The steel doors are closing. Embattled, uncompromising, Iran’s rulers are returning the country to a state of siege, locking out freedom and preparing to extinguish the remaining flickers of resistance. Yesterday one hardline cleric called for the execution of “rioters”, demanding punishment “without showing any mercy to teach them a lesson”. The Guardian Council, the supreme legislative body asked to look at possible instances of electoral fraud, found no major violation, declaring the vote the “healthiest” since the 1979 revolution. Armed police patrolled Tehran, prepared to fire on anyone daring to protest.

Yet one image has defied all attempts to expunge democracy and crush the hopes for change: the image of Neda Soltan, the 26-year-old music student who bled wordlessly to death in a Tehran side street after being shot by a government militiaman. Her tragic death, poignantly captured on grainy mobile telephone footage, has flashed around the world. It has appalled foreign ministers of the G8, prompting even the Russians to deplore the post-election violence. It has galvanised Mir Hossein Mousavi’s supporters, reinforcing their determination to surrender neither their principles nor their voice. And it laid bare the cynicism, ruthlessness and brutality of a self-appointed clique determined to remain in power at whatever cost.

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“I have to tell you about Maggy,” my colleague said excitedly. He was just back from Africa, and I was eager to hear about his work and his meeting with 100 Christian leaders from east-central Africa. But he wanted to talk about Maggy.

“Love made me an inventor,” Marguerite “Maggy” Barankitse had told several of my colleagues with a sparkle in her eye. The more she talked, the more my colleagues wanted to see her Maison Shalom (House of Peace). They arranged to travel from Bujumbura to Ruyigi, the city in Burundi where Maggy lives.

Maggy’s story goes back 15 years to the civil war in Burundi…

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Nowhere in Iraq is the silence about the Iranian election controversy more striking than in this city, the burial place of the founder of the Shiite sect of Islam and the faith’s theological center for hundreds of years.

Clerics and religious students here shy away from even admitting that they are watching broadcasts of the popular uprising next door, although Iran and especially its clergy in many respects are kith and kin; they study the same texts, follow similar courses of religious study and revere the same saints.

In the last 30 years, since the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the religious powers in the two countries have taken entirely different roads. Najaf’s clerics publicly rejected the idea promoted by Iran’s former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, that clerics have the final say over political matters. As Iran’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, threatens to use force to subdue protesters calling for an annulment of the election, Najaf’s senior clerics have said nothing.

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When you begin watching this lovely piece, guess where the featured man lives. His home will be shown toward the end–watch it all.

(ACNS) From the Most Revd Alan Harper, OBE, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland:

I very much look forward to full confirmation of the complete decommissioning of all armaments held by loyalist paramilitaries. It will represent a further and extremely welcome step towards confidence building and the normalisation of society in Northern Ireland. I recognise that on the part of the leadership of the paramilitary groups full decommissioning has been a challenging outcome to deliver; therefore, I commend those within loyalism who have argued consistently for decommissioning over a considerable period. Now full energy and commitment can be devoted to community development and the enhancement of the lives of people in loyalist areas free from the dark shadow of the gun.

By the grace of God we are now one step closer to the replacement of swords with ploughshares and spears with pruning hooks in our society. God willing, we shall soon know the day when weapons are never again lifted by one group against another and come to know what it means to learn war no more.

[James Baker said in 1989]: “Israeli interests in the West Bank and Gaza, security and otherwise, can be accommodated in a settlement based on Resolution 242. Forswear annexation; stop settlement activity.”

Those words make startling but depressing reading: Little has changed in 20 years. After Bush 41 and Baker, we got Clinton’s love affair with Yitzhak Rabin (“I had come to love him as I had rarely loved another man”); the disintegration of Oslo after Rabin’s tragic assassination; and the Israel-can-do-no-wrong policy of Bush 43.

Balance ”” the credential no honest broker can forsake ”” vanished from American diplomacy.

I don’t believe that’s been good for Israel. The Jewish state needs to be challenged by its inseparable ally if it is to achieve the security it craves.

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The cold-blooded murder of Dr. George Tiller on Sunday morning presents the pro-life movement in America with a crucial moral test — will we condemn this murder in unqualified terms?

I sincerely hope so. It takes a bad situation and makes it even worse. Read it all.

Update: The National Right to Life statement is here:

The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), the nation’s largest pro-life group, today condemned the killing of Dr. George Tiller. The following statement may be attributed to NRLC Executive Director, David N. O’Steen, Ph.D.:

National Right to Life extends its sympathies to Dr. Tiller’s family over this loss of life.

Further, the National Right to Life Committee unequivocally condemns any such acts of violence regardless of motivation. The pro-life movement works to protect the right to life and increase respect for human life. The unlawful use of violence is directly contrary to that goal.

The National Right to Life Committee has always been involved in peaceful, legal activities to protect human lives threatened by abortion, infanticide and euthanasia. We always have and will continue to oppose any form of violence to fight the violence of abortion. NRLC has had a policy of forbidding violence or illegal activity by its staff, directors, officers, affiliated state organizations and chapters. NRLC’s sole purpose is to protect innocent human life.

NRLC will continue to work through educational and legislative activities to ensure the right to life for unborn children, people with disabilities and older people. NRLC will continue to work for peaceful solutions to aid pregnant women and their unborn children. These solutions involve helping women and their children and do not involve violence against anyone.

More than 20,000 Tamil civilians were killed in the final throes of the Sri Lankan civil war, most as a result of government shelling, an investigation by The Times has revealed.

The number of casualties is three times the official figure.

The Sri Lankan authorities have insisted that their forces stopped using heavy weapons on April 27 and observed the no-fire zone where 100,000 Tamil men, women and children were sheltering. They have blamed all civilian casualties on Tamil Tiger rebels concealed among the civilians.

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Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina Catholic Church in the same neighborhood as Simeon, is outraged at the violence.

“What kind of crazy day do we live in, where our children are afraid to come home and go to school?” Pfleger says.

Outside of his church, Pfleger flies the American flag upside down ”” something the U.S. Flag Code states should only be done as a signal of distress and a dire need for help.

“Well, this is a dire need,” Pfleger says. “This is a distress signal we’re putting up saying we need help. We want to sound the alarm; we want a call for helping us deal with children being shot down in our city streets.”

I caught this last night in the car on the way to an appointment–heartbreaking. Read or listen to it all.

A senior Pakistani Taliban leader has claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s deadly suicide attack in the eastern city of Lahore.

Taliban official Hakimullah Mehsud told news agencies Thursday that the attack on police and intelligence offices was revenge for the ongoing military offensive in northwestern Pakistan’s Swat Valley.

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Watch it all from NBC (difficult content which may not be appropriate for some younger blog readers).

Here’s an example where it could have helped with the Just War document. One of our senior chaplains argued that the whole concept of Just War should be replaced and did graduate study on it. Another chaplain in a major paper specifically warned about proportionality and the safety of non-combatants. He wrote, “We increase the lethality of our weaponry and thereby the safety of our soldiers on the one hand; non-combatants are left to fend for themselves on the other.”

The battle area has become more and more toxic yet the bishops’ report addressed the enormity of this development with a simplistic statement like, “More care with air strikes may require pilots to fly lower, exposing them to greater danger of being shot down.” Constructing such thoughts without the expertise of experience speaks for itself.

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The Vatican on Tuesday sought to defend Pope Benedict XVI against criticism that his speech at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial on Monday was a disappointment coming from a German who experienced the Nazi terror firsthand.

But in seeking to clarify the pope’s wartime past, the Vatican further muddied the waters, appearing to revise ”” then retract ”” Benedict’s wartime history in the middle of his first visit to Israel as pontiff.

At a news conference on Tuesday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, seemed to contradict the pope’s own previous statements when he said that Benedict, growing up in Bavaria during World War II, “never, never, never” belonged to the Hitler Youth.

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So you might expect the mood in the Middle East to be awful, bordering on desperate. Although it is sombre, those who know the region feel that there is all to play for. There are two reasons for this.

The first is the complex personality of Mr Netanyahu. I have met him several times and had informal conversations with him. He is usually reticent on strategy but a master at tactics. I have no doubt that he deeply dislikes the concept of a Palestinian state but that is not the same as saying that he could never endorse one….

That brings me to the second and, perhaps, decisive reason why the situation is more fluid than might first be apparent. Unlike George W. Bush, Barack Obama is engaging himself in the Israel-Palestine issue from the very outset of his presidency. He is doing so with more goodwill from the Arab world than any recent president.

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Sudan is in real danger of sliding back to war, according to the head of the Anglican Church in the Eastern African nation.

On Monday, Archbishop Daniel Deng Bul, Primate of the Episcopal Church of Sudan, wrote a passionate letter to representatives of the international community in the country appealing for their increased support for implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) which ended the civil war in 2005.

He said he had recently toured many parts of South Sudan and witnessed first-hand the suffering of the people due to growing insecurity.

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From a distance, a woman named Samia, round-cheeked with thick eyebrows, who cooked meals at the mosque, watched the procession with horror in her heart.

Samia could not bring herself to enter the washing room or look at the victim, Aasiya Zubair Hassan, a woman she had known informally in life. She was too shaken to attend the funeral.

The two wives were connected by the close-knit Muslim community in western New York, including Buffalo, about 400 miles from New York City. But unbeknownst to each other, both shared a secret — marriages stained by abuse.

Samia got help. Aasiya died before help came.

Read it all.

Watch it all.

Popular explanations for the terror Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold wreaked on their Colorado high school often mention bullying. But Dave Cullen has been following the story since that deadly day, and in his new book, Columbine, he reveals the real story of their rampage.

In his interview with Neal Conan, Cullen warns of the pitfalls of reaching quick conclusions about the “why” behind tragedies like those at Columbine and Virginia Tech. “Key information doesn’t come out for months or even years,” he cautions, “so if you start to come to a determination of why within hours, it may be years before you have the information to make that conclusion.”

Cullen does believe, however, that in the years since Columbine, “people have been much much better about just holding off and saying, ‘we don’t know why yet.'”

Listen to it all.

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The quilt was sewn out of joy and pain, memories and loss.

This same quilt will forever memorialize a daughter and unborn grandchild lost in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

The patchwork of memories of Carrie Ann Lenz’s 26 years reminds her mother, Doris Jones, of happy times she shared with her daughter.

Cut from her daughter’s clothes, which until recently hung unworn but cherished in a guest bedroom, each of the quilt’s 48 squares holds a memory for Jones.

Read it all and the photos are worth the time also.

The whole memorial service is available here.

Today Rwanda is a much different place thanks, in part, to this man””Anglican Bishop John Rucyahana

Bishop JOHN RUCYAHANA (Chairman, Prison Fellowship Rwanda): People are smiling because they have the hope, but the wounds and the healing is a process that we’ll continue to engage deliberately to tell people that they just can’t cover it up. We need to be able to unearth it and deal with it head on.

[LUCKY] SEVERSON: That’s what the bishop has been preaching from the pulpit of his beautiful church in northern Rwanda since the killing stopped: deal with it head on. And it was personal for him. How could it not be after so many members of his extended family were murdered, including his niece?

Bishop RUCYAHANA: I have forgiven those who killed my niece, and they peeled off the flesh off her arms to the wrist, and they left bare bones, and they gang-raped her, and I forgive them because forgiving is not only benefiting the criminal, it benefits me.

Read or watch it all.

Apparently, the thing [after the Columbine killing spree] to do was to look not at the largest questions posed by the incident but rather at its particulars and to adopt a “zero tolerance” policy toward any behavior that seemed to mimic them. The result was a longish, culturally embarrassing interlude when kindergartners could get tossed out of school for bringing a nail clipper in a backpack. We began to look like a nation of adults who were terrified of our smallest children.

The one aspect of Columbine that seemed unworthy of examination — when it came to pondering the policy changes that might actually make American schools safer places — was the fact that the two killers had a long track record of doing exactly what deeply disturbed teenage boys have been doing since time out of mind: getting in trouble — lots of it — with authority.

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A Moultrie Middle School student took his father’s pocketknife to school Wednesday because he wanted to “attack and kill” a classmate who was picking on him, authorities said.

Mount Pleasant police said the 13-year-old boy instead held the knife over his head and lunged at a teacher who escaped injury as she escorted the other students out of the classroom.

The boy, a special needs student who has been attending anger management classes, was taken to the S.C. Department of Juvenile Justice.

Yuck. Read it all.

This month, as Rwanda marks the 15th anniversary of its genocide, an Anglican church in the Triangle is trying to glean lessons from the aftermath of the mass killings.

All Saints Church has good formal reasons to undertake the study. From a denominational standpoint, it is part of the Anglican Mission in America, which is overseen by the Anglican Church of Rwanda.

The congregation, formed in 2005, also has a sister parish relationship with a church in the southern Rwandan city of Butare.

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A recent spate of mass murders is prompting some criminal justice analysts and government officials to call for a renewed national focus on the violence.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors’ top staffer says much of the public has grown “numb” to a mounting body count. At least nine mass killings this year have claimed 57 lives, including the fatal shootings last week of 13 people at an immigration center in Binghamton, N.Y.

“As a country, we seem to be more interested in the origin of tainted pistachios, peanuts and ice cream than the people who are being killed in our cities,” says Tom Cochran, executive director of the mayors’ group. He has scheduled a “national conversation” on the shootings when the group meets in June in Providence.

Read it all.

Do the recent mass shootings in New York state and Pittsburgh suggest a need for more stringent firearms laws? The Brady Campaign’s Paul Helmke and ‘Ricochet’ author Richard Feldman debate….

Read it all.

One was a 14-year veteran of the Pittsburgh police; the other two were relative newcomers, each with two years on the force.

Two of them left behind wives and daughters; the other was engaged to be married.

What the three officers who were slain yesterday in Stanton Heights shared, colleagues and friends said yesterday, was their devotion to police work.

The fallen officers were identified yesterday as Eric Kelly, 41, a 14-year veteran; and Paul Sciullo III, 37, and Stephen J. Mayhle, 29, each with two years on the force.

Read the whole article. If you are so inclined, take a look at some notes of condolence. Here is an example:

My prayers are with the familes of these Fallen Heroes and the Troops of the Pittsburgh Police Department. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God” from the Bible’s book of Mathew.

Colonel David B. Mitchell
Superitendent Ret., Maryland State Police
Proud to be born and raised in Pittsburgh
~
David Mitchell,
Milford, Delaware

A police criminal complaint described the sequence of events that began with a domestic-violence call at 7:03 a.m. and led to the shooting deaths of Officers Paul Sciullo III, Stephen J. Mayhle and Eric Kelly at 1016 Fairfield St.

The suspect’s mother, Margaret Poplawski, called 911 to say that she had argued with her son after she discovered that a dog had urinated on the floor of the house. She told police she wanted him removed.

Officers Sciullo and Mayhle radioed at 7:11 that they had arrived at the home. Mrs. Poplawski told police she opened the door and told police “come and take his ass.”

When the officers were 10 feet into the residence, “she heard gunshots, turned and saw her son about six feet away with a long rifle in his hands, at which point she fled downstairs after asking him ‘what the hell have you done?’ ” according to the report.

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A gunman opened fire at an immigration services center in downtown Binghamton on Friday, killing as many as 13 people before authorities found him dead, officials said.

Gov. David Paterson said at a news conference that 12 or 13 people had been killed.

A law enforcement official said the body of the man believed to be the gunman was found in an office of the American Civic Association building. The official was not authorized to speak publicly about the details of an ongoing hostage situation and was talking on condition of anonymity.

Makes the heart very sad–read it all.

Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops in Northern Ireland have united to condemn the recent paramilitary-style shootings in Londonderry.

In a joint statement the Most Rev Seamus Hegarty, Catholic Bishop of Derry, and the Rt Rev Ken Good, Church of Ireland Bishop of Derry and Raphoe, said: “The recent shootings in our city must be outrightly condemned as immoral and indefensible.

“The Christian Church teaches that life is sacred. An attack on the person is a rejection of the teachings of Christ. It is also an offence against the dignity of a person created by God….

Read it all.