British Isles

British pastor and children drown

03 Jan 2020
Olubunmi Diya is mourning after her daughter Comfort (9), son Praise-Emmanuel (16), and husband Pastor Gabriel (52) drowned in a hotel swimming pool on Christmas Eve. Olubunmi said she believed something was wrong…

BBC ‘a secular church’

03 Jan 2020
Conservative peer Charles Moore, as a guest editor on Radio 4's Today programme, said the BBC has a liberal bias: ‘What I am objecting to is preaching.’ He said the BBC is a…

Youngsters with knives at school

03 Jan 2020
Between April 2017 and December 2019, Kent police investigated 109 children for possessing, or threatening with, an offensive weapon or blade at school. Two children, aged seven and nine, were not prosecuted for…

Personal debt crisis

03 Jan 2020
Britain's personal debt mountain is growing. Households borrowed an extra £20bn on credit cards and have £45bn more personal debt than they did a decade ago – an increase of 25%. In 2019,…

Church discourages bias against women

03 Jan 2020
CofE staff are being given ‘unconscious bias training’ in a bid to see an equal gender split across its leadership by 2030. The Bishop of London, Sarah Mullally, said, 'I certainly think that…

Cyprus: rape case

03 Jan 2020
UK foreign secretary Dominic Raab expressed ‘serious concern’ about a possible miscarriage of justice by a Cypriot court convicting a British teenager of lying about being gang-raped on holiday. The 19-year-old originally told…

Iran: ‘nuclear-capable projectiles’ cause concern

03 Jan 2020
France, Germany, and Britain have told the UN's secretary-general that Iran has developed a ballistic-missile system capable of delivering a nuclear weapon in violation of the Security Council resolution. A letter from those…

‘Let the healing begin’

19 Dec 2019
1 Timothy 2:2 tells us to ‘pray for all who are in high positions’. Boris Johnson’s first speech after the election urged ‘everyone, on either side of an increasingly arid three and a…

Quakers challenge the new government

19 Dec 2019
Quakers in Britain are challenging Boris Johnson’s new government to give priority to its promise to take action on climate breakdown. They are urging him to ensure that the economic transition puts the…

Children told not to sing ‘Lord’ in carol

19 Dec 2019
The headteacher of a London primary school ruled that children should sing ‘baby boy Jesus’, not ‘little Lord Jesus’ in the carol Away in a manger (so that pupils of all beliefs could…