The export manager of a factory in Sialkot in Pakistan’s Punjab province was killed by a mob on 3 December after he was accused of desecrating posters bearing the name of the prophet Muhammad.

Pakistani news outlet Dawn reports that Priyantha Diyawadana, a Sri Lankan national identified in initial reports by CSW sources as a Hindu, was attacked by “hundreds of men and young boys” on the Wazirabad Road in Sialkot, who tortured the man to death before proceeding to burn his body.

According to a tweet from researcher and journalist Rabia Mehmood, Mr Diyawadana was reportedly killed after his colleagues at the Rajco Industry factory where he worked witnessed him tear off a piece of a poster which read “Labbaik Ya Hussain” (an expression meaning “I am here, O Hussain!” and commonly associated with Shi’a Islam).

The state is set to roll out a free nationwide STI home testing service in 2022 at a cost of €3 million a year.

In the period up to the end of 2019, before Covid-related lockdowns began, there were major increases in the number of STIs in Ireland.

The kits will test for chlamydia, gonorrhoea, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, syphilis and HIV. The scheme will be run with the help of SH:24, a free online sexual health service.

The programme will be based on a pilot scheme from earlier this year, which involved 13,749 kits being posted to people’s homes over a five-month period at a cost of €734,000.

As part of the programme, anyone aged 17 and older will be able to order a free STI test to their home. There will be a set number of kits available to order per day. Results will be communicated through the SH:24 clinical team by phone or text message. If follow-up testing or treatment is required, this will be provided for nothing by HSE public STI clinics. The service is aimed at individuals who do not have symptoms of an STI.

The initial pilot scheme had to be halted for a period after almost 5,000 orders were received in less than a day. A spokeswoman for SH:24 called the uptake in Ireland “unprecedented”.

Cohabiting partners should not have the same rights as married couples, according to a leading family campaigner.

Harry Benson of the UK’s Marriage Foundation was giving evidence to the Women and Equalities Committee in Westminster last week.

He noted the problems that arise from cohabiting partners not having the same sorts of rights and protections as equivalent married couples following either break-up or death, and acknowledged the tremendous injustices where, for example, a woman sacrifices her career to bring up children only to be left penniless when her partner walks out with all the money that he says is his.

While sympathising greatly with those situations, Benson told the committee that automatically providing marriage-like rights to cohabiting couples, risks undermining commitment and creating ever more family breakdown that affects couples and children, precisely the problem he says everyone is trying to avoid.

An Evangelical Lutheran Bishop in Finland, is facing trial in January for expressing traditional Christian teaching on human sexuality.

In April, Finland’s Prosecutor General charged Rev Dr Juhana Pohjola and the Christian Democrat MP Dr Päivi Räsänen with “incitement against a group of people” over the 2004 publication of a booklet which described sex outside of heterosexual marriage, including homosexual practice, as sinful.

In an interview with Christian Today, Dr Pohjola affirmed he is ready to go to prison rather than refrain from proclaiming his faith: “We have nothing to be afraid of when we fear God more than men. In truth and in love we are called to confess Christ Jesus and publicly teach the faith of the Church.

“We have to be ready to pay whatever the price is and be labelled by media as intolerant and lawless. We must defend our basic rights and use the freedom of expression we still have.

Although we feel the cultural pressure and intimidation, our main focus as Christians is not to wage cultural war but to share the grace, life and hope we have in Christ Jesus.”

All Catholics should advocate for the availability of ethically developed vaccines, according to the Catholic Bishops of Ireland.

They gathered remotely this week for their Winter 2021 General Meeting via video-link, instead of the usual location at Saint Patrick’s College, Maynooth.

In a statement released after the meeting, they urged everyone to continue to support the Covid19 vaccination programmes.

However, they also called for pressure to be applied that vaccines be developed in an ethical way.

“In that way they bear witness that biomedical research should always be conducted in a manner which is consistent with respect for life and for human dignity.  We ask that the Departments of Health, North and South, would actively promote the development, sourcing, and supply of vaccines which do not have a historical link with abortion”.

They added: “Anyone who, for reasons of conscience, chooses not to be vaccinated must, nevertheless, do their utmost to avoid, by other means and by appropriate behaviour, becoming vehicles for the transmission of the infection”.

There is no evidence of a largescale desire by parents for the ethos of schools to change, even as it impacts the teaching of sex education.

In a reply to a parliamentary question from TD, Carol Nolan, the Minister for Education said that his Department had received only 60 communications in ten years, featuring complaints involving a perceived restriction on the teaching of Relationships and Sexuality Education [RSE] as a result of the ethos (or characteristic spirit) of schools.

The Laois-Offaly TD had asked Minister Norma Foley the details of the number of complaints made to her Department from 2011 to date involving the issue of school ethos, including the way in which it had shaped the teaching of RSE.

The US Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday into the constitutionality of Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, which could overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade case which imposed a radical abortion regime on all fifty American states.

While questions and comments during oral argument are no sure guarantee of how a judge will rule, editors at the conservative National Review, said it was “hard to see how the argument could have gone much better for the pro-life cause. Now, we wait to see if the Justices have the fortitude to do the right thing, end 48 years of judicial usurpation, and restore the primacy of the Constitution”.

They noted Justice Kavanaugh, regarded as the potential swing vote, stressed how often the Court has jettisoned prior precedents, and returned again and again to the theme that getting the Court out of abortion is the “scrupulously neutral,” small-d democratic middle ground. Chief Justice John Roberts “correctly compared Roe to the abortion regimes of China and North Korea and noted that it should be concerning for the USA to find themselves in that company.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who has given birth to five children and adopted two more, pushed back against the notion that women are forced to be parents, given the option to give up a child for adoption. None of those justices seemed particularly impressed by the answers to their questions.

“A majority of the Court appears to understand that Roe is bad law. What remains to be seen is whether they have the courage to act on that,” the editors concluded.

Callers phoned RTE’s Joe Duffy on Tuesday to share their “disappointment” and “anger” after discovering this year’s An Post Christmas stamps did not depict any nativity scenes.

The selection of Christmas stamps includes Peace & Joy, Naughty or Nice?, Nollaig Shona, Ho Ho Ho, Sending Hugs and Love.

One caller told Joe he was “disappointed”, “angry” and and felt “betrayed” that the stamp selection did not have any relation to Christianity.

Another listener phoned in to say she was “embarrassed” by what they implied:

She said: “When I opened them I said oh my gosh what am I going to put on this envelope, and then I saw Naughty or Nice, and I thought could you just imagine the poor men getting an envelope like that coming through the post.”

A third listener said she felt the naughty or nice stamp was too sexual to put on a postcard.

She told Joe: “Well, just about naughty but nice on a post-it stamp. I think is just plain crass… I mean, it’s sex basically, isn’t it, you know, which is fine it makes the world go round and all the rest of it, but on a postcard? No.

Europe’s Catholic bishops said on Tuesday that a withdrawn document discouraging European Commission staff from using the word “Christmas” was marred by “anti-religious bias.”

The controversial document, titled “Union of Equality,” recommended the expression “holiday period” instead of “Christmas period,” and, in order to guarantee the right of “every person to be treated equally,” preferred that a more generic “Ms” be used in the place of “Miss or Mrs.” Not only that, the document proposed that names typical to a specific religion such as “Mary” and “John” not be used anymore.

The Vatican’s Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin said the move represented a “cancellation of our roots, the Christian dimension of our Europe, especially with regard to Christian festivals”.

COMECE, (a commission of the Bishops of EU countries) said they “cannot help being concerned about the impression that an anti-religious bias characterized some passages of the draft document”.

The guide urged officials at the European Commission — the executive branch of the European Union, a political and economic bloc of 27 member states — to “avoid assuming that everyone is Christian.”