Walmart-owned Vudu began offering filtered streaming movies this month of more than 600 titles, allowing families to watch major films like the Marvel series without the coarse language, sexuality or excessive violence.

The announcement by Vudu came six months after a judge ruled that another streaming company – VidAngel – had violated copyright law. Although VidAngel remains in business, the judge’s ruling limits what content it can filter.

The Vudu feature, called Family Play, gives families the option of cutting out sexuality, nudity, violence, language and substance abuse. It is powered by Clearplay, a company that has been offering technology to filter movies for more than a decade.  

Tim Winter, president of the Parents Television Council, said he was “thrilled” by Vudu’s announcement. Walmart’s involvement, he said, gives the Vudu service staying power.

“Over the past two decades, Disney and some of the other studios have sued about 14 different technology providers, either into bankruptcy or to the brink of bankruptcy, and shut down most of them,” Winter told Christian Headlines. “But now Walmart is stepping in. It understands that there is a vast marketplace in America for this type of service. It’s going to be tough for the studios to squash Walmart like a bug – as they’ve been able to successfully do to these startup…

In a meeting with the United Nations’ Human Rights Council on Tuesday, a member of the China Tribunal testified that the Chinese government is actively harvesting organs from persecuted persons in the country. 

According to Business Insider, the China Tribunal – an independent non-profit human rights charity that is investigating the mass harvesting – claimed that the government is collecting hearts, kidneys, lungs and skin from members of banned and persecuted religious groups including Uighur Muslims and members of the Falun Gong religious group. 

“Forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, including the religious minorities of Falun Gong and Uighurs, has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale,” Hamid Sabi, a lawyer with the China Tribunal, said before the UN.

Sabi implored the Human Rights Council to bring an end to the forced harvesting of the marginalized people calling it “one of the worst mass atrocities of this century.”

While presenting the findings in the Tribunal’s final report from June, Sabi also testified that the group has “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” of the harvesting.

According to the final report, the group was able to collect evidence that thousands were “cut open while still alive for their kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs, cornea and skin to be removed and turned into…

JOS, Nigeria, September 27, 2019 (Morning Star News) – Muslim Fulani herdsmen this month kidnapped and killed a pastor’s wife in north-central Nigeria’s Kaduna state three days after suspected herdsmen killed a Baptist pastor in another part of the state, sources said.

Unaware that Esther Ishaku Katung had been killed after being kidnapped in Bagoma, 122 kilometers (75 miles) west of Kaduna City on Sept. 14, her family paid a 250,000 naira (US$690) ransom before discovering her body, said the Rev. Joseph Hayab, chairman of the Kaduna state chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN).

Her husband, the Rev. Ishaku Katung of the Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) congregation in Bagoma, escaped but was wounded by gunfire when the herdsmen broke into their home on church premises at 11:30 p.m. as they slept, Pastor Hayab said.

“Information we got from some of the kidnapped victims who escaped from the herdsmen’s enclave shows that Esther Katung and two other victims had escaped from the herdsmen’s captivity, but she was recaptured by them,” Pastor Hayab told Morning Star News. “She attempted to escape with two others after they were kidnapped by the herdsmen; this infuriated the herdsmen, leading them to kill her. They broke her legs in order to prevent her from escaping and smashed her head too. This led to her death.”

The kidnappers…

A British court ruled this week that a transgender man who gave birth after having partial gender-reassignment surgery must be listed as the mother, and not the father, on the child’s birth certificate.

Freddy McConnell was born female but began self-identifying as a male during adulthood. McConnell started taking testosterone at age 25 and then had a mastectomy. 

McConnell then stopped taking testosterone, during which time the transgender man became pregnant using sperm from a donor, the Guardian newspaper reported.

McConnell wanted to be listed as the child’s father on the birth certificate but was told by the registrar that British law would not permit it.

On Wednesday, Judge Andrew McFarlane of the High Court of Justice agreed with the current law and ruled McConnell must be listed as the mother.

“There is a material difference between a person’s gender and their status as a parent,” McFarlane wrote. “Being a ‘mother’, whilst hitherto always associated with being female, is the status afforded to a person who undergoes the physical and biological process of carrying a pregnancy and giving birth. 

“It is now medically and legally possible for an individual, whose gender is recognised in law as male, to become pregnant and give birth to their child,” McFarlane added. “Whilst that person’s gender is ‘male’, their parental…

VATICAN CITY (RNS) — During informal conversations with Jesuit clergy in Africa, Pope Francis opened up about his spirituality after being made pope — and criticized clericalism in the Catholic Church for its fixation on sex rather than equity and integrity.

“One dimension of clericalism is the exclusive moral fixation on the sixth commandment (which in the Catholic Bible is the prohibition on adultery),” Francis told 24 Jesuit priests sitting in a circle around him in Mozambique on Sept. 5.

“We focus on sex and then we do not give weight to social injustice, slander, gossip and lies. The church today needs a profound conversion in this area.”

The closed-door meeting took place during Francis’ Sept. 4-10 papal visit to the African countries of Mozambique, Madagascar and Mauritius. The official transcript was published Thursday (Sept. 26) by the Jesuit-run magazine La Civiltà Cattolica.

“Great shepherds give people a lot of freedom,” the pope continued. “The good shepherd knows how to lead his flock without enslaving it to rules that deaden people. Clericalism, on the other hand, leads to hypocrisy, even in religious life.”

A master communicator, Pope Francis holds his own amid the large crowds that usually follow such an influential faith figure, but private and off-the-cuff conversations such as the one with the Jesuits in Africa are…

TIZI-OUZOU, Algeria, September 26, 2019 (Morning Star News) – Authorities today sealed shut a church building in Tigzirt, Algeria, two days after shutting another building serving two churches without prior notice, sources said.

Acting on orders from the governor of Tizi-Ouzou Province, eight police officers arrived at 11:45 a.m. on Tuesday (Sept. 24) at the Church of Boghni building and sealed the doors and windows of the Protestant church building in Boghni, 35 kilometers (21 miles) southwest of the city of Tizi-Ouzou, pastor Tahar Chergui said.

“I was surprised when one of the police officers contacted me to meet them at the site where our church is,” Pastor Chergui told Morning Star News. “I had not received any notice; they went straight to proceed with the closure by sealing. They could have warned us before; why didn’t they?”

The building serves the 190 members of Pastor Chergui’s church as well as another Protestant church serving nearly 200 people from Assi-Youcef village, he said.

Officers posted a notice on the building indicating that it was closed due to lack of registration under Algeria’s 2006 law on non-Muslim worship: “We, the police of Boghni, inform the whole population of Boghni that the premises illegally used by the named Tahar Chergui [address] to celebrate non-Muslim worship was closed and sealed by order of the governor dated Sept. 18, 2019….