A September inquest into the 2007 suicide of a 26-year-old woman found that doctors at Norfolk and Norwich Hospital could have saved her, but that because she had executed a living will ordering no treatment, they rebuffed the pleas of family members to treat her because, they said, they feared the woman would sue them if she recovered.

An employment judge ruled in September that Tim Nicholson could use the "religion" claim for employment discrimination to sue the firm Grainger PLC, in Newcastle, even though the disputes he had with management were ostensibly just political -- about his fear of global climate change. Judge David Sneath said he found Nicholson's ecology convictions so sincere and all-encompassing that they amounted to religious beliefs.

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