A US woman who posted an ad last July in her church seeking a Christian roommate is being sued for a breach of civil rights in the state of Michigan. According to the complaint, filed by the Fair Housing Center of West Michigan, the ad “expresses an illegal preference for a Christian roommate, thus excluding...
A leading Church of Ireland bishop has said that religious freedoms should not be relegated below other rights. The Bishop of Raphoe and Derry, the Right Reverend Ken Good (pictured) warned that as values of pluralism and the promotion of equality and diversity are “considered to be paramount”, religion can be reduced to simply a...
The Government is set to propose new legislation to recognise prenuptial agreements, the Irish Times has reported. As yet, there is no date for publication of the proposals, but it is understood that the heads of the Bill are in preparation. The proposals will follow a report commissioned in 2007 by the then minister for...
A Canadian woman who was conceived through sperm donation seeking information about her biological father has won the right to proceed with a lawsuit to obtain the information. A British Columbia Supreme Court judge rejected a bid by the provincial government to block a lawsuit filed by Olivia Pratten. Her case resembles a case taken...
Families with children are the biggest losers from the UK Government spending cuts and tax rises, according to a leading UK think-tank. In a study of Chancellor George Osborne’s spending review, the influential Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) found that in every income group, from the richest to the poorest, parents with school age children...
Catholic parents should not have to “settle for being second-class citizens” in respect of their right to Catholic schools, the Primate of All-Ireland Cardinal Seán Brady (pictured) has said. He was responding to remarks made by DUP leader Peter Robinson in which the Northern Ireland First Minister described education provision for Church schools as “a...
Nearly one in ten of babies were born to parents living apart last year, according to official figures from the UK, a third lower than the equivalent Irish figure. Of the 706,248 births in England and Wales last year, 68,251 were when the parents listed different addresses on the birth certificate, the equivalent of 9.7...
A new report issued yesterday by the Oireachtas Committee on Social Protection is “deeply misguided” in equating marriage and cohabitation and in calling for the removal of disincentives in the social welfare code to marry or cohabit, the Iona Institute has said. Only the disincentive to marry should be removed, it continued. In a press...
Women’s brains grow after having a baby, especially in areas linked to the hallmark traits of motherhood such as maternal motivation, reward and emotion processing, sensory integration and also in the front of the brain where reasoning and judgment take place, a new study says. The study involved 19 women who gave birth at Yale-New...
Catholic school principals have attacked First Minister Peter Robinson after he said Catholic schools foster a type of “apartheid” and that State funding of such schools should end. The Catholic Principals Association (CPA) accused Mr Robinson of “rabble rousing” in a manner which was “a throw back to the bad old days of religious intolerance”....
