The Outer House of the Court of Session in Edinburgh rules that the law dealing with assisted suicide in Scotland is clear, consistent and not in need of clarification.
In the News
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September 24th, 2015
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September 24th, 2015ISIS has executed more than 10,000 people in Iraq and Syria since declaring a 'global caliphate' in June 2014, MailOnline has learned.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), which has secret sources inside ISIS territory, said 3,207 have been killed in that war-torn country.
Another 7,700 were executed in Iraq, according to the Iraqi Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks ISIS violations.
The soldiers and civilians who have been beheaded, shot dead, drowned, blown up, stoned to death and thrown off buildings for violating ISIS's twisted laws all contributed to this mammoth death toll.
The figure does not include the thousands more who have been killed in battle and suicide bombings - or the innocent people mown down by ISIS extremists as they tried to flee. -
September 24th, 2015Russian President Vladimir Putin has phoned pop star Elton John and proposed a meeting, according to the Kremlin.
Sir Elton has said he wants to talk to Mr Putin about his "ridiculous" attitude to gay rights.
The singer previously fell victim to pranksters who impersonated the Russian leader on the phone.
But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian media that Mr Putin had this time called the singer and asked him not to be offended by the hoax. -
September 24th, 2015Health experts want schoolchildren to learn about porn, female genital mutilation and forced marriage.Nottingham City Council will meet city schools to ask them to sign a sexual and relationships education charter, which will focus on increased teaching in coming days and weeks.Council officers hope the charter – which will include free resources for schools and a system for auditing the quality of lessons – will increase quality of teaching, give children information about topical issues and reduce the number of youngsters having sex without using a condom or losing their virginity at a young age.Catherine Kirk, sex and relationships education consultant at Nottingham city council told a meeting of the authority's health scrutiny committee that topics like porn, female genital mutilation and forced marriage were "emerging issues" and needed to be tackled.
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September 24th, 2015Seven Christian families in India’s Jharkhand state were ousted from their village because of their Christian faith and told that their tribal certificates would be annulled.A tribal certificate grants members of the Scheduled Tribes certain benefits such as school fee reductions or waivers, quotas in educational institutions, and extended upper age limits in applying for some jobs. Without the certificate, they are unable to access these privileges.Villagers in Sagarkatta, Chaibasa, were told on 28 August that they were not to allow the Christian families to use water from the village well, to graze their animals on village pastures, or to use the village pond. They were then told that on 9 September, the property of the seven families was to be destroyed or seized.
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September 24th, 2015Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk jailed for five days for refusing to issue gay marriage licences, has continued to defy her critics today saying she shouldn't have to quit her job over the row.
Davis, who became an Apostolic Christian four years ago, said in an interview that losing her job would mean 'losing my voice', and that she shouldn't have to quit a job she loves to suit others.
The Rowan County clerk also said that she has 'weighed the cost' of going back to jail for her beliefs and was willing to sit in a cell for 'as long as it takes' for an exception to be made. -
September 24th, 2015New policies have been put in place at York's universities, in an attempt to crack down on extremism.From this week, all universities in the UK are legally required to have policies in place to prevent students being radicalised by extremists on campus, but also to tackle gender segregation at public events.The plans also aim to support students at risk of radicalisation, and are part of government’s latest plans to tackle extremism, under the Prevent strategy - part of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act.
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September 24th, 2015The UK’s first self-injectable contraceptive for women is available for use at home, Pfizer has said.The Sayana Press long-acting reversible contraceptive has received a licence, which means women can inject themselves at home instead of having to go to their GP surgery or clinic.The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has extended the label for the product. Each jab provides contraception for at least 13 weeks.
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September 24th, 2015It has been almost 12 months since Argentinian pastor Marcelo Nieva survived an assassination attempt.
World Watch Monitor first met Nieva, 36, five months earlier, in May 2014, when he said that the introduction of a state law in August 2013 purporting to safeguard religious freedom was having the opposite effect.He said the lives of his wife Janet (now 24) and baby daughter Marta (then just one-month-old) had been threatened, while pressure on his church, the majority of whose members were former drug addicts and prostitutes, had increased.A year later, Nieva has been forced to leave his church in Río Tercero, a city in Argentina’s central Córdoba region, after the pressure against him and his Pueblo Grande Baptist Church became too great – pressure he claims came from corrupt local officials unhappy with the impact the church was having on the sex and drugs trades. -
September 23rd, 2015Pope Francis made an impassioned defence of religious freedom at the White House on Wednesday in remarks that were swiftly interpreted as a warning shot over demands for exemptions from the law on the grounds of faith.The issue of “religious liberty” has become a flashpoint between the Obama administration and faith campaigners, focused on rejections of same-sex marriage and contraception provision.The pontiff said that American Catholics were committed to “safeguarding the rights of individuals and communities, and to rejecting every form of unjust discrimination”.
Efforts to build a just society should “respect their deepest concerns and their right to religious liberty. That freedom remains one of America’s most precious possessions,” he added. “All are called … to preserve and defend that freedom from everything that would threaten or compromise it.”