In a welcome move, the Government has announced that this summer it will set out details of its plans to ban under-18s from undergoing sex-changes, with equalities minister Liz Truss saying that the development was about ensuring that under-18s were ‘“protected from decisions that they could make, that are irreversible in the future”’; she insisted: […]
A controversial sex education programme that taught children as young as six about touching their “private parts” has been withdrawn by a council in Britain following a backlash from parents. The Telegraph reports that the “All About Me” syllabus, which was rolled out at over 200 primary schools across Warwickshire, proposed that children should learn […]
The phrase ‘missing Mass’ used to refer to non-attendance at Sunday Mass and was a serious omission for any Catholic. If it was habitual it could lead to a call from the local priest. Today that would be represented as clerical policing rather than an act of pastoral outreach. In fact, in a homogeneous religious […]
The race is on to produce a COVID-19 vaccine: teams are working hard and fast across the world. We all long to see a vaccine in record time – but must, of course, have an eye to ethics too. Debates on vaccine ethics tend to focus on risks, whether to participants in clinical trials, or […]
Social media giant, Facebook, is under fire again for using biased ‘fact-checkers’ to label reporting as ‘fake news’. The New York Post, one of the most long-established newspapers in the U.S., hit back at Facebook this week saying that the platform’s “‘fact-checkers’ are the real fake news after censoring Post story”. As the newspaper explained: […]
One of the most effective public service messages of the coronavirus pandemic must a musical number by Ugandan artists Bobi Wine and Nubian Li. The reggae-style “Corona Virus Alert” is so catchy it makes hand-washing and staying home seem like the coolest things to do. The latest stats on Uganda show that the country has […]
Last year Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Catholic woman accused of blasphemy against Islam, arrived to make a new life in Canada with her family. After being convicted and sentenced to death, she had languished in jail for ten years. Her lawyers received death threats. But Asia Bibi is far from being the only Pakistani Christian […]
Population density and the proportion of society that is elderly quickly emerged as significant factors in the spread of COVID-19. Social distancing has been widely used as an effective way to avoid transmission, but is complex to implement in a very densely populated city without draconian government action. More than 55 percent of the world’s population is thought to […]
It was once understood that the purpose of college, among other things, was to expose an individual to the wonderful world of academia, a place with a wide variety of beliefs and opinions. The pursuit of knowledge was best facilitated by differing viewpoints, and politics were either irrelevant to the discussion or a cause for […]
With the Covid-19 pandemic dominating headlines, many important issues have been forgotten or shelved. One of those is the plight of Uyghurs and other persecuted minorities in Xinjiang in northwestern China. I’d like to clarify the often-conflicting reports on Xinjiang and drill down into the demographic statistics to give an accurate picture of the balance […]
They’re averaging 2000 deaths a day, and five million new job losses a week, now. Here are the numbers for this week alone: "The modest decline in initial jobless claims to 5,508,500 last week, from 6,615,000, means that the unemployment rate is now on track to hit somewhere between 15% and 20% in April, well […]
The Guardian published the image above two months ago. A man lying dead in the streets in Wuhan, as people walk past. No wonder, then, that they missed so many dead people. They probably walked past another guy the very next day, and assumed it was just the same dead guy as yesterday. You have […]