaign in Northern Ireland aimed at helping women access safe abortion medication and follow-up services, the BPAS said that a climate of fear over such prosecutions was risking lives in the region.

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  • Indonesian clerics are preparing to issue a fatwa against “fake news” after a series of damaging hoaxes on social media which targeted the Chinese and Christian minorities.

    The move follows growing concern in the world’s most populous Muslim nation about the spread of fake news – a phenomenon that has been credited with fuelling recent ethnic and political tensions.

    Some of the spurious items in recent months include a claim that China was using contaminated chilli seeds to wage biological warfare against Indonesia, a claim that the design of new monetary notes contains an image of the communist hammer and sickle, and a claim that Indonesia has been inundated by ten million Chinese migrant workers (the government says the number was actually 21,000). 

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  • The next Bishop of Sheffield has been announced by 10 Downing Street as Right Reverend Philip John North, currently Bishop of Burnley, in the diocese of Blackburn

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  • Thousands of children are successfully adopted each year, but a small number of cases will end in failure. So what makes an adoptive parent return their child into care?

    Rob had been warned by social services that the boy he was adopting could be difficult, but nothing prepared him for what came next.

    "He was violent towards my wife, so she got kicked and thumped," he said. 

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  • From July 1st it will no longer be forbidden for men who have had sex with men to give blood – provided they have been celibate for the past 12 months.

    Medical watchdog Swissmedic has approved the request, lodged by blood donor service Swiss Transfusion SRC last June, reported news agencies on Tuesday. 

    Currently, all men in Switzerland who have had sex with another man since 1977 are barred from donating blood – a rule brought in during the 1980s to stop the spread of Aids. 

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  • It was late evening on January 12, 1967 and three men were laboring over the body of psychology professor James Bedford, who had just died from kidney cancer at the age of 72.

    But while the manner of Bedford's death - in bed at a hospital in Glendale, California, was not unusual - what happened next certainly was.

    Bedford was about to become the world's first cryopreserved human being – and now lies suspended in liquid nitrogen in a vault in Scottsdale, Arizona.

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  • Austria's governing coalition has agreed to ban full-face veils in courts, schools and other "public places" as part of a reform programme aimed at countering the rise of the far-Right in the country.

    The agreement was made between the ruling coalition of Social Democrats and the centrist People's party as Chancellor Christian Kern attempts to regain the political initiative from the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) ahead of next year's parliamentary election.

    "The full-face veil will be banned in public spaces," Mr Kern said after the week-long negotiations concluded, adding that the ban will be implemented over the next 18 months. 

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  • A magistrate who refused to sit on a same-sex parenting case has been given a formal warning for misconduct.

    The Judicial Conduct Investigations Office said it had ordered Susan Preston to stand down from hearing future family cases after she “declined to adjudicate on a case... because of her personal views about same-sex couple parenting”.

    The disciplinary action against Mrs Preston, who has been a magistrate in South Derbyshire for 16 years, follows the case of Richard Page, a Kent magistrate who was struck off last year for voicing opposition to same-sex adoption

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  • There's a fresh call for the abortion limit to be changed after twins were born under the stage at which terminations are allowed and survived.

    Imogen and Annabelle Weir were born at just 23 weeks and four days in Glasgow meaning their mother could still have legally had an abortion.

    Under law, a mother is allowed to have a termination at 24 weeks because scientists believe that under this point life outside the womb is not viable.

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  • Christians are being warned against celebrating too soon, after talk of the government possibly retreating on plans to regulate Sunday schools.

    The Evangelical Alliance and the Christian Institute fear church classes still face potential inspections by Ofsted regardless of whether the Counter-extremism bill becomes enshrined in law.

    Simon Calvert, deputy director for public affairs at the Christian Institute, told Premier's News Hour: "If the government wanted to go ahead with some kind of regulation and inspection system, it could do that without the need for a counter-extremism bill. We have to be on the alert."

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