But the Episcopal Church went ahead and ordained Bishop Robinson

But the Episcopal Church went ahead and ordained Bishop Robinson.The commission’s 80-page report, published tomorrow, is expected to fall short of calling for the expulsion of the 50 bishops who attended the consecration of Bishop Robinson, and for Bishop Robinson to step down, as hardliners had called for.Instead the report, drafted in Windsor, will censure the bishops, most from the Episcopal Church in the US, who attended the consecration and ask the Episcopal Church to apologise for electing Bishop Robinson.This compromise is likely to anger both sides, one of which believes that homosexuality is for ever outlawed by the Bible, the other which believes 2,000-year-old words need reinterpretation to better reflect a changing society.. Canon John decided not to accept the post to avoid the possibility of schism raised by church conservatives, particularly in Africa. The Church of England will unveil a blueprint aimed at avoiding a rift over the ordination of gay bishops tomorrow, with the release of the Windsor report.
A commission of 19 senior churchmen, headed by the Primate of Ireland, Archbishop Robin Eames, has spent the last year deliberating on the question of gay bishops, which has threatened to pull the 70-million strong global Anglican community apart.The row was triggered by the nomination of Canon Jeffrey John as Bishop of Reading and the consecration of Gene Robinson as the Bishop of New Hampshire in America last year.Both men are gay. Newspapers rather like anniversaries, Watson, and there, I think, you have it.

Cancel our reservation for the boat train, Mrs Hudson, we shan’t be needing it after all Or then again …. Police warnings that this year’s Hallowe’en will be the most violent and destructive ever have prompted Asda, Britain’s second-largest supermarket chain, to take the extraordinary step of banning teenagers from buying eggs, commonly used as trick or treat missiles. Indeed, there was now a further mystery: what had set off the new hue and cry? Had some clue hitherto overlooked by decades of work by police and catchpenny journalists come to light?It appears not. Despite the Press Association’s communiqu?n the subject, reporting breathlessly that “police …

will use new techniques like DNA profiling to help solve the high-profile case”, no new evidence has been found. In the unambiguous words of Scotland Yard yesterday: “There are absolutely no new lines of inquiry.” The peer of the realm, despite a brief thrill last year involving a dead banjo player from St Helens, is as missing as ever.But this newspaper may have deduced the reason for the latest Lucan revelry The mystery began 30 years ago. The High Court was having none of this nonsense, declaring him dead in 1999. Thus did the mystery ­ and the sightings ­ go on.And, as it turns out, so did the police investigation. Scotland Yard said yesterday that, far from being reopened, the inquiry had never been closed, thus confirming what many of us had long suspected: this was no open-and-shut case. Now, we are told, the Met’s finest are on the case again, revisiting the saga which, Lucan’s friends insisted, really ended when the peer “did the decent thing” and tossed himself into the English Channel. The suspicion has persisted, however, that this was a cover story and that the seventh earl escaped to some extradition-free paradise, surrounded by endless supplies of cocktails and a bevy of tropical lovelieswafting palm fronds over his brow.

One paper even published a computer-generated picture of how the desperate fugitive would look now, together with the headline: “Police reopen the Lucan inquiry”. Such reports follow several weeks in which the trail of the missing earl ­ cold these past three decades ­ warmed up again. First the death of Susan Maxwell-Scott, “the last person to see Lucan alive”, was reported. Sadly, she went to her maker “taking her secrets to the grave”, as one paper’s teasing copy went. Then, last Sunday, “Lord Lucan and the mystery of the missing letter” appeared in a broadsheet. Common sense dictated that so many witnesses simply could not be wrong.