A group of experts are highlighting papal teaching that people in persistent comas should be nourished regardless of the cost, as an ordinary duty of persons to one another.

This was affirmed in an article published this month in the journal of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, Ethics and Medics, signed by a group of 15 scholars.

Some of the contributing scholars are: Robert George, jurisprudence professor at Princeton University; William May, retired moral theology professor at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family; Christian Brugger, moral theology professor at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary; and Father Thomas Berg, executive director of Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person.

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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad brought tens of thousands of supporters into the heart of Tehran tonight in a bid to take back the capital after a weekend of vicious running battles between state security forces and large crowds of Iranians who insist that Mr Ahmadinejad stole last Friday’s presidential election.

Chanting ’Allah o’Akbar” (God is great) and “Ahmadi we love you”, the army of zealous hardliners poured into the central square in a massive show of strength designed to intimidate the furious supporters of Mr Ahmadinejad’s relatively moderate opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi.

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The BBC said Sunday that the satellites it uses to broadcast in Persian were being jammed from Iran, disrupting its reports on the hotly-disputed presidential election.

The corporation said television and radio services had been affected from 1245 GMT Friday onwards by “heavy electronic jamming” which had become “progressively worse”.

Satellite technicians had traced the interference to Iran, it said.

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[William] Lawrence, who served as the Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts from 1893 to 1927, was cut from a different cloth than most of today’s prelates. He was the scion of an immensely wealthy, influential and philanthropic Boston family that made a fortune in textiles, founded the cities of Lawrence, Mass. and Lawrence, Kansas, and had a long association with Harvard University and the Episcopal Church. Bishop Lawrence travelled in elite circles ”“ he was a familiar of Theodore Roosevelt and a visitor to Buckingham Palace. So when he was called in to arbitrate the pay dispute in the newspaper industry, he immersed himself in the unfamiliar workplace before working out a deal.

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During that week, St. Paul’s will become the first parish in the San Joaquin Diocese — and one of the first self-incorporated parishes in the nation — to willingly sign its property over to the Episcopal Church before a lawsuit has been filed. The church, which is 130 years old and has been at various locations in Modesto, predates the San Joaquin Diocese and owns its property free and clear.

“Our name’s on the deed. It doesn’t even have the name ‘Episcopal’ on the deed, and we paid for it,” said the Rev. Michael McClenaghan, St. Paul’s priest. “Not a dime came from the Episcopal Church, not even a dime from the diocese.”

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“The Michael Ramsey Prize is intended for theological writing which, by freshness and originality, somehow changes the theological landscape, and also serves the needs of the Church; not by being safe or orthodox, or by reinforcing the Church’s institutional life ”“ but by giving people something with which to nourish themselves and to enrich their lived Christian experiences.

“Richard Bauckham in his book ‘Jesus and the Eyewitnesses’ had, in the words of one of the judges, ‘Placed something of a bomb under a good deal of New Testament scholarship’. His book shows why we are right to have confidence in the testimony of those who personally witnessed the life of Jesus as recorded in the gospels.”

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The decision taken last March by U.S. President Barack Obama to allocate Federal funds to research on stem cells created by the destruction of human embryos (embryonic stem cells) has rekindled the polemics on a topic characterized by complex bioethical implications. The situation has been further aggravated by the nature and content of the declarations made in support of this decision, which will have a huge impact on the question of the defence of human life in the context of stem cell research.

The argument that this decision is necessary in order to defend the right of the sick to have access to possible future treatments constitutes a distortion of logic. In this approach, the rights of the sick person are used as a lever to justify measures which, given the recent developments in this field, would not be justifiable on a scientific basis. Furthermore, the contemporaneous urging to look at the facts and not to act in conformity with ideological considerations is astonishing at a time when, analyzing the objective facts, we discover that they lead to diametrically opposite conclusions that is, that there is no need to destroy human embryos in order to pursue all possible paths in the search for cures for many serious diseases by means of stem cells.

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Could this not be used more often?.

Watch it all–hard to believe it has been a year already–KSH.

[BOB] ABERNETHY: And what did you tell them?

Rabbi [SHMUEL] HERZFELD: Well, I said to them sometimes there are just people who are wicked. You know, like sometimes you’ll see a kid in school who’s just being mean for no reason. Well, if we multiple that by so much, there’s some people who are so wicked in the world and there’s no way to understand it. But that means we have a job to do, and our job, I said to my children, is to reach out and be extra nice to people ”” especially people whom we don’t know, especially people who are different. That’s a message that kids can understand, and in the face of somebody who acts with senseless brutality and evil we have to be the opposite of such a person. We have to double-down on kindness.

ABERNETHY: Do you see this as an isolated incident, or do you fear that it’s part of something larger?

Rabbi HERZFELD: Well, there’s always the fear that this is part of something larger, and I’m very afraid that this is part of something larger.

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Binyamin Netanyahu is expected to endorse a “two-state solution” in a much-heralded speech this weekend, but he may stall on American demands to freeze Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Feeling the squeeze between the US Administration, which wants a moratorium on settlement growth and a commitment to a Palestinian state, and his national-religious coalition, which favours neither, the Israeli Prime Minister appears likely to try to steer a middle course.

Israeli newspapers were full of speculation about what Mr Netanyahu ”” who has so far refused openly to back a Palestinian state alongside Israel ”” might offer to deflect pressure from Washington. Ehud Barak, his Defence Minister, urged him this week to recognise a Palestinian state, but members of Mr Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party have cautioned him against the move.

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Supreme Court of British Columbia hearings have concluded in a case that will decide whether the Anglican diocese of New Westminister or parishes that have split away from the Anglican Church of Canada own disputed church buildings and resources. Judge Stephen Kelleher reserved his judgment and did not say when he might announce a decision.

Two lawsuits were filed against the diocese of New Westminster and its bishop, Michael Ingham, by clergy who cut ties with the Anglican Church of Canada and individuals who say they are the lawful trustees of church properties and resources for several congregations that also voted to leave the church. Other hearings have resulted in decisions about interim possession and sharing of Anglican church buildings in British Columbia as well as in Ontario, but this trial will be the first in Canada to rule on which side owns the buildings and resources.

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Some Church of England clergy and their families are living in crumbling and decrepit vicarages that are unsafe and environmentally unfriendly, according to trade union officials.

Unite, the country’s largest union that represents about 2,500 faith workers, is calling on the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, Dr Rowan Williams and Dr John Sentamu, to “practise what they preach” in terms of the carbon footprint left by hundreds of parsonages.

Unite want the Archbishops to revamp more than 6,000 vicarages and rectories that the union claims fail to meet modern environmental and safety standards.

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Despite a slow start, the program could soon expand broadly. Next week, the Fed will add commercial real estate mortgages ”” a vast market ”” to the list of loans it will buy. Eventually, officials say, the TALF program could provide as much as $1 trillion in financing.

Fed officials say they, too, are uncomfortable with their new role and hope to end it as soon as credit markets return to normal. When R.V. manufacturers recently sought a meeting, senior Fed staff members refused to see them in person and instead heard their pleas in a conference call.

The central bank is increasingly having to make politically sensitive choices. For example, it is weighing whether loans to people who buy speedboats and snowmobiles are as worthy of help as those to people who buy cars. And it is being besieged by arguments from R.V. manufacturers and strip-mall developers that they play a crucial role in the economy and also deserve help.

Many of the decisions could have political repercussions. On Feb. 9, President Obama traveled to Elkhart, Ind., a Republican stronghold that Democrats hope to convert to their column. Elkhart is also home to much of the R.V. industry, which has been battered by the recession.

Count me among the deeply uncomfortable. Speedboats? This is nuts. Read it all–KSH.

The authorities declared Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the official winner of Iran’s presidential election on Saturday afternoon, but opposition candidates and their supporters insisted the election had been stolen, and riot police officers used batons and tear gas against thousands of demonstrators in the worst street protests in a decade.

Witnesses reported that at least one person had been shot dead in clashes with the police in Vanak Square in Tehran. Smoke from burning vehicles and tires hung over the city late Saturday.

The Interior Ministry said Mr. Ahmadinejad had won 62.6 percent of the vote, with Mir Hussein Moussavi, the leading challenger, taking just under 34 percent. Turnout was a record 85 percent, officials said.

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A plan to create a new Pentagon cybercommand is raising significant privacy and diplomatic concerns, as the Obama administration moves ahead on efforts to protect the nation from cyberattack and to prepare for possible offensive operations against adversaries’ computer networks.

President Obama has said that the new cyberdefense strategy he unveiled last month will provide protections for personal privacy and civil liberties. But senior Pentagon and military officials say that Mr. Obama’s assurances may be challenging to guarantee in practice, particularly in trying to monitor the thousands of daily attacks on security systems in the United States that have set off a race to develop better cyberweapons.

Much of the new military command’s work is expected to be carried out by the National Security Agency, whose role in intercepting the domestic end of international calls and e-mail messages after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, under secret orders issued by the Bush administration, has already generated intense controversy.

There is simply no way, the officials say, to effectively conduct computer operations without entering networks inside the United States, where the military is prohibited from operating, or traveling electronic paths through countries that are not themselves American targets.

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