https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1883189/BBC-interview-climate-change-Guyana-viral
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
A Good Point: I Suggest That He Politely Asks Hamas To Stop Their Warmongering!
War in Gaza 'needs to end now', says Archbishop.
Archbishop Justin with the Rev Fadi Diab.(Photo: Lambeth Palace)The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has called for an end to the war in Gaza after meeting with a Palestinian priest.
The Archbishop met Rev Fadi Diab of St Andrew's Anglican Church in Ramallah, Palestine, on Friday.
Welby called the war "cruel and horrific" and said that the arming of settlers in illegal settlements in the West Bank had "intensified violence and contributed to a level of death and destruction not seen since the Second Intifada." CT.
News From Release.
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So Many Ridiculous Decisions: So Much Backtracking!
20mph Wales: Some roads to revert to 30mph after backlash.
Transport Secretary Ken Skates says the changes to the policy will address the concerns that "a lot of people" have raised "on a consistent basis"
Some roads in Wales will revert to 30mph following backlash at the Welsh government's £34m default 20mph policy.
Transport Secretary Ken Skates said the changes will address the concerns that "a lot of people" have raised "on a consistent basis".
"We've put our hands up to say the guidance has to be corrected," he said.
Swansea council leader Rob Stewart welcomed the change, but said the government must help foot the bill to swap signage.
Mr Skates highlighted the almost half a million signatures to a Senedd petition opposing the policy, brought in under former first minister Mark Drakeford and his transport minister Lee Waters.
"I have friends and family who have signed the petition," he said.
But the policy has also enjoyed support from groups including those representing cyclists, while some people have even called for it to be extended to areas not covered in the rollout to help make their communities safer.
Mr Skates was put in charge of transport for Wales on 21 March after Vaughan Gething succeeded Mr Drakeford.
"There is generally universal support for 20mph being targeted in areas where there are schools, built up areas like housing estates, and outside hospitals and so-forth," he told North Wales Live on Friday.
"But in many areas, routes that shouldn't have been included, were."
He said the changes will enable individual councils to revert routes back to 30mph where appropriate, adding that this will allow for "radical" changes, if that is "what people want".
Image caption,
Ken Skates says the Welsh government is holding its hands up to say "the guidance has to be corrected"
Mr Skates is expected to address forthcoming changes in a statement to the Senedd on Tuesday afternoon.
Rob Stewart, leader of Swansea council, said Mr Skates' "pragmatic approach" was "to be welcomed".
However, he said the Welsh government should "help us with the cost" of reverting back to 30mph roads.
Mr Skates added that he does not feel it would be fair to place that costs on local authorities, given that councils are making "really tough" decisions.
"I'm not going to say to councils that they need to find the money to make the changes," he said.
Media caption,
What did people make of the 20mph speed limit after it was introduced?
The controversial 20mph policy was introduced in Wales in September with the aim of improving road safety. It saw the default speed limit on roads in built up areas cut from 30mph to 20mph.
Mr Stewart added that he anticipated the changes to the policy could affect up to 10 roads in his own local authority.
"I don't think anybody is challenging the requirements or the ambition of the 20mph to make our roads safer, but it's about making sure we've got the balance right," he said.
"So I think it's just about being pragmatic and doing it in a way that's sensible."
Huw Thomas, leader of Cardiff council, said the news was welcome and that it was not possible to "pretend there isn't a half-million-person petition".
He said he was glad the power will rest with local governments and that the work will be "mostly" funded by the Welsh government.
Mr Thomas added that in Cardiff, where most of city was 20mph already, the policy had been "very popular" and that he "certainly can't see many roads changing".
Natasha Asghar, the Welsh Conservative's transport spokesperson, said the party had "consistently voted against the ridiculous 20mph policy involving 97% of previously 30mph roads".
"The Welsh Conservatives want to see this policy scrapped," said the Member of the Senedd.
"A more targeted approach is needed with the support of the Welsh people."
Plaid Cymru leader Rhun ap Iorwerth said: "Over six months have passed since Plaid Cymru tabled a Senedd amendment, and won the vote, gaining a commitment from Welsh government to review the impact of new limits and to empower local authorities to make further exemptions.
"I support the principle of widespread 20mph zones but it's clear that it was implemented very poorly and inconsistently, with too many roads changing to 20mph in places where it felt unreasonable.
"Welsh government must push ahead now and sort it out." BBC.
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Yet Another Cult Blended Into The Mix?
The human rights cult has replaced common sense compassion.
The noble belief that all people are entitled to basic freedoms has become a narcissist’s charter
JANET DALEY13 April 2024 • 
The most shocking thing about the Cass report is that it had to be commissioned at all. Why in God’s name did it require an official government study to establish that medical interference in the sexual development of healthy children was unacceptable?
The outrage over this absurdity has been thoroughly aired – not least by my colleagues on these pages – so let’s take that as read. Whatever benign inclinations there may once have been in this campaign, they were swamped by the most poisonous wave of personal and professional denigration that I have ever seen.
That itself should have been a significant clue: the hysterical vindictiveness with which the militant trans lobby pursued any attempt to question its assumptions should have thrown up an immediate warning. People whose response to any challenge is to extirpate their critics are not well-intentioned.
But it’s over. This whole bizarre phenomenon has imploded and nobody needs to be afraid to utter obvious truths any longer. The clinicians who went along with it (whose reasoning processes remain a mystery because many of them would not cooperate with the Cass investigation) must be made to pay a price and the victims (because that is what they are) must somehow be compensated.
That last one will be difficult because many of them will have no idea what it is they have lost. And that, it has to be said, is possibly the most terrible and irremediable aspect of this. So before this extraordinary chapter of social history is just swept away in a tidal wave of self-congratulatory unanimity, we must examine precisely what it was that was so very mistaken and destructive at the heart of it.
There seem to be two misunderstandings which are in danger of being overlooked in the immediate outrage over possible medical malpractice. First is the specific matter of pubescent depression and anxiety – which is what this form of treatment was supposed to remedy. The other is a larger political question to do with human rights and how that concept has now transmogrified into a parody of its original Enlightenment intentions.
On the urgent matter of treating children who are traumatised by the signs of approaching puberty, we need a genuinely compassionate discussion. It is very important to note that although the most vociferous trans campaigners were men who claimed to be women, the overwhelming majority of children coming forward for transitioning are young girls who are frightened by the changes to their maturing bodies. And that, as most grown-up women have always known, is not abnormal.
The shock of female puberty can be well tolerated by girls who are in supportive families or communities which cope with this process by shared ritual. But even for them, it is a sudden and dramatic change of condition.
I remember an advertisement for sanitary products many years ago which showed two identical photographs of a young girl in a ballet pose. Under the first one, were the words, “Yesterday, Katy was a girl of thirteen.” And under the second, “Today, she is a woman of thirteen.”
That overnight transformation has been the inspiration for mythologies and story-telling through the ages. The most recent version – Disney’s animated fairy tale “Frozen” – involved a young princess awakening one day with the magical, and inescapable, power to turn anything she touches to ice. So dangerous has she become, in her adult female sexuality, that she is hidden away even from her younger sister whose innocence must be protected.
The fact of menstruation and its life-changing consequences are startling even for the well-balanced and emotionally secure. For the less fortunate who have mental disabilities or troubled histories, it can be terrifying.
The answer to this must not be to collude with the disadvantage and reinforce the phobic reaction of the child. You don’t tell someone with an irrational fear of dirt that they are right to wash their hands hundreds of times a day and offer them an endless supply of soap.
What these girls need is help to deal with physical reality, not a pharmaceutical remedy for avoiding it followed by mutilation to enforce the illusion that it has been conquered. How could anyone have thought otherwise? Was this the ultimate hubris – believing that in the modern age we had the power, and the responsibility, to alter even the most basic facts of the human condition if they did not, at any given moment, offer happiness?
Or was it some kind of defiant ideological joke from the infiltration army: let’s see how outrageous a proposition we can sell to a credulous public using only crude moral blackmail and shameless bullying.
That brings us to the larger political issue. Somehow, the idea of natural or universal human rights to which all the peoples of the world are entitled from birth, which was born in the 18th century and enshrined in the sacred founding documents of the great revolutionary republics, has turned into a narcissist’s charter.
The reverence for the individual who, as the American Declaration of Independence states, is “endowed by his Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” was designed to ensure that no state or ruler could ever transgress the essential liberties of any citizen.
But what every individual was being guaranteed was not his own idea of a perfect life: it was not happiness itself that the government was committed to deliver but the right to pursue it within rational limits.
The state cannot undertake to deliver your own personal version of a contented life. This is exactly the contradiction that the European Court of Human Rights has exposed with its ruling that one group of protesting Swiss citizens must have their “right” to be protected from climate change enforced in law.
You don’t have a right to be comfortable, or healthy, let alone happy. You only have a right to pursue those things in ways that do not damage others. That is the unalienable principle on which all of our freedoms are built. ST.
'Progressive' Is A Weasel Word Created By Leftists To Conceal A Multitude of Sins.
What progressive Christians get wrong.
(Photo: Unsplash)Progressive Christians, intent on enforcing equality in the church, instead sow division. In their desire for absolute equality they remake God as a cosmic Henry Ford who famously told his customers that they could have any colour of Model T 'as long as it's black'. But God does not go in for mass production: He is a craftsman and each one of us is unique.
Injustice based on skin colour, sex, age or any of the other discriminations common in our day should be opposed, especially when it appears in the church. But Christians should also be clear on the grounds on which they oppose injustice.
Subordinating theology
In attempting to undo what they see as injustice, progressive Christians abandon theology and adopt secular woke hermeneutics, particularly Critical Race Theory (CRT). This is the route chosen by the Church of England, teaching it in their schools and preaching it from their pulpits. So entrenched is CRT that a social justice unit being set up in the diocese of Birmingham announced that it would be hiring a 'deconstructing whiteness' officer. In attempting to create equality, they end up emphasising difference.
Recently the Ven Dr Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, Archdeacon of Liverpool, called for 'anti-whiteness' in the church; she also wants Christians to 'smash the patriarchy'. Giving the reason for her views, Dr Threlfall-Holmes did not say they were the result of intensive study and reflection on Scripture; instead she said she had attended a one-day conference on racial justice organised by the charity Reconciliation Initiatives. This resulted in her waking up to the harmful whiteness of the Anglican church.
Far from helping Christians to grasp the value of loving our neighbours, a command Jesus considered of greatest importance, progressive Christianity begins by emphasising divisions between Christians on the basis of skin colour. It encourages the majority of Christians in the UK to view themselves morally flawed due to their inherited skin colour.
Starting point
Critics of progressivism within the CofE point to its divisive and demoralising effects. Valid as these criticism are, they miss the main failure. Dr Threlfall-Holmes and the other progressive Christians make a fundamental error in their starting point by adopting a secular ideology which subordinates the Bible. Where you start influences where you end up. If you are seeking racial harmony through CRT, 'you can't get there from here'.
Progressive Christians take human concepts, varnish them with biblical terminology and imagine they are being true to God's will. It doesn't matter how much of a coating you give these ideologies, they remain human and ignore the sovereignty of God. Nowhere in Scripture do we find the concept of 'intersectionality'.
In the church the Word of God must always be our starting point and supreme rule in faith and life. In Scripture we find a very different approach to reconciling people and helping us live together. The apostles, in a very unjust society, did not operate on a framework of oppressor and oppressed. The Romans who ruled Paul's world certainly oppressed the people they conquered and considered themselves above all others, yet nowhere do we find Paul railing against 'Roman privilege'.
If Paul had used progressive categories the early church would have fractured and died an early death. We find him doing something very different. Paul defends equality not by filling quotas and comparing percentages but by focussing on the person of Christ.
The same in Christ
Instead of demanding visible racial equality between Christians, Paul insists that outward differences are immaterial due to what Christ has done within us. He tells us that in Christ, 'There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus' (Galatians 3:28). Our differences are recognised, but Paul ignores them because we have something far better and more important which binds us together. This is where true equality is found, in Christ and especially when we come to His table.
We are taught that we all, whatever our background, are in the same condition, need the same Saviour, receive His grace in the same way and travel together to the same end. Christians 'have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all' (Colossians 3:10,11).
No division within the gospel and its outworking was permitted. At the Lord's Supper every believer came to the same table. Nationality, language, colour, social class, these were all immaterial. In a hierarchical society based on difference and oppression, the gospel created a place of genuine equality, the church. This scandalised the Romans and provoked opposition to Christians because of their dangerously radical ideas and practices which threatened to undermine their stratified society.
Follow the Gospel fully
The church has not always lived up to its foundational principles: it consists of fallen people who screw things up. There are things in the church's history of which we should be proud and other things of which we should be ashamed. But the things of which we are ashamed should inspire us to redouble our efforts to follow the gospel more fully rather than abandon it for secular ideology.
There is only one place where there is true equality between people, in Christ. Resisting the encroachment of progressive ideology and especially CRT in the church is much more than resisting a political stance: it is a vital defence of the gospel.
Campbell Campbell-Jack is a retired Church of Scotland minister. He blogs at A Grain of Sand. CT.
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