Peter Rhodes: Can religions change their spots?

IF you have ever seen the stars in a night sky free of industrial smog and undimmed by light pollution, you have witnessed a dazzling, memorable exhibition better than any laser show. Today, as the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England reports glumly, our view is ruined by light from towns and cities. So here's an idea. Let's have a national light-free event every now and then, switching off every single bulb for a couple of hours on a suitably cloudless night. It would be a great event for children, astronomers and, of course, muggers.

A LOCAL imam popped up in the wake of the Orlando massacre to sing the praises of "my peaceful religion." So which bit of the Koran is peaceful towards gays? Islam, Judaism and Christianity have all spent hundreds of years preaching that homosexuality leads to hellfire. Suddenly, having inspired loathing and distrust for so long, some holy men now want to appear all loving and inclusive. The Book of Jeremiah is part of all three religions. It includes the famous verse that tells us the leopard cannot change his spots. Can religions?

MEANWHILE, on the day that the Imam in Orlando was preaching peace and tolerance, a Dutch woman who alleged she had been drugged and raped in Qatar was convicted in an Islamic court of having sex outside marriage. The 22-year-old was fined and given a suspended sentence. An official described the sentence as "lenient."

HAS there ever been a more deliciously detestable telly-villain than Rupert Everett as Feron, the corrupt Governor of Paris in The Musketeers (BBC1)? He exudes so much nastiness that when we learn he is in agony from a crumbling spine, we just want to see him wince. What a class act.

IN all the years that I have been researching and writing about the First World War, I cannot recall a sadder story than the one I stumbled across a few days ago in a church in Devon. Two brothers, Archie and Charlie Gush, are included on the plaque to the dead of 1914-18 in Beer parish church. What the plaque doesn't tell us is that both these brothers actually survived the war. A little research reveals that Archie was a hero, awarded the Military Medal and Bar for two feats of leadership and courage. Charlie was no less heroic, serving in the medical corps. At war's end, on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, both Gush brothers were alive and well, Archie on the Italian front and Charlie in Uganda. Their relatives in Beer must have celebrated, knowing their boys, having survived so much carnage, would soon be home. But as the war ended, an epidemic of influenza swept the world. Archie died of the disease near Venice on November 17, Charlie a month later in Africa. Hopes raised, hopes dashed. How in God's name could any family cope with such anguish?

I STRODE out of the surgery a few weeks ago having scored a healthily low 4.9 on my cholesterol. Oh, the dizzy sensation of goodness. What a fine, clean-living specimen of humanity I must be. And this week comes research based on nearly 70,000 patients which suggests that cholesterol doesn't matter in the over-60s and statins are a waste of time. Meanwhile, out of the blue, I have been invited to have something called a pneumococcal vaccination which I'd never even heard of. Medicine: the more we learn, the less we know.