A number of religious organizations are speaking out after British Prime Minister David Cameron was attacked by a group of left-wing activists following his claim that the U.K. was a “Christian nation.”
Cameron had delivered an address before Easter where he said that Britian was a Christian nation and that Christians needed to be “more evangelical” about their faith and to “get out there and make a difference to people’s lives.” He also said that being a “Christian country” did not mean that you condemned those of other faiths.
“People can secularize those traditions but it doesn’t take away from the fact that the country was based in Christian traditions,” Anil Bhanot, managing director of Hindu Council U.K. said. He added that he was “very comfortable” with the U.K. being described as a Christian country.
“A sense of the sacred is to be cherished,” the head of the Muslim Council of Britain said. Secretary General Farooq Murad said no one could deny that the U.K. remains a Christian country.
The left-wing critics say that Cameron was deliberately causing divisions within the nation by making his statement.
A British woman who openly told a newspaper that she exercised her “right” to have an abortion to end her baby’s life so she could be on the television show “Big Brother” is now being attacked on social media for her decision.
Josie Cunningham, 23, told London’s Sunday Mirror that she’s finally on the road to becoming famous and that she wasn’t going to ruin it by having a baby.
“An abortion will further my career. This time next year I won’t have a baby. Instead, I’ll be famous, driving a bright pink Range Rover and buying a big house. Nothing will get in my way,” Cunningham said.
Now, many pro-abortion advocates are attacking the woman for exercising the “right” they repeatedly say is perfectly fine for any woman to “choose”. Pro-abortion advocates are posting online that Cunningham should be banned from the show because of her choice, that she is a “new low for humanity” and some have even advocated for her to be sterilized.
A pro-abortion advocate in the Guardian newspaper wrote a piece defending the woman’s decision, however, saying that anyone who supports abortion but doesn’t support this woman is opening the door to stopping other women from having abortions.
“What makes the “debate” around Josie Cunningham so disturbing is that it refuses to even acknowledge the idea that access to abortion is a basic human right, or that women are entitled to choose what they do with their own bodies,” Martin Robbins wrote. “If we fail to defend Cunningham, then we accept that only those women who are ‘deserving’ enough should be allowed to have an abortion. And if we accept that, then it’s only a matter of time before others are deemed undeserving as well.”
Pro-life advocates are pointing out that this situation is simply the logical progression of those who claim ending a baby’s life via abortion is a “human right.” They point out that under the vocalized morality of those who support abortion, Cunningham has done absolutely nothing wrong or deserving of scorn.
The Prime Minister of Great Britain says that Christianity is now the most persecuted religion in the world and that his nation should be “unashamed” in standing up for the rights of Christians.
Prime Minister David Cameron, in a speech to a group attending an Easter reception, said that he believes his nation can play a leading role in stopping the persecution of Christians around the world.
“We’re seen as a country that is engaged internationally,” Cameron said. “We should stand up against persecution of Christians and other religious groups wherever and whenever we can, and we should be unashamed in doing so.”
The Pew Research Center says that Christians are the most oppressed religious group with persecution against them reported in at least 110 countries around the world.
Cameron also said there was a need to expand the role of faith and faith based organizations in the country.
“[We need] more belief that we can get out there and actually change people’s lives and make a difference and improve the spiritual, physical and moral state of our country,” Cameron said.
Officials in the U.K. have reported the first ever confirmed case of humans contracting tuberculosis from cats.
Public Health England reported that the two human cases are linked to nine cases of infection in cats. PHE reports that the two human patients have been responding well to treatment.
Veterinarians believe the cats likely contracted the disease from badgers or from rodents that had been inside badger setts.
“We’ve all become rather complacent because we haven’t been seeing TB for so many years but bovis is back with a little bit more significance,” Professor Danielle Gunn-Moore, a feline researcher, told the Daily Telegraph. “It’s important we don’t get blinkered and think it’s only badgers and cattle that get infected. This is a bacteria that is not very fussy about who it infects.”
PHE reports at least 39 people have been in close contact with the infected cats and are being monitored by health officials.
The bodies of aborted and miscarried babies have been found to been burned as clinical waste with some even used to heat British hospitals.
Ten different National Health Service units across England have admitted to burning the bodies of aborted children in “waste-to-energy” plants that provide power for heating hospitals. An investigation by Channel 4 discovered that over 15,500 babies were burned in the last two years.
Health Minister Dr. Dan Poulter declared the action “totally unacceptable” and issued an immediate ban on all hospitals burning the remains of babies.
The investigation also found in the case of miscarriages, the parents were often not consulted about what they wanted done with the remains of their child which was then dumped into bags of medical waste.
A Cambridge hospital was found to have used the babies to heat their facility and told the mothers of the dead children that the bodies had been “cremated.”
The Chief Inspector of Hospitals, Sir Mike Richards, said that the actions discovered breached the standard on respecting and involving people who use their services.
A new document from the trove of NSA leaker Edward Snowden shows that the British intelligence services used webcams of Yahoo users to spy on them including taking nude pictures of users.
The GCHQ ran a program called Optic Nerve between 2008 and 2010 that collected images from Yahoo webcam chats and stored them even if the users in the chats were not considered targets of intelligence operations.
In one six month period over 1.8 million Yahoo users were spied on worldwide.
When the Guardian newspaper contacted Yahoo, officials were furious to find out they had been targeted by intelligence services. The company termed the action “a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy.”
There are no restrictions in British law that would keep them from tracking Americans and storing information about them without an individual warrant.
It sounds like the plot of a thriller movie but it’s reality.
A “ghost ship” has been floating loose in the upper Atlantic Ocean and is believed to be heading to the British coast filled with aggressive, disease-ridden, cannibalistic rats.
The Lyubov Orlova was being towed by a second ship after it was seized from its previous owner because of unpaid debts. During the towing process, the boat broke free from the moorings and disappeared into the Atlantic. It has only been spotted from the air a few times and has sent out signals twice in March 2013 but then went silent.
Experts are now warning that the recent wave of severe storms throughout the region could be driving the ship directly into the British coast.
The belief comes from the fact the lifeboats attached to the ship have not activated indicating they have touched down in the ocean. If the ship had sunk, all the lifeboats would have had an emergency beacon activate.
If the ship were to make landfall, the disease infested rats could devastate the local rat population and be a major risk to humans for diseases like bubonic plague.
Lady Warsi, a Muslim who is Great Britain’s Faith and Communities Minister, told the BBC that Christianity in large parts of the Middle East and in a majority of Islamic nations is on the brink of extinction.
I’m concerned that the birthplace of Christianity, the parts of the world where Christianity first spread, is now seeing large sections of the Christian community leaving, and those that are remaining feeling persecuted,” Lady Warsi told the BBC Radio 4 Today program. “One in 10 Christians live in a minority situation and large numbers of those who live in a minority situation around the world are persecuted.”
She said that as Islamic extremist groups gain influence, they are able to convince the local population that Christians are “newcomers” to the area that should be driven out when in many cases the Christians were living in the area before the arrival of the Islamists. She also said that Christians are being made the scapegoat for problems in the Middle East created by Islamists.
She also said that violence against Christians in Pakistan is threatening to drive all Christians from that nation.
She said that violence against Christians worldwide should not just reverberate in the Christian community but in all communities.
Britain’s Prime Minister has announced that the UK will be the first non-Muslim country to issue an Islamic bond.
David Cameron also announced at the World Islamic Economic Forum that a new Islamic index would be introduced on the London Stock Exchange.
Under Islamic rules, no interest on business dealings can be charged and no transaction can involve anything forbidden under Sharia law like alcohol or gambling.
“I don’t just want London to be a great capital of Islamic finance in the Western world, I want London to stand alongside Dubai as one of the great capitals of Islamic finance anywhere in the world,” Cameron told the WIFE.
The British Treasury said they hope to launch the Islamic bond next year.
Andrew Parker, the new head of Britain’s MI5 security service, is warning that the British general public is now a legitimate target for attacks by Islamic extremists.
In an address to the Royal United Services Institute, Parker said that al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Pakistan and Yemen present “direct and immediate threats to the UK.”
“It remains the case that there are several thousand Islamist extremists here who see the British public as a legitimate target,” Parker said.
Parker said that 330 people had been convicted of terrorism offenses in the last decade and that in the first few months of 2013 at least four major trials were connected to terrorist plots. In those cases, 24 terrorists were sent to prison.
Parker said the increase in technology is allowing terrorists to communicate in ways difficult for their intelligence services to track under current laws. He called for lawmakers to allow services to use the same tools the terrorists use to track terror plots.
