Mr. Oltzik received what some doctors call palliative sedation and others less euphemistically call terminal sedation. While the national health coverage debate has been roiled by questions of whether the government should be paying for end-of-life counseling, physicians like Dr. Halbridge, in consultations with patients or their families, are routinely making tough decisions about the best way to die.

Among those choices is terminal sedation, a treatment that is already widely used, even as it vexes families and a profession whose paramount rule is to do no harm.

Doctors who perform it say it is based on carefully thought-out ethical principles in which the goal is never to end someone’s life, but only to make the patient more comfortable.

But the possibility that the process might speed death has some experts contending that the practice is, in the words of one much-debated paper, a form of “slow euthanasia,” and that doctors who say otherwise are fooling themselves and their patients.

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American officials agreed to send the two terrorists from Guantanamo to Saudi Arabia where they entered into an “art therapy rehabilitation program” and were set free, according to U.S. and Saudi officials.

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What has happened, however, makes next year more fraught with challenges and danger than ever in dealing with Iran.

First, Iran was caught (again) cheating and lying about its nuclear program, especially when U.S. and other intelligence agencies revealed a new undeclared uranium enrichment facility near Qom, an installation the Iranians had tried to keep secret. So persistent has been the Iranian policy of deceit and of on-again, off-again co-operation that Mohamed ElBaradei, the outgoing head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, lost his legendary patience with Iran and denounced the country’s approach.

Second, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election was obviously a rigged affair. The result has been an even greater grip on government and the economy of the Revolutionary Guards and the special police, the Basij, both under the control of the Supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A mixture of political thuggery, institutionalized corruption, religious inflexibility and a morbid suspicion of the West now permeates the Iranian government.

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A fight over athletic fields in this city goes beyond who gets to play soccer where and raises thorny questions about separation of church and state and public aid to religious institutions ”” divisive issues that have flared repeatedly in heavily Catholic Rhode Island.

Parents of public school students accuse the city of favoring Saint Raphael Academy ”” a prominent Catholic school and alma mater of city and state power brokers ”” by granting its football team exclusive use of a public field. They say it’s unconstitutional to give a religious school priority access to a field meant for public use.

“It’s a long-standing and troublesome issue,” said Maggi Rogers, whose two children played tennis for a public high school here and is among the parents suing the city. “I have a strong belief in public education, and I know that public education suffers when public resources are diverted into private education.”

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We remember this day, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by the order of King Herod. Receive, we beseech thee, into the arms of thy mercy all innocent victims; and by thy great might frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish thy rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

When Daniel Ottalini entered the University of Maryland in 2004, his family had an array of choices to cover the cost — cheap student loans, a second mortgage at low rates, credit cards with high limits and their own soaring investments.

By the time his younger brother, Russell, started at the University of Pittsburgh this fall, the financial crisis had left the family with fewer options. Russell has had to juggle several jobs in school, and the money he could borrow came with a much higher interest rate that could climb even further over time.

The upheaval in financial markets did not just eliminate generous lending for home buyers; it also ended an era of easy credit for students and their families facing the soaring cost of a college degree.

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The attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253 from the Netherlands as it prepared to land in Detroit on Christmas Day was mercifully aborted by good luck — and the brave intervention of Dutch passenger Jasper Schuringa and the flight’s crew. But while the incident had a happy ending, it raised a number of troubling issues, starting with the stunning failure of the U.S. terrorist watch program to identify the suspect in this case as a threat despite ample evidence.

The suspect’s father, a prominent and wealthy Nigerian banker, had warned U.S. officials about his son’s radical religious views (see Cal Thomas’ column on today’s Commentary page).

The London Times reports that in May the suspect was refused re-entry to Britain, where he had been a university student and resident until November 2008. The New York Times reports that the alleged bomber’s name was recently added to a list of people to be investigated for terrorist ties. That list has 550,000 names, whereas the list of people who must have additional screening at airports has only 13,000 names and the “no fly list” has only 4,000.

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The Episcopal Church has endorsed a letter to members of the United States Senate endorsing taxpayer funding of abortions.

On Dec 4, the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice released a letter endorsed by the Episcopal Church, Catholics for Choice and other liberal religious groups expressing their opposition to an amendment to the health care reform bill before Congress that would remove abortion funding from the proposed legislation.

“We believe that it is our social and moral obligation to ensure access to high quality comprehensive health care services at every stage in an individual’s life,” the RCRC letter said, noting that “affordable and accessible care for all” was “necessary for the well-being of all people in our nation.”

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Modern liberalism is both authoritarian and antinomian at the same time: it wants to use the hammer blows of the courts and other instruments of state power to achieve its ideals, which treat the human person as an abstraction.

R.R. Reno in the First Things blog First Thoughts.

The last time global negotiations collapsed like this was in Doha in 2001. After the trade talks fell apart, the World Trade Organisation assured delegates that there was nothing to fear: they would move to Mexico, where a deal would be done. The negotiations ran into the sand of the Mexican resort of Cancun, never to re-emerge. After eight years of dithering, nothing has been agreed.

When the climate talks in Copenhagen ended in failure, Yvo de Boer, the man in charge of the process, urged us not to worry: everything will be sorted out ”in Mexico one year from now”. Is Mexico the diplomatic equivalent of the Pacific garbage patch – the place where failed negotiations go to die?

We can live without a new trade agreement; we can’t live without a new climate agreement. One of the failings of the people who have tried to mobilise support for a climate treaty is that we have made the issue too complicated. So here is the simplest summary I can produce of why this matters.

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Here is one:

5. Manhattan Declaration Prods Culture, Invites Pushback Despite disconcerting cultural trends, Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox leaders united around a statement declaring their fidelity to biblical morality. But the Manhattan Declaration produced an unintended consequence by pitting allies against one another and reigniting a fierce debate over whether evangelicals should engage in ecumenical dialogue and joint social activism.

Guess the other nine and then check it out

This is the culmination of an unprecedented policy disaster, inflicted on the American taxpayer by congressional supporters of Fannie and Freddie who refused over many years to approve new and tougher regulations for the two GSEs. Now that many of these folks are in charge of the House and Senate committees that deal with financial reform, they have suddenly found new respect for regulation and are trying to apply it to the entire financial system. Perhaps the American taxpayers, acting as voters in 2010, will decide that one disaster per career is all they should be allowed.

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The events, people, and debates of the past year that have shaped, or will significantly shape, evangelical life, thought, or mission.

See how many you can guess before you look.

In the nation’s capital, where $12.1 trillion of national debt looms and Democratic President Barack Obama’s projected 2010 budget shortfall is expected to hit $1.26 trillion, a bill is pending to establish up to $3,500 in annual tax deductions for the family pet.

The legislation is known as the HAPPY Act – Humanity and Pets Partnered Through the Years – and it has some support.

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“The father ”” Alhaji Umaru Mutallab ””- who is a responsible and respected Nigerian, has already expressed deep shock and regret over his son’s action,” Akunyili said. “We want to reiterate that Nigeria as a nation abhors all forms of terrorism. Nigerian security agencies are working hand in hand with international security agencies on this matter.”

In its statement today, Abdulmutallab’s family said that before cutting ties, the suspect had never displayed any behavior to give them concern. Mike Rimmer, his history teacher for three years at the exclusive British School of Lome in the west African nation of Togo, said he couldn’t believe his ears when he heard the news.

“I was absolutely shocked,” Rimmer said. “I was expecting great things from Umar. I certainly wasn’t expecting this. He was a great lad. He was a model student ”” very keen, very enthusiastic.”

Rimmer told the BBC that it hadn’t occurred to him then, but perhaps there were early signs that he had missed.

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There is just nothing like kids at a parade.

The Oversight Committee for the Search, Transition and Election certified Rev. Margaret Babcock and Rev. Sandra Casey-Martus.

The two candidates will be added to the ballot for the March 20 election after background checks.

All of the candidates will be on a statewide tour or “walkabout” between Feb. 24 and March 4.

“It’s actually an advantage to have the walkabout in winter,” said John Peacock, the director of the Wyoming Association of Churches and a member of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church here.

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“There was the emphasis upon the Incarnation, the striving after synthesis between theology and contemporary culture which the term ‘liberal’ broadly denotes, the frequent shift of interest from dogma to apologetics. But if these were the more dated characteristics, there were also the more permanent ones, seldom absent from Anglican divinity in any age: the appeal to Scripture, and the Fathers, the fondness for Nicene categories, the union of doctrine and liturgy, the isolation from continental influences.”

–Arthur Michael Ramsey, An Era In Anglican Theology (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960), p. viii

Now the man to whom I’m going to introduce you was not a scrooge, he was a kind, decent, mostly good man. Generous to his family, upright in his dealings with other men. But he just didn’t believe all that incarnation stuff which the churches proclaim at Christmas Time. It just didn’t make sense and he was too honest to pretend otherwise. He just couldn’t swallow the Jesus Story, about God coming to Earth as a man. “I’m truly sorry to distress you,” he told his wife, “but I’m not going with you to church this Christmas Eve.” He said he’d feel like a hypocrite. That he’d much rather just stay at home, but that he would wait up for them. And so he stayed and they went to the midnight service.

Shortly after the family drove away in the car, snow began to fall. He went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier and heavier and then went back to his fireside chair and began to read his newspaper. Minutes later he was startled by a thudding sound. Then another, and then another. Sort of a thump or a thud. At first he thought someone must be throwing snowballs against his living room window. But when he went to the front door to investigate he found a flock of birds huddled miserably in the snow. They’d been caught in the storm and, in a desperate search for shelter, had tried to fly through his large landscape window.
Well, he couldn’t let the poor creatures lie there and freeze, so he remembered the barn where his children stabled their pony. That would provide a warm shelter, if he could direct the birds to it. Quickly he put on a coat, galoshes, tramped through the deepening snow to the barn. He opened the doors wide and turned on a light, but the birds did not come in. He figured food would entice them in. So he hurried back to the house, fetched bread crumbs, sprinkled them on the snow, making a trail to the yellow-lighted wide open doorway of the stable. But to his dismay, the birds ignored the bread crumbs, and continued to flap around helplessly in the snow. He tried catching them. He tried shooing them into the barn by walking around them waving his arms. Instead, they scattered in every direction, except into the warm, lighted barn.

And then, he realized, that they were afraid of him. To them, he reasoned, I am a strange and terrifying creature. If only I could think of some way to let them know that they can trust me. That I am not trying to hurt them, but to help them. But how? Because any move he made tended to frighten them, confuse them. They just would not follow. They would not be led or shooed because they feared him. “If only I could be a bird,” he thought to himself, “and mingle with them and speak their language. Then I could tell them not to be afraid. Then I could show them the way to safety … to the safe warm barn. But I would have to be one of them so they could see, and hear and understand.”

At that moment the church bells began to ring. The sound reached his ears above the sounds of the wind. And he stood there listening to the bells – Adeste Fidelis – listening to the bells pealing the glad tidings of Christmas. And he sank to his knees in the snow.