A central question before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit: Can Metro allow secular advertisers to promote Christmas shopping and charitable giving, but not the church?

Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh was unrelenting in questioning Metro’s lawyer, former solicitor general Donald B. Verrilli Jr., and stated unequivocally his view that the policy is “pure discrimination” in violation of the First Amendment.

Kavanaugh, who is on President Trump’s list of candidates for possible Supreme Court vacancies, made several references to recent high court opinions, including a 2017 ruling that sided with a Missouri church denied access to government grants meant for a secular purpose.

The two other judges on the panel — Judith W. Rogers and Robert L. Wilkins — pointed out that the archdiocese had acknowledged its ads were designed in part to promote religion, not just charitable giving.

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Starting in May, Chinese citizens who rank low on the country’s burgeoning “social credit” system will be in danger of being banned from buying plane or train tickets for up to a year, according to statements recently released by the country’s National Development and Reform Commission.

With the social credit system, the Chinese government rates citizens based on things like criminal behavior and financial misdeeds, but also on what they buy, say, and do. Those with low “scores” have to deal with penalties and restrictions. China has been working towards rolling out a full version of the system by 2020, but some early versions of it are already in place.

Previously, the Chinese government had focused on restricting the travel of people with massive amounts of debt, like LeEco and Faraday Future founder Jia Yueting, who made the Supreme People’s Court blacklist late last year.

The new travel restrictions are the latest addition to this growing patchwork of social engineering, which has already imposed punishments on more than seven million citizens. And there’s a broad range when it comes to who can be flagged. Citizens who have spread “false information about terrorism,” caused “trouble” on flights, used expired tickets, or were caught smoking on trains could all be banned, according to Reuters.

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“Sorry, I died.”

The flight attendants looked as stunned as everyone else — my eyes went directly to them after the jolt — and quickly wheeled the drink cart back to the front of the plane and gathered near the cockpit. They started looking through an emergency manual. I’m no expert, but I’m thinking that’s not a great sign.

I was on the left side of the plane, an aisle seat a couple of rows in front of where the engines under the wings are located. We were about 20 minutes into the flight and I was doing work on my laptop, preparing for Sunday’s assignment of covering the Tennessee Titans at the Cleveland Browns. After that first wave of panic, with my heart trying to beat its way out of my chest, I went to my Yahoo mail account and started writing something to Katie and the kids. I figured, get them something, get a few words out, comfort them in some way. Say goodbye.

Then I realized the wireless was gone. I gulped, closed the laptop, put it in my bag and looked around the plane.

Read it all–this was used to introduce the morning sermon.

(Onion) Buick Introduces New Self-Buying Car https://t.co/gbjAoyqtIc #humour #consumerspending #AutonomousVehicles “In what marks a watershed moment for this company, we here at Buick are proud to present the first and only car that purchases itself” LOL

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) November 29, 2017

Minnesota’s Jack Carlson is making sure kids with physical challenges can still experience the freedom of riding a bike. Boyd Huppert of KARE in Minneapolis reports….

Priests at one of England’s most visited parish churches have expressed concern over the unholy racket made by tourists who feel obliged to photograph everything they see.

The University Church of St Mary the Virgin, in the heart of Oxford, welcomes hundreds of thousands of tourists each year, but the volume of visitors risks overwhelming the peace of the church, parts of which date from the 13th century.

The Rev Charlotte Bannister-Parker, the associate priest, said in a newsletter that tourists needed to challenge the mentality that “if you don’t take a photo, it did not happen”.

The priest, daughter of Sir Roger Bannister, the first person to run a mile in less than four minutes, said: “I am not usually a grumpy person but I have been overwhelmed by the number of tourists coming through the church and the fact that so many of them seem unaware that this is a sacred space.

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Reihane Taravati, an outspoken social media activist, was riding in a taxi the other day when she received a stern reprimand from the driver.

Unbeknownst to Taravati, 26, her headscarf — which Iranian women are required to wear as a show of modesty — had slipped down the back of her head, leaving most of her hair exposed.

“Fix your scarf, or the undercover [moral] police will see it,” the cabbie told her. He worried about receiving a ticket in the mail, which would cost him about $30.

As Taravati relayed this story while sipping tea with friends in a Tehran cafe, a debate was raging in the Iranian capital that combines two things that people here obsess over: cars and the way women dress.

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Charleston is the nation’s No. 1 city again, and No. 2 in the world, according to the readers of Travel + Leisure magazine.

The recognition comes at a time when residents are increasingly worried about the city’s capacity to handle more visitors.

The results of this year’s survey were released Tuesday morning. Readers were asked to rate cities they had visited on sights/landmarks, culture/arts, restaurants/food, people/friendliness, shopping and value.

This is the fifth consecutive year the magazine’s readers have named Charleston the nation’s top city. Charleston was the top city in the world last year. This year San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, took the top global spot.

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In his 1980 book The Third Wave, the futurist Alvin Toffler predicted the rise of the “electronic cottage”. The idea was that technology would become so ubiquitous that working from home would replace the 9-5 slog in a cubicle, in the process helping to “glue the family together again”. As Iain Gately, the author of Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work, put it: “The power to work anywhere and everywhere — have laptop, will travel — or stay at home according to one’s mood, seized the imaginations of Generation X: every day could be a No Pants Day.”

Yet that future has not arrived. Smartphones and laptops may be everywhere, but they have not given many white-collar employees the opportunity to work full-time in pyjamas from log cabins.

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With the chances of a gas-tax increase to pay for road repairs dwindling, advocates of bringing casinos to South Carolina think they have found a winning hand.

Republican Gov. Henry McMaster declared last week that he would veto raising the state fuel tax for the first time in 30 years to fix crumbling roads and bridges. He favors a plan to borrow $1 billion, which would cover a small portion of the state’s repair tab and comes a year after lawmakers already agreed to borrow $2 billion for roads.

But there’s another roads-funding plan, one favored by a majority of South Carolinians, that’s on the table.

Casinos in the Myrtle Beach area and along the borders of North Carolina and Georgia could have South Carolina cashing in a potential $500 million a year while not raising gas pump prices or adding to the state debt load, legalized gambling backers say.

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On a personal note, my wife Elizabeth kindly got me tickets to this Saturday’s Manchester United game (a surprise for my birthday). Since I have never been to Old Trafford, this is a big deal for me. My son Nathaniel is coming to meet me and today we fly to the UK for a little over a week. Blogging will be catch and catch can during that period–KSH.

We return to Old Trafford when we host @WBA this weekend – read more in our @PremierLeague preview: https://t.co/iuR2fdGt1m #MUFC pic.twitter.com/Dxmt3oly2q

— Manchester United (@ManUtd) March 30, 2017

Family Exiting Church Unable To Find Minivan In Sea Of Identical Minivans https://t.co/Oye92AjHVU pic.twitter.com/Jpbnm97Db1

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) February 10, 2017

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Theological schools debate how much field education is the right amount and how to integrate practical experience into ministerial training. But what if field education were inseparable from M.Div. courses? And what if seminarians’ primary classmates were the people in the congregations they serve during their three years of seminary?

Bexley Seabury Seminary, an Episco­pal school based in Chicago, has such a model in mind as it relaunches its M.Div. degree program. “At every step,” the school states, “students will be challenged to connect the content of their academic work with insights and reflections drawn from their internship experience.”

KyungJa Oh, director of field education and formation, sees the advantages of keeping students rooted in the context of ministry.

Read it all from the Christian Century.

Bicycle sensors in Copenhagen clocked a new record this month: there are now more bikes than cars in the heart of the city. In the last year, 35,080 more bikes have joined the daily roll, bringing the total number to 265,700, compared with 252,600 cars.

Copenhagen municipality has been carrying out manual traffic counts at a number of city centre locations since 1970, when there were 351,133 cars and 100,071 bikes. In 2009, the city installed its first electric bike counter by city hall, with 20 now monitoring traffic across the city.

Copenhagen’s efforts to create a cycling city have paid off: bicycle traffic has risen by 68% in the last 20 years. “What really helped was a very strong political leadership; that was mainly Ritt Bjerregaard [the former lord mayor], who had a dedicated and authentic interest in cycling,” says Klaus Bondam, who was technical and environmental mayor from 2006 to 2009 and is now head of the Danish Cycling Federation. “Plus, a new focus on urbanism and the new sustainability agenda broke the glass roof when it came to cycling.”

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As a Peace Corps volunteer, Ginny Fonner worked in a rural village in Zambia, a southern African country with a severe shortage of doctors. While there, a short-term mission group visited. Their goal: distribute medicines to fight intestinal worms.

“It’s a great goal. Worms are a big problem,” she said during a recent global health symposium at the Medical University of South Carolina. “So they spent day after day going to schools, distributing treatments, feeling really good about it.”

Except for one thing.

“They had no idea that the previous week the local government had done the exact same thing with the exact same children.”

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Abu Sayyaf, once written off as one of the global jihadist movement’s also-rans, is gaining strength in the southern Philippines by chasing down high-value victims at sea and ransoming them off for millions of dollars.

After a relative lull for most of a decade, kidnappings have surged to more than 20 annually since 2014, when the group’s main leader Isnilon Hapilon swore allegiance to Islamic State.

That rebranding””and the accompanying brutality, including beheadings””has generated international headlines and raised fears that the island-dotted region could re-emerge as a hub for Islamist terrorists, as it was for al Qaeda in the 1990s.

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Charleston has been named as the nation’s top small city for the sixth time in a row.

Condé Nast Traveler announced its annual Readers’ Choice Awards Tuesday.

“The readers of Condé Nast Traveler are lauded as some of the world’s most discerning, and the hospitality scene in Charleston continues to charm,” Linn Lesesne, board chair of the Charleston Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, said in a statement. “We are thrilled to be recognized once again for our friendly people, historic ambiance and culture, award-winning restaurants, one-of-a-kind shopping and renowned accommodations.”

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NORWAY Let the journey be your goal from Pasquale Baseotto on Vimeo.

For some families with an Autistic child, going on vacation isn’t always easy, but now there’s a place that’s making it possible for them to enjoy their time together.

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This good feel for the campus where my family came every summer and just outside of which I am now staying.

Even when the dead bodies Zachary Smeltz lifts for a living are hefty, he makes sure to handle even the burliest corpse in a gentle manner, masking any exertion. “Treat every case like that’s your mom that you’re transferring,” is the motto Mr. Smeltz imparts on the staff of the mortuary transport business he owns that sends him all over New Jersey and Pennsylvania and to other locales, picking up bodies.

Mr. Smeltz is part of an unusual niche in the labor market: He is among a proliferating group of independent entrepreneurs capitalizing on the need to collect the dead from houses, hospitals, morgues and accident scenes. It is a little-known link in the chain of death-to-final-resting-place that is growing as places like funeral homes and hospices as well as governments cut their budgets and increasingly outsource the transport of the dead.

A class-action suit unfolding in California has opened a window onto this often lightly regulated industry: Charons of the highway, who shuttle corpses from one place to another. While in some places, like New York, such work must be carried out under the auspices of licensed funeral directors, in others, like New Jersey and Pennsylvania, private contractors without any special permits may pick up bodies.

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The BPT’s philosophy emphasises personal fulfilment ”” on pilgrimage, says their website, ”˜You are free to be the best person you can dream of being’ ”” but also social conscience: they encourage pilgrims to give something back, whether by picking up litter, buying locally or talking to a stranger. They also promise that ”˜You will rediscover your relationship with self and Nature. Engaging with the world in the way your body was designed to do is a sure path to feeling grateful for being alive.’

It is, in short, a very 21st-century kind of spirituality. It has much in common with the atheist church the Sunday Assembly, whose slogan is ”˜Live better, help often, wonder more’. Which sounds very much like the self-help tradition ”” a term Hayward happily applies to pilgrimage. ”˜It is a self-help technique, as much as anything else. But religion, of course, is a self-help”¦’ He checks himself. ”˜I mean, would it call itself self-help?’

It’s a complex question, but as far as Christianity goes I think the answer is probably no. Jesus provoked not so much ”˜a sense of wonder’ as fear, astonishment, fiercely personal hatred and even more fiercely personal love. He spoke about individual fulfilment, but said that the only way to it was a slow death by crucifixion. He showed compassion, but often in startling ways ”” negotiating with devils, controlling the weather, raising the dead. It was not your average Ted talk.

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….it would be very useful if our political leaders felt able to speak the name of the actual cause for which all those murderous guns and knives and cars are being deployed. Perhaps that is too much to hope.

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