Tower Hamlets council has told the developers of the site, which used to house a gay bar, that their plans for offices and nine luxury flats will get planning permission only if it includes a pub that will “remain a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender-focused venue for a minimum of 12 years”. It is believed to be the first time that the sexual orientation of a venue’s customers has been included as a condition of planning approval.
The borough’s mayor, John Biggs, said: “Tower Hamlets council is committed to celebrating our great diversity, which includes serving the needs of our LGBTQ+ community. I am delighted that as a council we are leading the way in using innovative ways to protect spaces such as the Joiners Arms site.”
According to the Guardian’s correspondent, Rupert Neate, City Hall’s culture at risk officer, Ed Bayes, will be involved in assessing licensee applications to ensure that the operator of the new bar “will be sufficiently LGBT, and not seeking to open a gay bar in name only”.
Hundreds of primary school pupils in the UK, including some as young as five, have been suspended or expelled from their schools in the last four years after being involved in sexually inappropriate behaviour, including watching pornography and sharing indecent images, according to separate sets of figures published by the Press Association and the department of Education. The figures also revealed a marked gender divide with there being 18 incidents involving boys for every one incident involving a girl.
The Press Association figures were compiled from freedom of information requests to local authorities around the country although the vast majority of councils contacted said they did not hold the information or refused to disclose it. Of the 15 councils who did respond, there were 754 reported incidents between July 2013 and April 2017. Broken down by age range, the figures revealed that there were seven cases of children in their first year of school involved in sexual misconduct during the four-year time period.
Last month, figures from the Department of Education revealed there were in total 2,070 suspensions for sexual misconduct and 70 expulsions in English schools for the 2015-16 academic year alone. Of those, primary school children accounted for 200 suspensions and five expulsions.
In a bizarre turn of events, a Children’s organisation called ‘Having Kids’ has sent an open letter to Prince William and Kate Midleton urging them to stop having kids. In an echo of China’s coercive two-child policy laws, the San Francisco based group believes that couples should limit themselves to having at most two children as a means of promoting sustainable living. In their letter to the Royal couple, they say, “Your discussion of having a larger family raises compelling issues of sustainability and equity. Large families are not sustainable. As degraded as the world’s environment is today, none of us can imagine what the world would be like if fertility rates had not been halved in the 20th Century, below 3 children per woman.”
“We must keep moving in the right direction, especially given the many studies that show family planning has the most potential for mitigating climate change and its impacts. The future of your country will be defined by the impacts of climate change.”
They say that all people, and especially public figures, should plan their families with goal of “producing a smaller and more resilient populace capable of thriving in that environment”.
“Rather than having a third or more children, families consider forgoing another child and taking part of the substantial resources saved to help a different family plan a fair start in life for their child,” they write, adding helpfully, “There are many ways to do this and we can provide more information.”
A postal vote will be held in Australia in November to gauge public opinion on whether or not to legalise same-sex marriage. The result will not be binding on parliament, but the Government has pledged to act on the outcome by either moving a same-sex marriage bill or dropping it from the legislative calendar.
Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott has come out against the legalisation of gay marriage, offering several reasons why people should vote “no” in the upcoming plebiscite. Speaking to reporters outside Parliament, Abbott said: “I say to you: If you don’t like same-sex marriage, vote ‘no.’ If you worry about freedom of speech and freedom of religion, vote ‘no’; and if you don’t like political correctness, vote ‘no’ because this is the best way to stop it in its tracks.”
Advocates for same-sex marriage have opposed the postal vote. Green Party LGBTI spokeswoman, Janet Rice, said the “threat of a postal plebiscite” was a “ridiculous distraction”. She warned that mail can go astray and many young people “hardly know how to send a letter … it’s just not the way to be making a decision”.
Pope Francis has launched another attack on gender theory, this time taking aim at the teaching of children in school that they can ‘choose’ their own gender, calling it a form of ‘ideological colonisation’ promoted and funded by international lobbies. Speaking to bishops in Poland, the Holy Father said that in both the developed and the developing world there are real forms of “ideological colonisation” taking place. “And one of these – I will call it clearly by its name – is [the ideology of] ‘gender’. Today children – children! – are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex,” he said. “Why are they teaching this? Because the books are provided by the persons and institutions that give you money. These forms of ideological colonisation are also supported by influential countries. And this terrible!”
Euthanasia has become “common practice” in the Netherlands, accounting for 4.5 percent of deaths, according to researchers who say requests are increasing from people who aren’t terminally ill. A 25-year review published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine and compiled from doctors’ questionnaires shows that in 1990, before it was strictly-speaking legal, 1.7 percent of deaths were already from euthanasia or assisted suicide. That rose to 4.5 percent by 2015. The vast majority — 92 percent — had serious illness and the rest had health problems from old age, early-stage dementia or psychiatric problems or a combination thereof. Almost two-thirds of those who died were under 80.
Penney Lewis, co-director of the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics at King’s College London., said the increase in numbers is not surprising. “Doctors become more confident in practicing euthanasia and more patients will start asking for it,” she said.
Scott Kim, a bioethicist at the U.S. National Institutes of Health said the report raises concerns, particularly in regards to elderly recipients. “These are old people who may have health problems, but none of them are life-threatening. They’re old, they can’t get around, their friends are dead and their children don’t visit anymore,” he said. “This kind of trend cries out for a discussion. Do we think their lives are still worthwhile?”
A leading academic has called for an ethical approach to gene-editing that would preserve and protect embryos rather than destroy them in the process. Martin Clynes, Professor Emeritus of Biotechnology at the National Institute for Cellular Biotechnology in Dublin City University, said that such an approach would preserve the possibility of finding medical cures. “If gene editing could be used to eliminate or correct disease-causing genes (such as cancer predisposition genes) in sperm, ova, or individual embryos, thus sparing the individual and their descendants from inherited disorders, this would surely be a worthwhile undertaking,” he said.
“While the technology to do this may not be quite there yet, I believe it will be possible to do this before long and we should distinguish this clearly desirable application from unethical approaches which involve experimentation and destruction of embryos.”
Campaigners and politicians in have expressed confidence that same-sex marriage will soon become a reality in Northern Ireland. Jeffrey Dudgeon, an Ulster Unionist member of Belfast City Council, who has been campaigning on gay rights for more than 40 years said he is confident that same-sex marriage will be introduced relatively soon: “I have always believed that you take the long view, you take your victories when you can and don’t expect too much too quickly. But we are at the end of the road.” SDLP Assembly member Claire Hanna believes that there has been an under-the-radar transformational change in attitudes to same-sex marriage over recent years and that even the DUP leadership would love to see the back of the issue.
Recent political changes also point to vulnerability on the issue. In the last and fifth Assembly vote on it, in November 2015, a majority voted for the first time in favour of same-sex marriage. The DUP, however, used the petition of concern mechanism to veto any change. That mechanism can be triggered by 30 MLAS and it then mandates that 60 per cent of the chamber, with 40 per cent of both unionist and nationalist representatives be required for legislation to pass. A successful petition of concern vetoes legislation only for the lifetime of the Assembly.
In the new, probably more liberal, 90-member Assembly, the DUP has 28 seats so would need the support of two other Unionist members if it wanted to obstruct a prospective sixth attempt to introduce same-sex marriage.
Part of the negotiations to bring back Stormont are about taking the petition of concern away from issues such as gay marriage. But if Stormont does not come back commentators think that British direct rule ministers might introduce same-sex marriage through Westminster.
The Bishop of Elphin, Kevin Doran, has said the Church is totally opposed to bio-medical research that reduces embryos purely to research material to be experimented on and destroyed. He was speaking after researchers in the USA used embryos in such a manner to develop gene-editing techniques to remove mutations linked to heart disease.
Bishop Doran, who is chair of the Catholic Bishops’ Consultative Group on Bioethics and Life Questions, said – as part of the research – human embryos were “being deliberately generated under laboratory conditions with a higher than average risk of congenital heart disease”. They were being “deprived of any other purpose than to be used for research and then disposed of”, he said. He cited a recent charter for healthcare workers released by the Vatican that it was “gravely immoral to sacrifice a human life for therapeutic ends”. That charter stated: “To create embryos with the intention of destroying them, even with the intention of helping the sick, is completely incompatible with human dignity, because it makes the existence of a human being at the embryonic stage nothing more than a means to be used and destroyed.”
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said the Government will seek to avoid holding an abortion referendum in the summer months when many students will be out of the country. “I definitely take the point and get the message that young people would like to have a referendum at a time that they are in the country so they can fully participate. So we will absolutely take that into account in setting a date,” he said.
He added that it was not just a matter of holding a referendum as a wording had to be agreed, legislation had to be put in place and a campaign had to happen.
“What we are planning for is a referendum probably May or June of next year,” he said.
“So if we don’t have it before the summer then we’ll probably have it in the latter part of the year. We haven’t set a date yet”.
If a referendum were not held in May or June next year, then it would likely be timed to coincide with the Presidential election in November 2018, which would be some months after a visit of Pope Francis to Dublin for the World Meeting of Families.
