A judge has set a five-day trial for Hong Kong Cardinal, Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, and four other defendants who face charges under China’s stringent national security law.

It will take place Sept. 19-23.

The 90-year-old cardinal was detained May 11 and charged with failing to properly register a fund to offer financial assistance to those involved in anti-government protests in 2019. It was disbanded last year after coming under scrutiny by authorities.

The national security law made participating in or supporting the pro-democracy movement crimes of subversion and collusion with foreign organizations and allowed for those remanded to be extradited to mainland China. Punishment ranges between a minimum of three years and a maximum of life imprisonment.

All five defendants pleaded not guilty. If convicted of the improper registration, each defendant could incur a fine of about $1,300.

A longtime critic of the Chinese government, Zen drew Beijing’s ire for his continued critique of the Vatican’s controversial 2018 deal with China regarding the appointment of bishops.

New research shows that three years after Quebec’s secularism law — commonly known as Bill 21 — was adopted, religious minorities in the province are feeling increasingly alienated and hopeless.

“Religious minority communities are encountering — at levels that are disturbing — a reflection of disdain, hate, mistrust and aggression,” Miriam Taylor, lead researcher and the director of publications and partnerships at the Association for Canadian Studies, told CBC in an interview.

“We even saw threats and physical violence,” Taylor said.

Bill 21, which passed in 2019, bars public school teachers, police officers, judges and government lawyers, among other civil servants in positions of authority, from wearing religious symbols — such as hijabs, crucifixes or turbans — while at work.

The HSE has said it will continue to refer children with gender dysphoria to the Tavistock Clinic in the UK despite it being forced to close next year because of controversial practices such as giving children puberty blockers.

National Clinical Director for Integrated Care within the HSE Dr Siobhán Ni Bhriain said: “The service has not been deemed not safe, because if it was deemed completely unsafe it would have closed immediately, that’s the first thing.

“The second thing is the Tavistock will keep open for another year or so until the regional units are developed in the UK and increased numbers of people with the skills to deliver care to these children.

“So, we will continue to refer while Tavistock is still open, we will monitor extremely closely and we have for quite a number of years been exploring other options.”

Human rights advocates say that Canada’s euthanasia laws lack necessary safeguards, devalue the lives of disabled people and are prompting doctors and health workers to suggest the procedure to those who might not otherwise consider it.

Equally troubling, advocates say, are instances in which people have sought to be killed because they weren’t getting adequate government support to live.

Euthanasia “cannot be a default for Canada’s failure to fulfill its human rights obligations,” said Marie-Claude Landry, the head of its Human Rights Commission.

Landry said she shares the “grave concern” voiced last year by three U.N. human rights experts, who wrote that Canada’s euthanasia law appeared to violate the agency’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They said the law had a “discriminatory impact” on disabled people and was inconsistent with Canada’s obligations to uphold international human rights standards.

Over €5 million in emergency aid has been sent to Ukraine by the pontifical charity, Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), to help the local Catholic Church’s initiatives on behalf of its people.

“The worst consequences of the war will not be felt in the short-term: the psychological, physical and humanitarian effects will only become apparent later. Only God can heal the deeper wounds, but we can try to soften the more immediate needs and support the local Church so that it can remain on the ground”, says Thomas Heine-Geldern, executive president of ACN International.

“Thanks to the help of ACN benefactors, priests and religious can offset shortages of food, and basic hygiene and medical products felt by many of the internally displaced people. Furthermore, they can provide psychological and spiritual support to all those who are traumatised from losing their homes or loved ones”, explains Heine-Geldern.

“We are in daily contact with the whole country”, adds Magda Kaczmarek, who has headed the foundation’s Projects in Ukraine for the past 14 years. “In this way we can identify the projects that the local Church considers to be a priority and be flexible in our monthly aid”.

For the first time since records began, a majority of babies were born out of wedlock in England and Wales in 2021.

However, the figures came with one proviso: the period coincided with the COVID-19 lockdown, when weddings and civil partnership ceremonies were not allowed.

There were 624,828 live births registered in England and Wales in 2021, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.

This includes 320,713 live births to women who were not married or in a civil partnership when they delivered – 51.3% of the total – compared to 304,115 live births to parents who were married or civilly partnered.

It is the first time this occurred since counting such statistics began in 1845.

Dr James Tucker, head of health analysis at the ONS, said the figures followed a “long-term trend of declining marriage rates and increasing numbers of cohabiting couples seen in recent decades”.

The fertility rate last year was 1.61 children per woman in 2021, well below the replacement level of 2.1.

However, the 2021 rate still remained below that of 2019.

The Ladies Gaelic Football Association (LGFA) has said it is developing a policy around transgender players after an objection to a biological male identifying as a woman played in a ladies’ shield final in Dublin.

Na Gaeil Aeracha, the GAA’s first openly LGBT club, beat Na Fianna’s ladies E team in the Dublin Junior J Shield football final last Wednesday.

The referee stopped the game after the first break in play to tell Na Gaeil Aeracha that there was “a problem with your number 21” and told them “the player is a man”.

Na Gaeil Aeracha’s captain said that the player, Giulia Valentino, was a trans woman but the referee said “this is the Ladies’ Gaelic football association”.

Valentino played on and was later taken off as a blood substitute but returned and played until half time when a substitute came on.

A major investigation by the Sunday Independent has revealed that senior doctors in the National Gender Service (NGS) warned the HSE in 2019 that it would face a wave of patients who would regret medical gender reassignments due to the poor level of care given to Irish children by the Tavistock clinic in the UK.

Paul Moran, a consultant psychiatrist at the NGS which treats over-16s in Loughlinstown, and his colleagues set out their concerns over Tavistock’s “unsafe” practices in writing and at a number of meetings since 2019.

The Tavistock clinic, which operated a satellite service in Crumlin children’s hospital from 2014 to 2020, is still getting Irish patients referred to it despite plans to close it due to a recent damning report from Dr Hillary Cass.

She found Tavistock clinicians felt pressurised into “affirming” children’s gender changes and prescribing puberty blockers and hormones without proper assessment. Dr Moran told the Sunday Independent he fears the HSE is “ideologically committed” to hormone-based care for children “which is wrong and unsafe” given growing concerns puberty blockers can have detrimental health effects on developing children.

Fertility has declined much more among nonreligious Americans than among the devout, according to a leading social scientist.

Lyman Stone of the Institute for Family Studies, says data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) from 1982 to 2019, along with data from four waves of the Demographic Intelligence Family Survey (DIFS) from 2020 to 2022, point to a widening gap in fertility rates between more religious and less religious Americans.

Among those who attend religious services every week, the fertility rate remains above the replacement rate of 2.1, while among the non-religious it has gone below 1.5.

In recent years, the fertility gap by religion has widened to unprecedented levels. But while this difference may comfort some of the faithful who hope higher fertility will ultimately yield stable membership in churches and synagogues, these hopes may be in vain. Rates of conversion into irreligion are too high, and fertility rates too low, to yield stable religious populations.

A leading Catholic bioethics agency has called for changes in the law and for a government review after the trauma experienced by the parents of 12 year old Archie Battersbee, who passed away last week following the switching off of his ventilator and other forms of life support against the wishes of the parents.

“The court battle over Archie Battersbee’s care is the latest example of the dying of children becoming complicated by unresolved conflict between parents and hospital authorities. It seems clear that there are serious problems with the current clinical, interpersonal, ethical, and legal approach to these situations.”