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Charles Flowers, director of the Christian youth “boot camp” Love Demonstrated Ministries in Banquete, Texas, was charged with aggravated assault in August; authorities said that when one 15-year-old camper wouldn’t keep pace during a morning run in June, Flowers and an employee tied a rope to her and dragged her along behind a van. Also in August, Wiley Drake, a Baptist pastor in Buena Park, California, acknowledged that after an activist group urged the IRS to investigate his church’s nonprofit status (in light of his recent endorsement of presidential candidate Mike Huckabee), he instructed his followers to pray for the deaths of the group’s leaders.
The Jerusalem Post reported in June that certain ultraorthodox Israeli pirate radio stations had stopped playing songs by 20-year-old Eliyahu Faizkov, seemingly because his singing voice sounds too much like that of a woman. Jewish law compares hearing a woman sing to seeing parts of her body that are ordinarily kept covered, and many Orthodox authorities hold that men thus may not listen even to a recording of a woman singing; apparently the concern was that male listeners would believe they were violating the law even though they actually weren’t.
A surgeon and a gynecologist were arrested in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu in June for allegedly having their 15-year-old son perform a caesarean section while they filmed him, apparently in hopes it would get him into Guinness World Records. Witnesses said the father (the surgeon) had screened the video at a recent meeting of the Indian Medical Association; according to one news-paper account, he’d earlier told an interviewer that the boy had been performing similar procedures since age 12.
