Portugal’s parliament approved Friday the final wording of legislation allowing euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill and gravely injured people.

Lawmakers voted 136-78, with four abstentions, in favour of the law that combined five so-called right-to-die bills passed last February.

After their passage, and in accordance with parliamentary procedure, the bills went through committees where administrative procedures and other details of the euthanasia process were set out and merged into a single piece of legislation.

Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa must decide in coming weeks whether to approve the law, veto it or send it to the Constitutional Court for review.

Portugal’s Constitution states that human life is “sacrosanct,” though abortion has been legal in the country since 2007.

Parliament can override the president’s veto by voting a second time for approval.

US President Joe Biden has been criticised by America’s Catholic bishops after he signed an Executive Order directing that taxpayer funds to be sent to organisations that both promote and provide abortions in developing countries.

Speaking on behalf of the US Bishops, Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City said it is “grievous that one of President Biden’s first official acts actively promotes the destruction of human lives in developing nations”.

“This Executive Order is antithetical to reason, violates human dignity, and is incompatible with Catholic teaching. We and our brother bishops strongly oppose this action. We urge the President to use his office for good, prioritising the most vulnerable, including unborn children. As the largest non-government health care provider in the world, the Catholic Church stands ready to work with him and his administration to promote global women’s health in a manner that furthers integral human development, safeguarding innate human rights and the dignity of every human life, beginning in the womb. To serve our brothers and sisters with respect, it is imperative that care begin with ensuring that the unborn are free from violence, recognizing every person as a child of God. We hope the new administration will work with us to meet these significant needs.”

Pope Francis has previously spoken in trenchant terms, describing as an ideological colonisation, and a blasphemy against God, when foreign aid from rich nations is tied to the promotion of abortion and contraception.

A teacher has become one of the first single fathers by choice in the UK after a change in the law to end the restriction of surrogacy services to couples only. Surrogacy is banned in many countries on the grounds that it commodifies children, can exploit poor women, splits motherhood between a gestational mother and a biological mother, and can lead to a children being deliberately deprived of a mother in their upbringing.

David Watkins, 42, was the first man to become a solo parent through Surrogacy UK, the country’s biggest not-for-profit surrogacy organisation, since the rules were reformed in 2019.

A Northern Ireland-wide abortion regime remains in limbo as the issue is still being considered by the Executive, and no date has been set for its introduction.

But it also said that Health Minister Robin Swann had brought forward proposals for an early medical abortion regime to the Executive – which ministers are still considering.

Leading figures in the UK Jewish community are using Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January to focus on the persecution of Uighur Muslims, saying Jews have the “moral authority and moral duty” to speak out.

Rabbis, community leaders and Holocaust survivors have been at the forefront of efforts to put pressure on the UK government to take a stronger stance over China’s brutal treatment of the Uighurs.

In a recent letter to the prime minister, Marie van der Zyl, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said: “As a community, we are always extremely hesitant to consider comparisons with the Holocaust.”

However, there were similarities between what is reported to be happening in China and what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s, she said. Urging Boris Johnson to take action, she said violations of the Uighurs’ human rights were “shaping up to be the most serious outrage of our time”.

A 12-year-old Christian girl in Pakistan who was kidnapped, raped, shackled hand and foot, and forced to work from dusk till dawn while authorities refused to act has at last spoken out about her ordeal.

Farah Shaheen was rescued from the house of her 45-year-old abductor Khizar Ahmed Ali (Hayat) in December 2020 after harrowing five-month ordeal.

Her father, Asif Masih said his daughter was “was treated like a slave. She was forced to work all day, cleaning filth in a cattle yard. 24-7 she was attached to a chain.”

She was also forcibly converted to Islam, married off to her kidnapper and “was sexually assaulted by her abductor and raped multiple times by [his] landlords”.

In addition, Mr Masih described his “dismay” at the alleged failure of the police, the courts and medical professionals, whom he accuses of “repeatedly letting us down” for failing to do justice for his daughter.

Mr Masih blasted the police for failing to act in June 2020 when he reported that Farah had been abducted and for taking three months to register the case.

Moreover, in spite of an official birth certificate confirming Farah was only 12 in June when she was abducted, a medical report, commissioned by the courts assessing the legitimacy of her marriage to Mr Ahmed, gave the girl’s age as between 16 and 17.

He also spoke out against the judiciary which – pending a court case into the legitimacy of her marriage to a man more than 30 years her senior – placed Farah in a women’s refuge rather than allowing her to go home to her family.

A spokesperson for Aid to the Church in Need, Regina Lynch, said they have “not been able to verify the exact details of what would be a real massacre. Travel in the region is not currently possible and communications are very restricted, but we have received confirmation of a series of killings and attacks on innocent people in many parts of the region and also in the Aksum area”.

“The population is terrified,” she added.

According to information received by ACN, there could have been another massacre with over a hundred victims in the church of Maryam Dengelat in December.

Although the conflict has led to the deaths of hundreds of Christians, the sources reiterate that the violence is not motivated by religion but by political conflict.

The US Catholic Bishops have described as ‘misguided’ an executive order of President Biden giving ‘gender identity’ and ‘sexual orientation’ a protected status equal to sex or race.

The order would allow boys and men, who identify as women, to access female only spaces, and compete in women’s sports.

The order is based in part on a Supreme Court ruling from last year which the Bishops’ say “needlessly ignored the integrity of God’s creation of the two complementary sexes, male and female, with reasoning that treated them as devoid of meaning”.

However, they say the executive order goes further than the Court and threatens “to infringe the rights of people who recognize the truth of sexual difference or who uphold the institution of lifelong marriage between one man and one woman. This may manifest in mandates that, for example, erode health care conscience rights or needed and time-honored sex-specific spaces and activities”.

A report for the Oireachtas justice committee on Kenny’s ‘Dying with Dignity Bill’ found a number of “issues” with the proposed legislation, such as a jail term of no more than one year for breaking the law, compared with the current 14-year penalty for assisting a suicide.

The paper from the Oireachtas research unit is expected to be published this week and to be debated by the committee next month.

James Lawless, chairman of the Oireachtas justice committee, pointed out that assisted suicide legislation endorsed by referendum last year in New Zealand ran to “several hundred pages”, whereas Kenny’s bill is just five pages long. “Without expressing anything about the merits of the bill before us, that in itself registers a note of caution as a very crude metric, and suggests it is likely to require significant checks and balances in a comprehensive legal framework,” said Lawless.

The Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco has issued a strong statement in which he accused US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of impugning the motives of pro-life voters.

“On the question of the equal dignity of human life in the womb”, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone said in a statement, she, “speaks in direct contradiction to a fundamental human right that Catholic teaching has consistently championed for 2,000 years.”

“This is not the language of unity and healing,” he said. “She owes these voters an apology.”

While Cordileone noted that there are many issues Catholic must weigh when casting their vote in November, he said that “no Catholic in good conscience can favor abortion.”

“‘Right to choose’ is a smokescreen for perpetuating an entire industry that profits from one of the most heinous evils imaginable,” he said. “Our land is soaked with the blood of the innocent, and it must stop.”