from http://www.smh.com.au/:
Girl kills herself over atom-smashing Big Bang fears
A teenage girl in India has reportedly killed herself out of fear the world was about to end because of the atom-smashing “Big Bang” experiment conducted in Europe.
The 16-year old girl, from the state of Madhya Pradesh, died after drinking pesticide, The Daily Mail said.
Her father, identified on local television as Biharilal, said his daughter, Chayya, had killed herself after watching doomsday predictions about the Large Hadron Collider on Indian news programmes.
“In the past two days, Chayya had asked me and other relatives about the world coming to an end on September 10,” Biharilal said.
“We tried to divert her attention and told her she should not worry about such things, but to no avail.”
As part of their experiments, scientists have now successfully fired protons in both directions around a 27-kilometre underground ring on the Swiss-French border.
They hope to smash the components of atoms together in attempts to learn about their structure.
But fears have been raised the experiment could create a black hole that would suck the Earth away, although the scientists involved insist the experiment is safe.
Fears about the experiment had spread rapidly through the media in deeply religious India, The Daily Mail said.
Thousands of people had rushed to temples to pray and fast while others savoured their favourite foods in anticipation of the world’s end, the paper said.
from news.com.au:
THE Church of England will make an official apology to naturalist Charles Darwin for criticising his famous theory of evolution
Coming 126 years after his death, the church’s apology will focus on how wrong it was for senior bishops in the past to misunderstand and attack Darwin’s theory about man being descended from apes.
Senior church officials will post the apology in the form of an article written by the Reverend Dr Malcolm Brown on the church’s website tomorrow.
“Charles Darwin, 200 years from your birth (in 1809), the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still,” the article says, according to extracts printed by The Mail on Sunday newspaper.
“But the struggle for your reputation is not over yet, and the problem is not just your religious opponents but those who falsely claim you in support of their own interests.”
But the apology by Dr Brown, who is the director of mission and public affairs of the Archbishops’ Council, has been dismissed as “pointless” by Darwin’s great great grandson Andrew Darwin.
“Why bother? he said.
“When an apology is made after 200 years, it’s not so much to right a wrong, but to make the person or organisation making the apology feel better.”
But Dr Brown says everyone makes mistakes, the church included.
“When a big new idea emerges that changes the way people look at the world, it’s easy to feel that every old idea, every certainty, is under attack and then to do battle against the new insights,” he writes.
“The church made that mistake with Galileo’s astronomy and has since realised its error.
“Some Church people did it again in the 1860s with Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
“So it is important to think again about Darwin’s impact on religious thinking, then and now.”
Dr Brown said there was nothing incompatible between Darwin’s scientific theories and Christian teaching.
