Thursday, December 20, 2012

Gates of Vienna News Feed 12/20/2012

Gates of Vienna News Feed 12/20/2012Republican leaders have pulled their backup tax plan from the floor of the House, saying that they do not have enough votes to pass it. This leaves it up to President Obama and Senate Democrats to devise legislation to avert the fiscal cliff.

Meanwhile, civil servants in Greece who work for state enterprises will receive salary cuts of 25% after the new year.

In other news, pupils in a Church of England primary school may experience a shock when they return to class after the holidays. The teacher they had always known as “Mr. Upton” will have become “Miss Meadows”, the name by which he/she wishes to be addressed after his/her gender change.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Insubria, Jerry Gordon, JP, Nilk, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

1 comments:

bewick said...

UK Brighton and Hove Council prayers. I'm CoE. My Dad and sister were Catholic. Mam was Methodist. ( took the middle road and entirely of my own volition.

Until the 50s/60s most Catholic services in the UK were conducted in Latin as were some parts in the CoE. I could have translated but 99% of the congregation could not - just like the majority of Muslims can neither read, write, speak, or understand Arabic.
The Catholic Church changed to English so that everyone could understand.
Brighton and Hove Council allowed a Muslim cleric to conduct prayers. I don't have a problem with that. I DO though have a problem that it was allowed to be spoken in Arabic which no-one would understand. What was he actually saying? The recipients may have followed the cadences but not the meaning.
Allow by all means but in the language of the host nation. Might the cleric have chosen a different prayer? Who knows.