US MAN BEING FIRED FROM JOB SHOOTS FIVE COLLEAGUES DEAD

A man being fired from his job shot dead five co-workers at a factory on the outskirts of Chicago and wounded five police officers before being gunned down himself, in the country’s latest mass shooting. The gunfire took place at 1.24pm at the Henry Pratt Company in Aurora, Illinois. Police named the suspect as Gary Martin, 45, of Aurora. He was a 15-year employee of the company and “information that we have indicates he was being terminated today”, said Aurora police chief Kristen Ziman.

BERLIN: German health minister Jens Spahn said on Friday that he will seek to ban conversion therapies that claim to change sexual orientation.

“Homosexuality is not an illness, which is why it does not need to be treated,” Spahn, who is gay himself, told the Berlin daily left-leaning daily Die Tageszeitung.

He hoped that a German law banning such therapies could be adopted by the middle of the year.

Conversion therapies have spread in the US and have been used by parents of homosexual or transgender adolescents against their will.

Some techniques involve injections of large doses of testosterone, while others apply electric shocks to people as they view images of homosexual acts.

“I do not believe in these therapies, mainly owing to my own homosexuality,” said Spahn, who represents the right-wing of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative CDU party.

The health minister is counting on support from his colleagues if and when a vote is taken. “I cannot imagine there is a partisan of conversion therapies in my Parliamentary group,” he said.