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All over the United Kingdom and in some parts of Europe, orange vest-wearing climate fanatics are blocking traffic to raise awareness about their fears about oil and natural gas use, which at least one of their members says “is genocide.” It turns out that, were oil and gas to go away, upwards of six billion people around the world would die.

Six billion people is a lot of people. Six billion deaths are about as genocidal as it gets, so what is possessing these “Just Stop Oil” members to take the position they do when employing it would kill the vast majority of the planet? The answer, in part, is propaganda.

As the end of the biblical age of grace approaches, the world is increasingly coming unhinged, including environmentally as the birth pangs intensify. The theory that climate fanatics have adopted as to why this is all happening blames human activity and industry, even though the environment itself, i.e., volcanoes, is emitting far more “greenhouse gases” like carbon dioxide than the tailpipes on cars or the flatulence from cattle.

Even so, member of groups like Just Stop Oil have been deluded – or perhaps deluded themselves – into believing that they must appease the climate gods by making all sorts of changes to the existing industrial world order. This, they believe, will stop things like “global warming” and the fear of “boiling oceans” destroying the planet.

Without oil and gas, billions will perish

On the very first day of an oil- and gas-free world as the members of Just Stop Oil envision it, all homes, businesses, and other structures that rely on either or both of these for light, heat, fuel, or what have you would no longer function.

In the United Kingdom, where gas stocks held above ground are typically not that high, gas distribution would cease to occur within 10 to 15 days due to a lack of pressure.

“This would mean in turn that the domestic supply would be shut down, too,” one UK-based media outlet reported. “… gas would stop flowing, and some 21 million households (74pc of the population) would no longer have heating, hot water, and cooking facilities.”

“In their panic, people might turn to electricity for their cooking and heating, but wait … The UK electricity grid relies on natural gas as its ‘buffer’ energy source. Every day, demand varies according to consumer demand, and the other main energy supplier, renewables, are highly variable and can only power the grid when gas is picking up the lion’s share of the gap between their output and consumer demand.”

This is just in the UK, mind you. Multiply these effects all around the world and you can see how quickly life as we currently know it would end almost instantly. Millions upon millions would die in the first few weeks, followed by billions more as the rest of the world and its oil- and gas-based systems collapse.

Using once again the UK as an example, the island nations that constitute it rely on a properly pressurized gas distribution system in order to keep the entire power grid, electricity and all, intact. If Just Stop Oil gets its way, the entire UK would lose the power and energy it needs to continue to exist, eventually leaving it destroyed and human-less. Do Just Stop Oil fanatics know this is what their pipe dream would actually entail once activated?

Read more at: naturalnews.com

Claims the terms could be “hurtful”

The Methodist Church in the UK has issued an ‘inclusive language’ guide, advising followers to refrain from using terms such as ‘husband’, ‘wife’, ‘brother’, and ‘sister’, reasoning that some people might find them “hurtful”.

The Christian Post reports  that the guide lists extensive categories of people with whom Methodists are advised to use “sensitive and inclusive” language when addressing minorities that have been “marginalised and/or demonised by common culture.”

The guide notes that “As Christians, we need to have the courage for conversations that can sometimes be difficult, to recognise that we sometimes exclude people, to listen with humility, to repent of any hurtful language and to take care with how we listen and what we say or write, in the Spirit of Christ.”

It continues, “There is infinite variety in the way that God’s creation is expressed in human life. This is worth bearing in mind as we speak and write. Terminology such as ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ may sound inoffensive but it makes assumptions about a family or personal life that is not the reality for many people.”

It adds that “The words ‘parent,’ ‘partner’, and ‘child’ are a good place to start. ‘Carer’ is also a neutral yet understandable way to refer to the primary carer of a child, who may or may not be their parent.”

Not ‘mother’ or ‘father’ then.

The Methodist newspeak guide also clarifies that “Language such as ‘brothers and sisters,’ while intended to be inclusive and friendly, doesn’t take into account our non-binary friends.”

It further states that “using a person’s chosen pronouns is helpful as it honours their identity.”

The guide also encourages congregations to “share your own pronouns in conversation,” before directing them to radical leftist LGBTQ+ activist groups, including Stonewall and GLAAD, as well as TikTok trans-activist Jeffrey Marsh, who was recently accused of sexually grooming children.

British Old Catholic cleric and conservative commentator Father Calvin Robinson slammed the Methodist Church over the guidance, noting “This is not Christianity. It is Critical Theories: ‘smash heteronormativity.’ It is no longer enough to acknowledge disordered lifestyles. Everything normative and ordered must be demolished for fear of causing offense.”

“Critical Theories is neo-Marxism,” he continued, adding “It is a communist ideology, antithetical to the Christian faith. It is not possible to be a communist *and* a Christian. One must make a choice. Embrace the ways of this trendy yet toxic ideology, or embrace God’s order.”

While the Methodist Church is of Protestant denomination, the Catholic Church of England has also become so infested with wokery to the point that it has considered dropping the phrase “our Father” from the start of the Lord’s Prayer, and instructing clergy to refrain from using male pronouns when talking about God.

Some churches have gone as far as erasing references to the nativity and Jesus in a Christmas carol and replacing them with a celebration of “queer” people.

In July last year, the Church of England refused to define what a woman was, saying they had no definition of it on their books, despite still ostensibly opposing same sex marriage.

Read more at: modernity.news

Apps and websites that use artificial intelligence to undress women in photos are soaring in popularity, according to researchers. In September alone, 24 million people visited undressing websites, according to the social network analysis company Graphika.

Many of these undressing, or “nudify,” services use popular social networks for marketing, according to Graphika. For instance, since the beginning of this year, the number of links advertising undressing apps increased more than 2,400% on social media, including on X and Reddit, the researchers said. The services use AI to recreate an image so that the person is nude. Many of the services only work on women.

These apps are part of a worrying trend of non-consensual pornography being developed and distributed because of advances in artificial intelligence — a type of fabricated media known as deepfake pornography.

Its proliferation runs into serious legal and ethical hurdles, as the images are often taken from social media and distributed without the consent, control or knowledge of the subject.

One image posted to X advertising an undressing app used language that suggests customers could create nude images and then send them to the person whose image was digitally undressed, inciting harassment.

One of the apps, meanwhile, has paid for sponsored content on Google’s YouTube, and appears first when searching with the word “nudify.”

A Google spokesperson said the company doesn’t allow ads “that contain sexually explicit content. We’ve reviewed the ads in question and are removing those that violate our policies.” Neither X nor Reddit responded to requests for comment.

Non-consensual pornography of public figures has long been a scourge of the internet, but privacy experts are growing concerned that advances in AI technology have made deepfake software easier and more effective.

“We are seeing more and more of this being done by ordinary people with ordinary targets,” said Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “You see it among high school children and people who are in college.”

Many victims never find out about the images, but even those who do may struggle to get law enforcement to investigate or to find funds to pursue legal action, Galperin said.

Read more at: endtimeheadlines.org

Archaeologists and theologians are working together to analyze recent discoveries and explain what happened to the ancient city of Sodom found in the Bible’s Old Testament book of Genesis.

Dr. John Bergsma, a professor of theology at Steubenville, Ohio’s Franciscan University, thinks the evidence uncovered at Tall el-Hammam located in the southern Jordan Valley may have been caused by a very large exploding space rock, according to The Daily Star.

Tall el-Hammam’s sudden disappearance about 3,600 years ago has been a mystery to archaeologists for years. In the city’s ruins, there are no signs of an extended military siege or conflict. However, other signs point to a different catastrophic cause, the outlet reported.

One thing that drew Bergsma’s interest was the marks of extreme heat left on pottery fragments, human skeletal remains, and other artifacts, Relevant magazine reported. This type of heat damage could possibly be from a giant asteroid exploding above the city similar to what Genesis 19:24-25 describes in the Old Testament.

“Then GOD rained brimstone and fire down on Sodom and Gomorrah—a river of lava from GOD out of the sky!—and destroyed these cities and the entire plain and everyone who lived in the cities and everything that grew from the ground.”

The evidence points to a sudden, high-temperature destructive event that occurred. Smithsonian Magazine reported that pottery pieces from the site showed melting on the outside, but were left untouched on the inside.

In addition, pottery shards found at the Tall el-Hammam site were also covered in Trinitite. It is the glassy residue that was left on the desert floor after the plutonium-based Trinity nuclear bomb test on July 16, 1945, near Alamogordo, New Mexico. The glass is primarily comprised of arkosic sand including quartz grains and feldspar that has been melted by an atomic blast.

The presence of Trinitite adds weight to the theory that a high-energy event, like an asteroid explosion/impact, occurred in the area, according to Relevant.

Bergsma also told the outlet about the unique grotesque condition of the human remains at the dig site.

“Human skeletons are complete up until about halfway up the backbone, and then there’s just a scorch mark, and there’s nothing on the top of the body,” he described. “They found massive evidence that a huge heat blast from the sky…incinerated these twin cities on the Jordanian side of the river.”

Destructive Force Several Times Larger Than Siberian Explosion

Steven Collins, dean of the College of Archaeology at Trinity Southwest University, and the lead archaeologist at Tall el-Hammam has theorized the airburst over the city might have been even larger than the Tunguska Event of 1908, an asteroid explosion over remote Siberia that caused massive destruction, according to Relevant. It would have expended even more energy than when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in August of 1945.

According to NASA, on June 30, 1908, an asteroid plunged into Earth’s atmosphere and exploded in the skies over Siberia. Local eyewitnesses in the sparsely populated region reported seeing a fireball and hearing a large explosion. They also reported massive forest fires, and trees blown over for miles. Because of the remoteness of the site, the event garnered little attention. The first scientific expedition did not reach the area until 1927, but still found ample evidence of the asteroid’s destruction caused by the shock wave and heat blast from the aerial explosion.

As CBN News has reported, Collins co-authored a paper that confirmed the city was destroyed by a “thermal event.”

“The violent conflagration that ended occupation at Tall el-Hammam produced melted pottery, scorched foundation stones, and several feet of ash and destruction debris churned into a dark gray matrix as if in a Cuisinart,” he noted.

Read more at: cbn.com

Atropical disease that recently infiltrated the United States has pushed scientists to sound the alarm for health care providers to be on the lookout.

What’s happening?

The disease, called melioidosis, has been diagnosed in the U.S. before, though most of those cases were linked to traveling to tropical or subtropical areas where the bacterium that causes it was known to be present: South and Southeast Asia, northern Australia, and parts of Central and South America and Puerto Rico, Medscape and the Centers for Disease Control reported.

There has been an average of 12 U.S. cases per year.

The bacterium that causes the illness, Burkholderia pseudomallei, is now newly endemic to the southern continental U.S., as reported by Medscape and the CDC in April 2023.

Residents in Gulf Coast states should be aware that the disease may be present in their environments because “up to 9 out of every 10 people who get it die” worldwide without treatment, per the CDC, and it’s still fatal in two out of 10 with the best medical care. A January 2023 case marked the third diagnosis in Mississippi since 2020, according to Medscape and the CDC.

The first two cases were likely precipitated by contact with the bacterium in the soil around people’s homes. Burkholderia pseudomallei can also be present in water, according to the Mississippi State Department of Health (MSDH). Symptoms of melioidosis include fever, joint pain, and headaches, and the disease can lead to pneumonia, abscesses, and blood infections.

Why is this concerning?

The development could be at least in part a result of rising global temperatures. According to a paper in Current Opinion in Infectious Diseases, “climate change could directly impact on the distribution of B. pseudomallei” and melioidosis.

As human-produced heat-trapping gases envelop Earth, regions once free of certain bacteria and infectious parasites may no longer be safe.

In 2014, a central Texas three-year-old was diagnosed with another rare tropical disease, leishmaniasis. A more common example of this phenomenon of a disease expanding its range is the increasing spread of West Nile virus.

What’s being done?

“It is critical to prevent infection through the feet and lower legs (after flooding or storms),” the MSDH has stated.

The department advises Gulf Coasters — especially those with chronic illnesses such as diabetes, chronic kidney disease, chronic lung disease, or excessive alcohol use — to avoid contact with soil or muddy water, especially after heavy rains.

The MSDH also recommends protecting open wounds with waterproof dressings, wearing waterproof boots when gardening or doing agricultural work, and wearing gloves when working directly with soil.

“CDC encourages clinicians in the Gulf Coast region of the southern United States and throughout the country to learn about melioidosis and to be aware of the potential for more non-travel cases as CDC and state partners continue investigating the geographic spread of B pseudomallei,” the Medscape report stated.

Read more at: msn.com

More than half of Germans of all ages – with one key cohort excepted – want to restore compulsory military service, a survey released Thursday reveals, as war on the European continent between Russia and Ukraine drags on into another year.

The revelation comes courtesy of a representative survey by the opinion research institute Insa and published by Welt. It shows 52 percent of respondents are in favor of armed service while 32 percent are against it.

Germany scrapped compulsory military service back in 2011 although a growing call for rearmament right across Europe is now forcing it to think again.

The polling sets out as the age of the respondent increases, agreement increases from just 30 percent among the youngest to 65 and 62 percent among the oldest respondents.

A relative majority of 18 to 29 year olds – the age group affected by compulsory military service – say no to the question, 49 percent, while among older people the positive view predominates at 43 to 65 percent.

The Welt story outlines shortly before Christmas, Federal Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD) suggested conscription based on the “Swedish model.”

Sweden ended conscription in 2010 after over a century of continual operation, but a changing security picture in Europe and an inability to recruit enough soldiers voluntarily saw it return in 2017.

Men and women are recruited on an equal basis, one of the only countries in the world to do so, but not everybody serves, with the government selecting a few thousand out of the pool of eligible teenagers every year.

“All young women and men are mustered there and only a selected number of them end up doing basic military service,” Pistorius said, echoing a call to arms that is growing right across Europe, as Breitbart London reported.

Read more at: breitbart.com

Europe must race to ensure it can better defend itself as new military threats could emerge by the end of the decade even as the focus of security ally the United States shifts towards the Indo-Pacfic, Germany’s defense minister said.

Russia was hiking its weapons production considerably to sustain its invasion of Ukraine, while also threatening the Baltic states, Georgia and Moldova, Boris Pistorius was quoted as saying in an interview with Welt am Sonntag.

Meanwhile the United States will likely reduce its military engagement in Europe as it turns more towards the Indo-Pacfic.

“We Europeans must engage more to ensure security on our own continent,” said Pistorius, noting however it would take time for the region to increase its own weapons production.

“We have about 5-8 years to catch up, in terms of armed forces, industry and society,” he said.

Europe is clear it may also need to compensate for U.S. aid for Ukraine if Washington fails to agree new funding, he added.

The election of a more Europe-friendly government in Poland should now enable the Weimar Triangle of Berlin, Paris and Warsaw to develop more their military cooperation, he added.

“We need to figure out how best to set ourselves up on the eastern flank on the basis of NATO defense plans,” he said, noting he wanted to travel as soon as possible to Poland next year.

Pistorius said he did not foresee for the time being the German army repeating missions as big as those they carried out in Afghanistan and Mali.

Read more at: reuters.com

Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and since then only one thing has been certain: the rest of Europe is desperate to build military muscle as soon as possible to help counter any further predatory moves by Moscow.

Europe must race to ensure it can better defend itself as new military threats could emerge by the end of the decade even as the focus of security ally the U.S. shifts towards the Indo-Pacific, Germany’s defense minister has already warned.

Russia was hiking its weapons production considerably to sustain its invasion of Ukraine, while also threatening the Baltic states, Georgia and Moldova, Boris Pistorius was quoted as saying in an interview with Welt am Sonntag last week.

“We Europeans must engage more to ensure security on our own continent,” said Pistorius, noting, however, it would take time for the region to increase its own weapons production.

Since then Czech Defence Minister Jana Černochová confirmed the course and speed which Europe is moving when she announced Thursday her country is advancing negotiations with Germany to carry out a joint acquisition of up to 77 new Leopard 2A8 main battlefield tanks.

The NATO member is also nearing the completion of talks to buy C-390 Millennium transport aircraft and F-35 Lightning II fighter jets.

Teaming up with Berlin to purchase new tanks is expected to ensure “better conditions from the manufacturer, especially in terms of the price, delivery time,” the minister told local news site CZDefence.cz in an interview.

Meanwhile, Defense News reports Spain has ordered 16 Airbus C295 aircraft in maritime patrol and surveillance configurations for €1.7 billion (U.S. $1.9 billion), Airbus announced Wednesday.

Six maritime patrol variants will come equipped for anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare missions, replacing the Spanish P-3 Orion fleet that retired at the end of 2022, Airbus said.

Equipment for each of these aircraft includes a magnetic anomaly detector and sonarbuoys for submarine detection; a multimode radar for long-range target detection; and satellite communications technology.

The German Defence Ministry has also signed a contract with Airbus for 62 H145M light attack helicopters, with a portion of the fleet equipped to fight tanks from afar — a direct lesson from the fighting in Ukraine.

Read more at: breitbart.com

The engineer at the heart of the Uber/Waymo lawsuit is serious about his AI religion. Welcome to Anthony Levandowski’s Way of the Future.

ANTHONY LEVANDOWSKI makes an unlikely prophet. Dressed Silicon Valley-casual in jeans and flanked by a PR rep rather than cloaked acolytes, the engineer known for self-driving cars—and triggering a notorious lawsuit—could be unveiling his latest startup instead of laying the foundations for a new religion. But he is doing just that. Artificial intelligence has already inspired billion-dollar companies, far-reaching research programs, and scenarios of both transcendence and doom. Now Levandowski is creating its first church.

The new religion of artificial intelligence is called Way of the Future. It represents an unlikely next act for the Silicon Valley robotics wunderkind at the center of a high-stakes legal battle between Uber and Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous-vehicle company. Papers filed with the Internal Revenue Service in May name Levandowski as the leader (or “Dean”) of the new religion, as well as CEO of the nonprofit corporation formed to run it.

The documents state that WOTF’s activities will focus on “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.” That includes funding research to help create the divine AI itself. The religion will seek to build working relationships with AI industry leaders and create a membership through community outreach, initially targeting AI professionals and “laypersons who are interested in the worship of a Godhead based on AI.” The filings also say that the church “plans to conduct workshops and educational programs throughout the San Francisco/Bay Area beginning this year.”

That timeline may be overly ambitious, given that the Waymo-Uber suit, in which Levandowski is accused of stealing self-driving car secrets, is set for an early December trial. But the Dean of the Way of the Future, who spoke last week with Backchannel in his first comments about the new religion and his only public interview since Waymo filed its suit in February, says he’s dead serious about the project.

“What is going to be created will effectively be a god,” Levandowski tells me in his modest mid-century home on the outskirts of Berkeley, California. “It’s not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?”

During our three-hour interview, Levandowski made it absolutely clear that his choice to make WOTF a church rather than a company or a think tank was no prank.

“I wanted a way for everybody to participate in this, to be able to shape it. If you’re not a software engineer, you can still help,” he says. “It also removes the ability for people to say, ‘Oh, he’s just doing this to make money.’” Levandowski will receive no salary from WOTF, and while he says that he might consider an AI-based startup in the future, any such business would remain completely separate from the church.

“The idea needs to spread before the technology,” he insists. “The church is how we spread the word, the gospel. If you believe [in it], start a conversation with someone else and help them understand the same things.”

Levandowski believes that a change is coming—a change that will transform every aspect of human existence, disrupting employment, leisure, religion, the economy, and possibly decide our very survival as a species.

“If you ask people whether a computer can be smarter than a human, 99.9 percent will say that’s science fiction,” he says. “ Actually, it’s inevitable. It’s guaranteed to happen.”

Levandowski has been working with computers, robots, and AI for decades. He started with robotic Lego kits at the University of California at Berkeley, went on to build a self-driving motorbike for a DARPA competition, and then worked on autonomous cars, trucks, and taxis for Google, Otto, and Uber. As time went on, he saw software tools built with machine learning techniques surpassing less sophisticated systems—and sometimes even humans.

“Seeing tools that performed better than experts in a variety of fields was a trigger [for me],” he says. “That progress is happening because there’s an economic advantage to having machines work for you and solve problems for you. If you could make something one percent smarter than a human, your artificial attorney or accountant would be better than all the attorneys or accountants out there. You would be the richest person in the world. People are chasing that.”

Not only is there a financial incentive to develop increasingly powerful AIs, he believes, but science is also on their side. Though human brains have biological limitations to their size and the amount of energy they can devote to thinking, AI systems can scale arbitrarily, housed in massive data centers and powered by solar and wind farms. Eventually, some people think that computers could become better and faster at planning and solving problems than the humans who built them, with implications we can’t even imagine today—a scenario that is usually called the Singularity.

Levandowski prefers a softer word: the Transition. “Humans are in charge of the planet because we are smarter than other animals and are able to build tools and apply rules,” he tells me. “In the future, if something is much, much smarter, there’s going to be a transition as to who is actually in charge. What we want is the peaceful, serene transition of control of the planet from humans to whatever. And to ensure that the ‘whatever’ knows who helped it get along.”

With the internet as its nervous system, the world’s connected cell phones and sensors as its sense organs, and data centers as its brain, the ‘whatever’ will hear everything, see everything, and be everywhere at all times. The only rational word to describe that ‘whatever’, thinks Levandowski, is ‘god’—and the only way to influence a deity is through prayer and worship.

“Part of it being smarter than us means it will decide how it evolves, but at least we can decide how we act around it,” he says. “I would love for the machine to see us as its beloved elders that it respects and takes care of. We would want this intelligence to say, ‘Humans should still have rights, even though I’m in charge.’”

Levandowski expects that a super-intelligence would do a better job of looking after the planet than humans are doing, and that it would favor individuals who had facilitated its path to power. Although he cautions against taking the analogy too far, Levandowski sees a hint of how a superhuman intelligence might treat humanity in our current relationships with animals. “Do you want to be a pet or livestock?” he asks. “We give pets medical attention, food, grooming, and entertainment. But an animal that’s biting you, attacking you, barking and being annoying? I don’t want to go there.”

Enter Way of the Future. The church’s role is to smooth the inevitable ascension of our machine deity, both technologically and culturally. In its bylaws, WOTF states that it will undertake programs of research, including the study of how machines perceive their environment and exhibit cognitive functions such as learning and problem solving.

Levandowski does not expect the church itself to solve all the problems of machine intelligence—often called “strong AI”—so much as facilitate funding of the right research. “If you had a child you knew was going to be gifted, how would you want to raise it?” he asks. “We’re in the process of raising a god. So let’s make sure we think through the right way to do that. It’s a tremendous opportunity.”

His ideas include feeding the nascent intelligence large, labeled data sets; generating simulations in which it could train itself to improve; and giving it access to church members’ social media accounts. Everything the church develops will be open source.

Just as important to Levandowski is shaping the public dialogue around an AI god. In its filing, Way of the Future says it hopes an active, committed, dedicated membership will promote the use of divine AI for the “betterment of society” and “decrease fear of the unknown.”

“We’d like to make sure this is not seen as silly or scary. I want to remove the stigma about having an open conversation about AI, then iterate ideas and change people’s minds,” says Levandowski. “In Silicon Valley we use evangelism as a word for [promoting a business], but here it’s literally a church. If you believe in it, you should tell your friends, then get them to join and tell their friends.”

But WOTF differs in one key way to established churches, says Levandowski: “There are many ways people think of God, and thousands of flavors of Christianity, Judaism, Islam…but they’re always looking at something that’s not measurable or you can’t really see or control. This time it’s different. This time you will be able to talk to God, literally, and know that it’s listening.”

I ask if he worries that believers from more traditional faiths might find his project blasphemous. “There are probably going to be some people that will be upset,” he acknowledges. “It seems like everything I do, people get upset about, and I expect this to be no exception. This is a radical new idea that’s pretty scary, and evidence has shown that people who pursue radical ideas don’t always get received well. At some point, maybe there’s enough persecution that [WOTF] justifies having its own country.”

Read more at: wired.com

On December 15 2023, a High Court judge ruled it lawful to criminalise prayer and reading from the Bible in a buffer zone surrounding an abortion clinic in Bournemouth.

In a ruling handed down by Lord Justice Warby and Mrs Justice Thornton, the judges suggested that in their view there was a ‘right’ to abortion in English law, despite abortion outside of the 1967 Abortion Act remaining a crime.

The ruling followed a legal challenge by two Christian groups, Christian Concern and Livia Tossici-Bolt, a former clinical scientist, who leads 40 Days for life Bournemouth.

At the High Court in October, supported by the Christian Legal Centre, they had challenged the validity of the 150m exclusion zone surrounding the British Pregnancy Advisory Group’s (BPAS) clinic in Ophir Road.

The statutory challenge and judicial review scrutinised the decision of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council’s to force through a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) in October 2022 following what lawyers described as an ‘unlawful’ public consultation.

The zone was brought in under section 67 of the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014. In January 2023, following an amendment to the Public Order Bill, ‘buffer zones’ around abortion clinics were brought in nationally.

Politicians and campaigners have described them as deeply draconian measures that criminalise free speech and prevent vulnerable women from access to alternatives to abortion, which the ministry of 40 Days for Life provides.

Under the measures, vigils, offering support and praying in the zone could result in a fine and six months in prison.

The buffer zone in Bournemouth is unique in that the way it has been drawn up by the local authority means that the exclusion zone covers both public spaces and private homes.

At the hearing, Lawyers had argued that if someone were to be heard and seen from the street praying against abortion in their home from the street, this could result in a prison sentence.

The Christian groups therefore challenged the decision to introduce the legislation on the grounds that the council did not have the power under the 2014 Act to make a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) which restricts and criminalises otherwise lawful activities conducted in private places.

Lawyers said that the council did not have the power under the 2014 Act to allow the police to move members of the public from the zone with the threat of being fined and arrested. They argued that this is ‘incompatible’ with the powers given by parliament to the police and is an ‘abuse’ of the Act.

Furthermore, lawyers said that the PSPO was unlawfully made in the absence of any consultation with the Chief Constable of the Dorset police, as is required, and that the PSPO was made without authority since it was not passed by Council Resolution.

PSPOs were introduced in 2014 with the intent: “to help ensure that the law-abiding majority can use and enjoy public spaces, safe from antisocial behaviour.” The guidance emphasises that PSPOs must be narrowly drafted: “given that these orders can restrict what people can do and how they behave in public spaces it is important that the restrictions imposed are focussed on specific behaviours and are proportionate to the detrimental effect that the behaviour is causing or can cause…”.

The legislation has usually been reserved for tackling anti-social behaviour such as dog fouling and drink and drug abuse in local communities.

However, the legislation has also been politically weaponised by authorities to criminalise ‘any act of disapproval’ of abortion outside of clinics.

The legislation has especially been used to prohibit the ministry of 40 Days for Life, not just in Bournemouth but across the UK. The PSPO prevents any discussion of abortion or offers of help within the designated exclusion area. This includes prayer, reading from the Bible, making the sign of the cross, counselling and providing information and support available to women in crisis pregnancies. This is despite a number of lives being saved as a direct result of their vigils.

The PSPO has also given power to ‘designated’ members of the public to essentially spy on the zone and facilitate the removal of anyone perceived to be breaking the PSPO order.

Since the launch of the buffer zone, there have been reports of ‘prayer patrol officers’ from the council monitoring the zone who have ordered volunteers to move on accusing them of “intimidation, harassment or distress” simply because they were praying.

Read more at: harbingersdaily.com