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The Christian owners of a Northern Ireland bakery have lost an appeal against a ruling that their refusal to make a "gay cake" was discriminatory.
"The fact that a baker provides a cake for a particular team or portrays witches on a Halloween cake does not indicate any support for either," said the appeal court judges in their ruling.
There are some pretty silly laws on the UK’s statute books. But the Court of Appeal in Belfast has today confirmed one that might be the silliest of the lot: if you’re a gay man, you’re now legally entitled to force a devout Christian to bake you a cake.
I am a gay man. I support equality under the law for people of all sexual and gender inclinations. More to the point, I love cake. Nonetheless, I’m siding with the Christians. This gay plaintiff is wrong; the law is wrong. Nobody should be forced by law to bake anybody else a cake. Ever.
A court ruling on an appeal by a bakery which was found to have "unlawfully discriminated" against a gay man, will be made public shortly.
Two years ago, the family-run firm refused to make a cake for gay rights activist Gareth Lee with the slogan "Support Gay Marriage".
The judge ruled the Christian owners of Ashers had discriminated against him. The family firm then appealed.
Islamic scholars lack knowledge of basic science showing that stunning animals prevents them from feeling pain when their throats are cut, a study has found.
The ignorance among scholars, who help to set rules governing what meat is deemed “halal” or permissible, is reflected among ordinary Muslims, the study by the University of Bristol found.
The British Muslim community is divided over pre-slaughter stunning, with some halal licensing bodies accepting it and others rejecting it.
The government inquiry into Sharia is deeply flawed and failing to address fundamental defects in the theology, a former senior bishop has said.
The Right Rev Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester, said that the Home Office review was scratching the surface by only examining the way that Sharia was applied.
“It asks whether the application of Sharia is incompatible with English law when it should be asking whether Sharia is itself incompatible with English law,” he said. “If Sharia is recognised in any way in terms of the public law, it will introduce a principle of contradiction in the body of the law, which will cause enormous problems.”
Relatives of 32-year-old Sicilian woman have claimed that she died in a Catania hospital last week after a doctor refused to carry out an abortion on grounds of “conscientious objection”.
Although the hospital has rejected the accusations, a judicial investigation into the death of Valentina Milluzzo and her two premature babies has been opened by Catania magistrates.
Ms Milluzzo, who had conceived the two babies through in vitro fertilisation, had been admitted to Cannizzaro Hospital on September 29th, in the fifth month of her pregnancy, suffering from “premature dilation of the uterus”.
An artificial intelligence system has correctly predicted the outcomes of hundreds of cases heard at the European Court of Human Rights, researchers have claimed.
The AI predicted the verdicts to an accuracy of 79%, according to the scientists involved.
AI is increasingly being used in fields such as journalism, law and accountancy.
But critics said no AI would be able to understand the nuances of a legal case.
The number of legal battles over transgender children's rights is rising, as charities say councils are becoming increasingly involved in cases of gender reassignment.
Christian Concern is dealing with four separate cases in which parents are opposing decisions taken by schools and social workers to let children to transition from girl to boy, or vice versa. A cluster of disputes has emerged despite no similar cases being dealt with in previous years, suggesting they are a new phenomenon.
Andrea Williams, of the Christian Legal Centre, which funds legal support for families, said more legal disputes involving transgender children were arising as a result of public opinion having becoming more accepting of gender reassignment.
Over 400 parishes have so far passed a resolution under the House of Bishops' Declaration to bring them under the oversight of a bishop of The Society. (In addition, other parishes have passed a resolution that brings them under the oversight of the Bishop of Maidstone.)
According to official figures (Statistics for Mission 2012: Ministry), at the beginning of 2013 there were 368 parishes with a petition under the former Episcopal Ministry Act of Synod in force. The replacement of the Act of Synod with the House of Bishops' Declaration has thus resulted in a significant increase in the number of parishes under the oversight of one of the Church of England's catholic bishops.
Hundreds of Muslims have staged a mass prayer outside the Rome's Colosseum in protest against the closure of mosques in Italy.
Children attended the demonstration holding signs saying, “peace”, “love” and “open the mosques”.