DE SAM LAZARO: More importantly, Pomeroy says he fears any changes could jeopardize fragile congressional support for what remains the world’s largest food aid program, even though it accounts for just $1.2 billion of the $280 billion U.S. farm program.

Rep. POMEROY: One of the things about the structure of our program is that it’s been able to sustain congressional support through all kinds of political circumstances. Even in the years I’ve been in Congress, I’ve seen very different environments relative to the receptivity of members of Congress to supporting foreign aid.

Ms. MCGROARTY: So for purchasing we want to be targeting associations. I mean, it’s impossible for us to deal individually with each farmer and each farm.

DE SAM LAZARO: World Food Program officials say they make local purchases carefully. They reject criticism that this causes prices to rise. But they’re not about to reject Food for Peace donations.

Mr. SCALPELLI: I am asked this question quite a bit, and I’m not going to bite the hand that helps feed essentially a million Malawians today, and the United States government is indeed the number one largest donor to Malawi still.

DE SAM LAZARO: Other food aid agencies, unlike CARE, say they must continue to monetize their U.S. donations.

(to Nick Ford): Would you not prefer just straight cash assistance?

NICK FORD (Catholic Relief Services): Absolutely, and that’s going to be a much more efficient use of the American taxpayers’ money. We still have a service to provide the target communities for our development activities. Monetization provides resources that do address the root causes of hunger and poverty in these countries.

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Monstrous to some, but representing a ray of hope in the fight against debilitating diseases to others, stem cell research has been steeped in controversy for over a decade.

While scientists, doctors, patient groups and medical charities welcome the ground-breaking advances it could bring, the Roman Catholic Church and several other faiths are vehemently opposed to stem cell research on the grounds that it compromises the sanctity of human life. Central to the religious objectors’ argument is that using stem cells amounts to deriving benefit from the destruction of human embryos – fertilized eggs in the early stages of development – and is therefore tantamount to murder, and certainly little better than abortion.

Yet supporters of the revolutionary research techniques are thrilled that stem cells taken from embryos can be made to grow into any cell in the human body, providing an extraordinary resource in the fight against Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Motor Neurone Disease, diabetes and other conditions.

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According to a Flint Journal article, regular attendance at the 66-year-old church was about 70, but dipped to 30 after Kulchar left. Today, attendance is at 45 and growing.

“We went through a great time of healing as a congregation and we are ready to move on,” said Norb Birchmeier, senior warden of Trinity Episcopal Church. “I believe we are a stronger congregation because everyone became closer to each other.”

Congregants often believe they are better at performing some of the management tasks of the church, he said, which leaves new pastor Rev. Lori Johnson more time to address spiritual growth. Johnson’s first service at the church was April 13.

“They seem to be connecting to something in each message,” Johnson said of the Sunday services. “They seem happy and excited to have a new priest and are looking toward the future.”

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With the price of gas approaching $4 a gallon, more commuters are abandoning their cars and taking the train or bus instead.

Mass transit systems around the country are seeing standing-room-only crowds on bus lines where seats were once easy to come by. Parking lots at many bus and light rail stations are suddenly overflowing, with commuters in some towns risking a ticket or tow by parking on nearby grassy areas and in vacant lots.

“In almost every transit system I talk to, we’re seeing very high rates of growth the last few months,” said William W. Millar, president of the American Public Transportation Association.

“It’s very clear that a significant portion of the increase in transit use is directly caused by people who are looking for alternatives to paying $3.50 a gallon for gas.”

Some cities with long-established public transit systems, like New York and Boston, have seen increases in ridership of 5 percent or more so far this year. But the biggest surges ”” of 10 to 15 percent or more over last year ”” are occurring in many metropolitan areas in the South and West where the driving culture is strongest and bus and rail lines are more limited.

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Optimists point out that some measures of housing affordability have dramatically improved. According to NAR figures, monthly payments on a typical house with a 30-year mortgage and 20% downpayment were 18.5% of the median family’s income in February, down from almost 26% at the peak””and close to the historical average. But this measure is misleading, not least because credit standards have tightened. A survey of loan officers conducted by the Fed suggested on May 5th that 60% of banks tightened their lending standards for prime mortgages in the first three months of 2007. And, as Michael Feroli of JPMorgan points out, the affordability gauge depends on what measure of home prices you look at. Use the Case-Shiller index, where the affordability of housing worsened sharply during the boom, and mortgage payments are still high in relation to incomes.

A better measure of housing fundamentals is the relationship between house prices and rents. This is a sort of price/earnings ratio for the housing market: the price of a house reflects the discounted value of future ownership, either as rental income or as rent saved by an owner who lives in the house.

A recent analysis by Morris Davis of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Andreas Lehnert and Robert Martin of the Fed, shows that the rent/price yield in America ranged between 5% and 5.5% from 1960 to 1995, but fell rapidly thereafter to reach a historic low of 3.5% at the height of the boom. Given the typical pace of rental growth, Mr Feroli reckons house prices (as measured by the Case-Shiller index) need to fall by 10-15% over the next year and a half for the rent/price yield to return to its historical average. Again, that suggests the national housing bust is only halfway through. And, given the scale of excess supply, house prices are likely to overshoot. All told, the pressure on policymakers to help struggling homeowners is bound to increase.

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SEAN COLE: Jen Peterson is a candidate for city council, and early last week she and her eight-year-old daughter Harley and I all piled into her minivan for a drive to the local food shelf.

JEN PETERSON: The Friends in Need Food Shelf in St. Paul Park.

This wasn’t a campaign stop. She was dropping by to pick up some food for her family. It was just her second visit this year.

JEN PETERSON: But I see a trend developing.

COLE: In your life?

JEN PETERSON: Yeah in this need.

Jen knows that trend well. When she was a single mom with four kids she had to lean on all kinds of state aid. She and her current husband, Tony, both work two jobs, and after a big child support settlement in 2004, they were able to make do without assistance.

JEN PETERSON: So we were, you know, living pretty happy, middle class, dual-income parents.

Except both Tony and Jen’s ex are in the building industry, and after the foreclosure crisis hit, she found herself back at the food shelf for the first time in four years.

JEN PETERSON: It’s just hard to keep the cupboards full without having to spend more and more money, and this is, you know, the food shelf is the one way that we can supplement that.

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Mo Udall, the great Democrat from Arizona, said the only known cure for the presidential virus once it invades a politician’s body is embalming fluid. And I think there’s great truth to that.

—Mark Shields on last night’s Lehrer News Hour

What drives this essay emotionally is not disdain for and disgust with dim-bulb students. X says he really identifies with his students and their struggles in life, and wants to help them along. “I could not be aloof even if I wanted to be,” he writes. But he can’t compromise academic standards out of pity or solidarity.

What it all boils down to, he says, is that a cruel hoax is being played on these students. “America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting someone’s options,” he writes. And he sympathizes with this ideal — but he’s the one who has to see how little it has to do with reality. His students aren’t college material. They don’t read (some of them can’t really read). They don’t share even the rudiments of a common intellectual culture on which to build. He says he tries to explain the basics of narrative to them in terms of movies, but they haven’t all seen the same movies. They are more or less well-mannered, hard-working barbarians. The only thing they all share is a sense that they are good people for being in college, and that they can be anything they want to be.

Prof. X says the whole system, premised on a false egalitarianism, is to blame here. One key question this excellent essay raises by implication is this: if quite a lot of Americans are incapable of doing college work, what does that do to the Thomas Friedmanesque understanding that in order to compete in a flattened, globalized world, US laborers are simply going to have to get retrained and better educated? What if there are natural limits to their ability to expand their cognitive skills? What then?

I mean, look, what if things were flipped, and the Friedmans of the world were telling the “knowledge workers,” for lack of a better term, that staying competitive in this globalizing world economy meant having a stronger back. Ergo, nerdling, you’re just going to have to start spending a lot more time at the gym to develop a longshoreman’s body, or get left behind. We’d laugh at this, because we have no problem grasping that nature has not endowed all of us equally well in terms of physical strength and capabilities. The nerdling would be able to improve his strength to a certain degree, but to tell him his physical limits are defined only by his desires and will to succeed is to play a cruel hoax on him.

Are we not doing that with some of the people who are in college now?

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Thom Mason, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said a Manhattan-like project for energy independence could employ some of the same development techniques used during the A-bomb work – such as parallel testing of different ideas to see which ones work best.

However, energy independence is likely to be an even more complicated task, Mason said, because unlike the World War II project it doesn’t have a single, dedicated “deliverable” – a bomb to end the war.

A number of ORNL scientists, including David Greene, a top fuel economist and transportation researcher, offered comments during the session and discussed what should be priorities. Greene said transportation is at the heart of the nation’s oil-dependence problem, and he said one goal should be doubling the fuel economy over today’s level by 2030.

But production of biofuels and greater fuel economy won’t be enough to achieve energy independence, Greene said.

“To accomplish that goal, we must make electricity, hydrogen – or both – clean, carbon-free, competitive choices for American motorists,” he said. Greene cited the need for a new generation of advanced batteries and fuel cells and better, safer ways of storing hydrogen aboard vehicles.

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Just as the Christian church patronized the arts, so it vigorously supported scientific research. The caricature of an obscurantist, ignorance-promoting church simply doesn’t correspond to historical truth.

Some of history’s greatest scientists ”” Newton, Pasteur, Galilei, Lavoisier, Kepler, Copernicus, Faraday, Maxwell, Bernard and Heisenberg ”” were all Christians, and the list doesn’t stop there. Some important scientists, such as astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, were actually Catholic priests!

Christianity is not against science, but against an absolutist reading of science. The empirical sciences cannot do everything, and hold no monopoly on knowledge and truth. Many important questions ”” the most important, really ”” fall outside the purview of science.

What is the meaning of life? How should people treat one another? What happens to us when we die?

No matter how long a white-coated scientist toils and sweats in his laboratory, his instruments will never reveal the answers to these questions. Science is the wrong tool for the job.

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The Spirit, the dynamic energy of God, the breath of the divine life, is often associated with random inspiration, with inspired prophets and enthusiasts who do their own thing. But in the Bible the Spirit is also the one who orders. The mighty wind that swept over the waters of chaos in the very opening verses of Scripture brings order and pattern and shaping life. Energy and order are not opposed in the order of the new creation of God’s life-giving Spirit any more than they are in the patterns of energy that make up the order of the universe. The church is to be and to live the order of the new creation. The Spirit is the Spirit of transforming holiness, shaping men and women in the pattern of the divine love in whose image they are made.

St Augustine knew that a fallen world was a world of disordered desire. He went so far as to say that all thefts, all murders and adulteries sprang from disordered love. “Shall we stop loving then?” he asks. “No, if you stop loving you will become a block of wood, a dead thing.”

Our calling is to “set love in order”, to be shaped and ordered, we might say, by the internet of the Spirit, the Lord and the Giver of life, who “alone can order the unruly wills and passions of sinful men”. And that grace and that life is at the heart of the Church’s being, and of what it is to be human, and so at Pentecost we pray: “Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire, and lighten with celestial fire!” for “the Spirit of the Lord has filled the whole world. Alleluia!”.

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At first glance, the two men in monogrammed T-shirts and jeans with their rumbling generator could be mistaken for any of the hundreds of maintenance workers scattered across the vast public grounds of the city.

But Kirk Bockman, 52, and Jim Lee, 59, are highly skilled artisans whose specialized craft is cloaked in grief.

In a yearly ritual that began in 1991 with the dedication of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial, Bockman and Lee have carefully etched 18,274 names of fallen officers into marbleized limestone.

This year, the engravers’ burden was heavy as they prepared for the annual vigil for slain officers on Tuesday.

The pair has recorded the names of the 181 officers killed in 2007, one of the deadliest years for police in two decades. They also added 177 officers whose deaths had not been previously recorded, some dating to the 19th century, says Berneta Spence, the memorial’s director of research.

“When we do this, we really feel like we become part of their family history,” Bockman says, his voice hushed in deference to a victim’s mother.

Read it all and don’t miss the great story at the end about their visit to the White House.

So when Horton’s world of Who-ville was “saved by the Smallest of All,” Robert Short saw the savior of the Whos as a symbol for the Savior of all people. From Green Eggs and Ham to How the Grinch Stole Christmas , Short has reinterpreted many of Theodor Seuss Geisel’s stories as subtle messages of Christian doctrine in the new book, The Parables of Dr. Seuss.

Questions remain, however, about whether the original author intended such an interpretation or Short, a retired Presbyterian minister, is just seeing the stories through the lens of his own life.

“I was amazed at what I found when I started looking at it ”” all this Christian imagery was very carefully factored into his stories,” Short said in an interview from his home in Little Rock.

“And that’s what this book intends to do, is show how he has done this in a very carefully crafted way. It’s there, and you could make an argument for it being intentionally there, because it’s done with such great care.”

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By his 16th birthday, Mark Cabrera had not been so sweet.

He carried a knife to school, got caught with drugs, skipped classes, broke into a shed and stole a car, jewelry and reptiles at different times.

He was becoming an alcoholic and was getting high on drugs. He was angry and rebellious. He thought he could make more money selling drugs than he could completing an education. He was in and out of juvenile and criminal courts. His life was a mess.

For violating probation after being caught with marijuana, the Stratford High School ninth-grader served 43 days at Coastal Evaluation Center.

That’s where he began to turn his life around.

On Thursday, he was one of 23 Berkeley County School District students honored by the district with a Turnaround Achievement Award.

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s local paper.

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Oil rose above $126 a barrel for the first time Friday, bringing its advance this week to nearly $10, as investors questioned whether a possible confrontation between the U.S. and Venezuela could cut exports from the OPEC member. Gas prices, meanwhile, rose above an average $3.67 a gallon at the pump, following oil’s recent path higher.

On Friday, The Wall Street Journal published a report that suggested closer ties between Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and rebels attempting to overthrow Colombia’s government. Chavez has been linked to Colombian rebels previously, but the paper reported it had reviewed computer files indicating concrete offers by Venezuela’s leader to arm guerillas. That appears to heighten the chances that the U.S. could impose sanctions on one of its biggest oil suppliers.

“If we put on sanctions, I’m sure Chavez would threaten to cut off our oil supply,” said Phil Flynn, an analyst at Alaron Trading Corp. “Obviously that would have a major impact on oil prices.”

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Here is one:

Sir, It is the statisticians who produced Religious Trends who should be on their knees (“Churchgoing on its knees as Christianity falls out of favour”, May 8). The methodology of the publication is so flawed that it is dangerously misleading to draw any predictions from it.

A few examples highlight the problems. Christian Research does not compare like with like. It takes the number of Muslims at the 2001 Census and assumes that half are active worshippers. Using the same assumption would give 20 million active Christians, yet it limits, for example, active Church of England membership to only average Sunday congregations. That ignores actual head counts showing the average million Sunday congregation is only part of the 1.7 million individual worshippers in any given month, recorded year on year since 2001.

It ignores the rapid growth in Back to Church Sunday initiatives that brought more than 20,000 people back to church last year. Being based purely on numbers in church buildings on Sundays, it ignores the thousands joining the Church through more than 5,000 fresh expressions initiatives meeting in other places, on other days.

The Right Rev Nick Baines
Bishop of Croydon

The Rev Lynda Barley
Head of Research and Statistics, Archbishops’ Council

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In his final address before retirement to the House of Bishops and Standing Committee of the Church of the Province of the West Indies, Archbishop Drexel Gomez urged the Church to reawaken to the power of God’s love.

The dry and distant Anglicanism of many parts of the West Indies, must make way for a “more caring and compassionate” church, he told the West Indian bishops and the congregation of St. Mary’s Anglican Church in Bridgetown, Barbados on April 17.

“We must face up to the challenge to see where we stand in love,” Archbishop Gomez said, and “must devise more strategies to assist members in their engagement with God and to foster a deeper commitment” that would transform the believer and society.

The rampant individualism and selfishness of Western culture was the greatest single threat to the faith. Believers must surrender their lives to God and be faithful to his will for their lives, rather than pursue their own moral, political or social agendas.

The Church faces “the challenge of discernment and commitment” as it entered the Twenty-first century, he said, urging the bishops to hold fast to the faith once delivered, and not succumb to the siren song of culture.

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An underground nuclear submarine base on China’s Hainan Island is drawing scrutiny from the United States and India.

According to satellite imagery on the Web sites of Jane’s Intelligence Review and the Federation of American Scientists, the base has a sea entrance wide enough to allow submarines to enter the underground facilities. The photograph reveals what appears to be a ballistic missile submarine moored to one of the piers outside.

Rumors of a nuclear submarine base had been swirling for a few years. Kurt Campbell, with the Center for a New American Security, says the satellite photographs confirm those suspicions and stoke anxiety in the region about China’s strategic capabilities ”” and its intentions.

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Warning: some blog readers may find this story of teenage misbehavior disturbing.

I am not going to spoil it you need to read it for yourself.

When you dial 770-978-5717, you’ll hear a recording that says “First Baptist Snellville is offering you the chance to win one of two $500 gas cards.”

Pastor Dr. Rusty Newman says “we are beginning a revival, ah starting this Sunday. If you attend the service you are able to sign up for a drawing to place your name in at the end of the service stating you were there. Then on Wednesday evening at the conclusion of service we will be drawing for that ability to win the prize.”

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Last weekend I had the opportunity to worship at Christ Church Cathedral as part of the Flower Festival weekend. As the celebration of the Holy Eucharist came to a close, the presider, the Rt. Rev. George Wayne Smith, Bishop of Missouri, turned to the Most Rev. Daniel Deng Bul Yak, Archbishop of Sudan, and invited him to impart the final blessing on the congregation. The words he used to extend this invitation were something like, “Archbishop, my brother, would you bless us in the language of your birth?”

It was, for me, a powerful moment. The Archbishop spoke in what I am told was Dinka, an African language utterly unfamiliar to me (and, I would guess, to nearly everyone else in the Cathedral). And yet, at the moment when he raised his hand high to begin making the sign of the cross over us, every person in that church knew that we were being blessed “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” and it made no difference to us in what language the words were spoken. This was Anglicanism at its best: generous and welcoming, respectful of both liturgical tradition and cultural difference, joyfully making room at the table for all who feel called to respond to Christ’s invitation to reconciliation, fellowship, and transformation.

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But one thing the document is not is a manifesto. A genuine manifesto is sharp, punchy and, ideally, short. A proper manifesto — say, the absurdist Dada Manifesto of 1921, which begins “DADA EXCITES EVERYTHING. DADA knows everything. DADA spits everything out” — is just a few hundred words long. If the thing’s going to be extensive, like the Communist Manifesto, it should at least begin with a memorable statement (“A spectre is haunting Europe”) and clearly specify its agenda. The true manifesto is bold, even extreme: It leaves us in no doubt about its commitments.

The Evangelical Manifesto, by contrast, is both long and insistently moderate. After the apparently self-undercutting statement that “no one speaks for all Evangelicals, least of all those who claim to,” it launches into a lengthy catalog of theological statements that effectively duplicates Lausanne. To whom is this directed? Who wants or needs an overview of evangelical theology? The document never says.

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IT IS becoming clear that the conservative case is going to be well represented at the forthcoming Lambeth Conference in Canterbury. At least two conservative bishops have confirmed that they will be attending, with the express purpose of promoting their cause.

One is the Presiding Bishop of the Southern Cone, the Most Revd Greg Venables. He told The Times that he would attend both the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) in June and the Lambeth Conference in July.

Bishop Venables has been censured in recent weeks for ministering to congregations in Canada and San Joaquin, in the US, without the permission of the Anglican leadership in those provinces, and in contravention of the Windsor process.

He told The Times: “It is clear the division is pretty final. Dialogue is the one thing that is lacking. I don’t think we are going to change people’s minds, but I think it would be wrong for us to get to a point where we acknowledge a division and try to organise it without being together and talking about it.”

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Eat food.

Not too much.

Mostly plants.

Sounds simple–but it is very hard to do–KSH.

(The text story is here if you do not have video access).

The recent tragic death of Stephanie Kuleba, an 18-year-old high school cheerleader who died as a result of complications during a breast augmentation surgery, brought our attention to the pursuit of a more “ideal” body amongst teenagers. In fact, search data confirms this phenomenon. One of the most popular sites visited from the search term “plastic surgery” is the official site of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (www.plasticsurgery.org). Over 25% of visitors to the site (the largest segment) fell within the 18- to 24-year-old demographic ”” that’s up from 19.6% two years ago.

Plastic surgery has become an American obsession. Checking other markets that Hitwise has data on, such as the U.K. and Australia, the 18- to 24-year-old fascination with plastic surgery is a decidedly U.S. phenomenon.

Looking at other health related sites visited by 18- t 24-year-olds, reveals just how obsessed this age group is with appearance. Unlike their older counterparts who visit sites related to diseases and keeping healthy, younger Internet users flock to sites that dwell on personal appearance, such as those focused on bodybuilding, weight loss and skincare. And definitely plastic surgery.

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“Women are no longer marrying the boy they met in high school,” Fisher says. “They’re concerned with getting a career before they marry. This takes time.”

But this is time on the biological clock that cannot be recaptured.

Most U.S. mothers, including Scruby Boggs, have paying jobs. She says that she and her husband, Michael, share the household chores.

The family could get by on her husband’s income, Scruby Boggs says, and she doesn’t want to spend too much time away from daughter. But, she says, “I like contributing to our income, and I like the intellectual challenge of going to work and my job.”

Scruby Boggs admits she might feel differently if she weren’t able to work part of the time from home and rely on relatives for baby-sitting. “I leave Ayda with either of her grandmothers when I’m at work,” she says.

Fisher, of Rutgers, predicts that society will more fully accommodate women’s needs and biological realities.

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