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In the News

  • Guardian: SNP forces rethink on plan to relax Sunday trading rules
    November 10th, 2015
    The government has shelved proposals to liberalise Sunday trading laws in England and Wales after the SNP announced it would oppose the move.
     
    Government sources said plans to introduce the changes in parliament next week through an amendment to the cities and local government devolution bill had been put on hold.
     
    Sajid Javid, the business secretary, will now have to broker a deal with the SNP leader at Westminster, Angus Robertson, who is demanding that special Sunday premium pay rates given to Scottish workers will be guaranteed and will apply across the UK.
     
    The government had been facing defeat in the Commons because the SNP’s 55 MPs Westminster, along with Tory rebels, would have helped overcome the government’s 17-strong parliamentary majority.
     
    Robertson, who told the Guardian and the BBC on Monday that the SNP would vote against the plans in their current form, welcomed the change of heart by the government.
  • Guardian: Sexting becoming 'the norm' for teens, warn child protection experts
    November 10th, 2015
    Sexting – the sending and receiving of nude pictures and sexually explicit text messages – is increasingly becoming normal among teenagers, who often don’t realise they may be acting illegally and could face police action, according to the government’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre.
     
    The true scale of young people’s sexting activity is unclear, but Ceop is notified of a serious incident on average about once a day, with reports coming from schools, parents or pupils. All involve serious concerns about child protection.
     
    Kate Burls, education team coordinator at Ceop, a command of the National Crime Agency, said: “Working with young people, we are finding that sexting increasingly feels like a norm in terms of behaviour in their peer group.”
     
    The former secondary school teacher said: “There’s no one kind of sexting incident. In some incidents you might have clear elements of coercion and pressure and it may well be appropriate for a school to confiscate a phone because it may contain evidence of a criminal offence.”
     
    In September, the legal risks were made clear when a 14-year-old boy was told his details would be held on a police database for 10 years for the crime of making and distributing an indecent image of a child. He had sent a naked image of himself to a classmate.
  • Christian Today: Abortion law devolved to Scotland as MPs pass Scotland Bill
    November 10th, 2015
    Abortion law will be devolved to Scotland after MPs in the House of Commons voted through a series of new powers in the Scotland Bill.
     
    The government has said the bill will make the Scottish Parliament the most powerful devolved assembly in the world. As well as devolving abortion law, the bill gives Holyrood the power to set rates and bands of income tax from April 2017, keep half of all VAT receipts, and be given the ability to top up welfare benefits and create new payments.
     
    Christian public policy charity CARE said the decision should mean the issue of abortion is debated by members of the Scottish parliament (MSPs).
  • BBC: Religious studies 'skewed', High Court told
    November 10th, 2015
    The government has "skewed" religious studies teaching in England by excluding non-religious beliefs from the new GCSE, the High Court has heard.
     
    Three families were seeking judicial review of the government's decision to give priority to religious views in the new course, due to be taught from 2016.
     
    But government lawyers argued equal consideration for religious and non-religious views is not required by law.
  • Birmingham Mail: Children told to chant - 'Do we send Christmas cards? No!' and 'Do we celebrate Christmas? No!'
    November 10th, 2015
    Pupils at Oldknow Academy, a school implicated in the Trojan horse scandal, were led in anti-Christian chants in assemblies, it has been alleged.
     
    Teacher Asif Khan allegedly led pupils shouting: “We don’t believe in Christmas, do we?” and “Jesus wasn’t born in Bethlehem, was he?”, a tribunal was told.
  • Christian Today: Pregnant British police officer won't abort child to get cancer treatment
    November 10th, 2015
    A pregnant police officer from the United Kingdom has rejected doctors' suggestions for her to abort her unborn child for her to be able to get rigorous cancer treatment.
     
    Last September, 32-year-old Heidi Loughlin was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer—a rare and aggressive kind of the disease. She was told by her doctor that she only had a maximum of five years to live.
     
    At that time, the female police officer was three months' pregnant. She has two other children: two-year-old Noah and one-year-old Tait.
     
    For her to get cancer treatment, doctors gave Heidi the option of terminating her pregnancy so she could undergo an intense type of chemotherapy.
     
    But the soon-to-be mother of three could not bear the thought of losing her unborn child. Because of this, she chose to keep her baby and begin a less aggressive form of chemotherapy.
  • BBC: Sunday trading law proposals 'facing defeat'
    November 10th, 2015
    Government plans to relax Sunday trading laws in England and Wales are facing defeat in the House of Commons.
     
    The SNP has told the BBC and the Guardian the party has decided to vote against the changes amid fears it could drive down Scottish workers' wages.
     
    With other opposition MPs expected to join forces with some 20 Tory rebels, the plans will struggle to pass.
     
    Ministers are said to be considering whether the proposals might have to be delayed or even dropped.
  • Times (£): 'Back door for spies means back door for hackers', Apple boss warns
    November 10th, 2015
    The boss of Apple has warned Theresa May against giving spies a “back door” into people’s emails, because weakening data security could ultimately help criminals.
     
    Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said that any attempt to weaken encryption could have “very dire consequences” for consumers by making their data less secure.
     
    Under the so-called snooper’s charter, the Investigatory Powers Bill, communications companies would be legally required to help spies gain access to suspects’ smartphones and computers, while domestic providers would be obliged to assist intelligence agencies when they are given warrants to interfere with equipment.
  • Birmingham Mail: Muslims in Birmingham told vote Labour or go to hell, court hears
    November 9th, 2015
    Muslim voters in Birmingham were told they would go to hell if they didn’t vote Labour, a court has heard.
     
    The claim came in an Election Court challenge to Labour councillor for Washwood Heath, Ansar Ali Khan, whose legal team said he had done nothing wrong.
     
    Councillor Khan was re-elected on May 7 with a thumping 7,802 majority – the largest in Birmingham.
     
    The case surrounded a Facebook photo and message published on April 15 in which it suggests all followers of Barelvi Sufi tradition of Islam should vote Labour.
     
    It showed leader of the Victoria Road Mosque in Aston Pir Siddiqui with eight Labour politicians, including Ansar Ali Khan, and the statement: “All Pir, Sahiban and Darbars in Birmingham have ordered Mureeds to vote Labour in elections.”
     
    It suggests religious leaders have urged followers to vote Labour.
  • Breitbart: Conservative prof may lose tenure after LGBT pressure
    November 9th, 2015
    Professor Robert Oscar Lopez says he always suspected the day would come when his employer, the University of California, Northridge, would move to oust him from his tenured position teaching English literature.
     
    Lopez became quite famous a few years ago after he “outed” himself as both bi-sexual and having been raised by lesbians. Writing in the academic online journal The Public Discourse three years ago, Lopez wrote his upbringing by two lesbians had been harmful to him and that he now opposed same-sex marriage. Despite appearing on a relatively small site, Lopez’s explosive essay has more than 9,000 Facebook shares.
     
    Lopez was a marked man from that moment. Lopez became an even more outspoken opponent of gay marriage, gay adoption and gay surrogacy. He founded a movement for children’s rights, filed an amicus brief in favor of man-woman marriage with the Supreme Court, and published a book about attacks on him and his colleagues by the Big Gay Hate Machine.
     
    He now charges that some of the groups after him, including the gay Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD and others, likely sent students into his classes to gin up charges against him so that he would be harassed into silence and eventually dismissed. Whether that’s true or not, at least one student did begin to monitor Lopez and she did begin filing charges against him sometime in 2014.

    The charges against Lopez shifted almost constantly and to this day he has never been shown the formal complaint from the still-unidentified former student. His understanding of the charges against him have been from meetings with university administrators and taking notes.