Out in the world, when people talk about the shootings at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, they call it “Kent State.” But in the small town of Kent, 35 miles south of Cleveland, and on the university campus, they call it “May 4th.”

It was 40 years ago Tuesday that the shootings ”” which killed four people and wounded nine others ”” stunned the nation. Even at the height of the Vietnam War protests, no one imagined that government soldiers would fire real bullets at unarmed college students.

“I saw the smoke come out of the weapons, and light is faster than sound, and so I knew immediately [they] were not firing blanks. So it was almost instinctive to dive for cover,” remembers Jerry Lewis, who was 33 and teaching sociology at Kent State in 1970.

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Black children, according to the signs, are ” an endangered species.” A news release backing this billboard campaign protests the “ugliest form of racism.” Those leading and supporting the drive speak ominously of an elite conspiracy, eugenics and black genocide.

You might think these volleys come from a progressive crusade against poverty, gun violence, or poor access to health care. Surprise: This recently concluded campaign in Atlanta was mounted by Georgia Right to Life, part of a new front in the anti-abortion movement that links abortion to a sinister plot to destroy black America.

Give credit to the abortion-is-genocide vanguard for this at least: They have demolished the usual left-right boundaries in their mixing of cries against racial injustice (typically a liberal cause) with anti-abortion politics (usually a cause of social conservatives). And by bringing new national attention to disproportionately high rates of abortion among African Americans, they have succeeded in shining a spotlight on distress in black communities.

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A bipartisan U.S. commission on religious freedom says President Obama is softening his stand on protecting the right to one’s faith at a time when religious persecution is on the rise, according to an annual report to be released today.

The 11th annual report by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom says Obama’s recent call for nations to respect “freedom of worship” rather than “religious freedom” allows regimes to claim they are not oppressing certain religions if those faiths exist in a form acceptable to the regime.

“When you start narrowing the discussion, the signal the administration is sending to the international community is that as long as they prop up a few churches or houses of worship (of minority faiths), there isn’t going to be a problem,” Leonard Leo, the chairman of the commission, told USA TODAY.

The report also criticizes the administration for failing to nominate an ambassador-at-large for religious freedom.

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Taxpayers are naturally eager for news about bailout repayments. But what neither G.M. nor the Treasury disclosed was that the company simply used other funds held by the Treasury to pay off its original loan.

Neil M. Barofsky, the inspector general overseeing the troubled asset program, revealed this detail when he spoke before the Senate Finance Committee on April 20.

“So it’s good news in that they’re reducing their debt,” Mr. Barofsky said of G.M. But he went on to note that G.M. was using other taxpayer money to make the loan repayment, according to the transcript of his testimony.

Armed with this information, Mr. Grassley fired off a letter to Mr. Geithner on April 22, asking for details of the transaction. “I am concerned … that this announcement is not what it seems,” he wrote. “In fact, it appears to be nothing more than an elaborate TARP money shuffle.”

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THE drama over Europe’s sovereign debt might seem good ammunition for American deficit hawks. Not so. As Barack Obama’s bipartisan deficit commission held its first meeting on April 27th, the rising cost of government debt across southern Europe was, if anything, being used to draw a favourable contrast between the American and Greek fiscal positions.

Nevertheless, the American fiscal picture has darkened considerably, thanks to the recession. The projected 2010 deficit, of around 11% of GDP, contrasts with one of 1.2% as recently as 2007, while the net public debt has climbed from 36% to 64% of GDP. These figures look good beside those of Greece, where debt may touch 150% of output by the middle of the decade. There is still enough gloom, however, to trigger concern over the potential for rising interest rates and continued fiscal weakness as America’s baby-boomers start to retire.

The good news is that the deficit is forecast to fall as the federal stimulus unwinds and growth returns.

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Church leaders in East Anglia are encouraging people to vote in the general election with the “wellbeing of all people in our communities in mind”.

Five years ago almost four in 10 of those registered to vote did not do so and in a bid to encourage more people to the polls, they have come together to urge people to exercise their rights.

In a joint statement, including Bishop of Norwich, the Rt Rev Graham James, and Bishop of East Anglia, the Rt Rev Michael Evans, said: “The churches in our area have hosted some of the best-attended hustings during this campaign and have done so in service to the wider community. The tradition of hospitality is well reflected in this area’s notable history of welcoming people fleeing persecution elsewhere in Europe, sometimes on religious grounds.

“As Christian leaders in this generation we believe living together with mutual respect remains the foundation of a civilised society. All human beings are created equally in the image of God. That is why racism is a sin. Christ calls us to love our neighbours as ourselves and in this forthcoming election we believe it is right to be vigilant about any party or individual candidate seeking to use people’s fears for their own wellbeing to stir racial or religious hatred.

“Inevitably this is an election taking place when people are anxious about their jobs, finances and future. We pray that the best and most generous traditions of our national life will guide all voters on May 6.”

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Despite disappointment and discouragement voiced over the slower pace of ecumenical talks than in decades past, Atlanta Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory offered his view that it is “high season” for the ecumenical movement during an April 20 address in Tampa.

“Some have even spoken of a ”˜winter’ of ecumenism in the sense that the enthusiasm of the early days has given way to a more sober realism,” Archbishop Gregory told participants at the April 19-22 National Workshop on Christian Unity.

He referred to German Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, whose book assessing the past 40 years of ecumenical dialogue, “Harvesting the Fruits: Basic Aspects of Christian Faith in Ecumenical Dialogue,” was published last year.

The book was written in part, according to Archbishop Gregory, because “we now face a new situation, quite different from the one we faced at the end of the Second Vatican Council,” whose decree on ecumenism, “Unitatis Redintegratio,” helped pave the way for greater ecumenical dialogue in the Catholic Church.

“We now realize that there was a kind of naive enthusiasm in those days, which now contributes to a certain fatigue or even disappointment,” Archbishop Gregory said. “We know now that the ecumenical enterprise will be longer than it appeared to be after the council.”

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In December 1969, Don Finto went looking for the Holy Ghost.

Growing up in the Church of Christ, Finto believed in God the Father Almighty, and he learned to trust in Jesus. But for the most part, he felt the Holy Ghost was missing from his life ”” especially when it came to speaking in tongues, a practice of praying in unknown languages.

“I felt like I was stuck in a box,” he said.

Finto, then 39, decided to give the Holy Spirit a try. The former missionary-turned-David Lipscomb University-professor knelt and prayed, asking to be baptized in the Spirit, an experience relatively unknown outside of Pentecostal circles.

When he stood up, Finto says, his life had changed forever.

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On Sunday, members of St. Matthew’s Episcopal Parish were still reeling from their separation.

For the second week, two dozen people gathered in the wood and brick building on Northeast Prescott Street that has been their home for 55 years. An hour later, almost 100 of their former brothers and sisters in Christ, who recently declared themselves Anglicans, worshiped in rented space at Mt.Tabor Seventh-day Adventist Church. The storm that has battered the Episcopal Church in the United States has touched down in Portland.

Since the Episcopal Church in the United States decided in 2003 to accept the election of its first openly gay bishop, the denomination has been rocked with disagreements over biblical authority. With a reputation as a conservative congregation, St. Matthew’s had for 66 years included people who read the Bible almost literally and others who interpreted it from more liberal points of view. But over time, that range grew problematic. On March 21, a majority of St. Matthew’s members voted to leave the church.

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Senior Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi was yesterday unable to confirm UK media speculation that leading Church of England bishops held a series of secret “conversion” meetings with advisers to Pope Benedict XVI in the Vatican last week. Other senior Vatican officials claimed to have no knowledge of such meetings.

Reports in yesterday’s online editions of the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail claimed the Bishop of Fulham, the Rt Rev John Broadhurst; the Bishop of Richborough, the Rt Rev Keith Newton; and the Bishop of Ebbsfleet, the Rt Rev Andrew Burnham were involved in meetings with the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith last week.

The scope of the meetings was to discuss future Anglican conversions “en masse” to Rome with the bishops reportedly informing the Vatican that many Church of England clergy are keen to defect to Rome.

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A conservative former Episcopal bishop of Albany who left the church in 2007 to become a Roman Catholic has now returned to his former faith.

Daniel W. Herzog became an outspoken national opponent of ordaining gay clergy after he retired from the ministry in 2007. He made news that year when he and two other diocesan bishops left the Episcopal Church to join the Roman Catholic Church.

The Episcopal Church, the American wing of the worldwide Anglican Communion, had been in turmoil following the consecration in 2003 of V. Gene Robinson as its first openly gay bishop.

Herzog’s return was announced this week by Albany Bishop William Love. Both Herzog and his wife, Carol, left the church. Herzog was one of only a handful of Episcopal bishops ever to join another church.

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Churchgoers in almost 300 parishes that disapprove of women priests may take advantage of Pope Benedict XVI’s offer to change denomination if their “flying bishops” lead the way.

However the Church of England is expected to make a last-ditch attempt to stop the disillusioned groups leaving, by offering them concessions over the introduction of female bishops.

As The Sunday Telegraph disclosed, the bishops of Fulham, Richborough and Ebbsfleet held a secret meeting with papal advisers last week to discuss plans for Anglicans to convert to the Roman Catholic Church en masse.

At least one key member of the English Catholic church’s commission on the Anglican Ordinariate ”“ the Pope’s move to allow Anglicans to enter into full communion with the Holy See while retaining some of their spiritual heritage ”“ was in Rome at the same time.

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When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad walks up to the podium today in New York to deliver another blast of venom, the only proper response is for the US to hit Iran’s economy with much tougher sanctions than anyone has yet tried. That means targeting its oil industry, not just its leaders and its banks.

Otherwise, Iran’s President will deliver real injury, not just insult, to this crucial conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). He has taken Iran to the brink of having nuclear weapons, and if it does soon get them (despite protestations that it only wants nuclear power), that will trigger a Middle East arms race.

The only country able to impose tough sanctions quickly is America. It should do so now. The brutal truth is that the time for dissuading Iran has probably passed. But if it hasn’t, the US needs to act now. It’s a tribute to the success of the NPT, in force since 1970 and signed by 189 countries, that these five-yearly reviews are usually dusty talks about the inspection of power stations. Meetings have tried to patch up ”” but not rewrite ”” the lopsided bargain built into the treaty. This says that the original five nuclear weapons states (the US, Russia, China, Britain and France) promise to help others to get nuclear power (but not weapons), while cutting their own stockpiles.

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Then on the way home we bought a Sunday Paper to find the Telegraph spinning nonsense about ”˜defections’ to the Catholic Church. Most of what they wrote was reprinted from a stolen email they had already published months ago. All that was new was an assertion that three of our Bishops had visited Rome. If they did, and no chapter and verse was given, then the Newspaper was unable to find anything about what was said, whom they had met, why they were there. Just daft speculation.

This is the sort of nonsense we must expect to see appearing in the media over the next few months, as preparations are made for the visit to England of the Holy Father. Meanwhile, I am getting ready to go on Pilgrimage to Fatima next week. And, guess what, the Pope will be there too! No doubt the pilgrimage of half a million Portuguese has been specially arranged in order to cloak the secret meetings between me and the Holy Father! I hope I might possibly get near enough to take a photo with my zoom lens, and you should with luck be able to pick out a small figure in white somewhere in the crowds ”“ look for my blog two weeks or so from now”¦ but don’t breathe a word to the Sunday Telegraph.

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BISHOP GERALD KICANAS (Roman Catholic Diocese of Tucson, Arizona): Even the Arizona legislators, Bob, are considering modifications to the bill, which suggests that they themselves are concerned about how it could be misinterpreted. So there will be legal action, certainly, and we’ll monitor that and participate where we feel it would be appropriate.

{BOB] ABERNETHY: Do you think the church might become a party to the lawsuits to try to stop the bill?

BISHOP KICANAS: I don’t know that we’ll be bringing the lawsuits forward. Those will be brought forward by, certainly, others, but we will review those, and perhaps being a friend of the court where it would be appropriate.

ABERNETHY: Do you think in the end that the bill can be stopped, that the law can be stopped?

BISHOP KICANAS: Well, there is great national concern, certainly concern within our state among religious leaders, among many portions of our community. It has to be addressed that this bill does not well represent the state of Arizona and is not going to resolve the issues that we are facing.

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Greece announced Sunday that it had reached an agreement on a long-delayed rescue package that will require years of painful fiscal belt-tightening, but the deal probably will not defuse the potential threats to other European countries also suffering from mounting debts and troubled economies.

“I have done and will do everything not to let the country go bankrupt,” Prime Minister George Papandreou said in a televised address that urged Greeks to accept “great sacrifices” to avoid “catastrophe.”

The bailout, which was worked out over weeks of negotiations with the International Monetary Fund and Greece’s European partners, calls for as much as €110 billion, or $145 billion, in loans intended to stave off an immediate debt default and stop the spread of economic contagion to other parts of the region.

But analysts warned that Greece itself has not yet solved its fundamental problems and that other sovereign debt crises could arise as lenders and market speculators turn their attention to a handful of similarly vulnerable nations.

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We are at a remarkable moment. We have an open, 2,000-mile border to our south, and the entity with the power to enforce the law and impose safety and order will not do it. Wall Street collapsed, taking Main Street’s money with it, and the government can’t really figure out what to do about it because the government itself was deeply implicated in the crash, and both political parties are full of people whose political careers have been made possible by Wall Street contributions. Meanwhile we pass huge laws, bills so comprehensive, omnibus and transformative that no one knows what’s in them and no one””literally, no one””knows how exactly they will be executed or interpreted. Citizens search for new laws online, pore over them at night, and come away knowing no more than they did before they typed “dot-gov.”

It is not that no one’s in control. Washington is full of people who insist they’re in control and who go to great lengths to display their power. It’s that no one takes responsibility and authority. Washington daily delivers to the people two stark and utterly conflicting messages: “We control everything” and “You’re on your own.”

All this contributes to a deep and growing alienation between the people of America and the government of America in Washington.

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From Harvard came the Marshall Plan, from the University of Michigan Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. John F. Kennedy gave his space-race speech at Rice and his world-peace speech at American University. Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo. Years from now, if we are lucky, we may recall that the big idea of the early 21st century came from Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa.

Like the others — the ideas that social justice and peace are good and that the threat of Soviet expansion and war are bad — the Allegheny idea isn’t really new, just a plain-sense notion plainly expressed.

Allegheny is a tiny college, fiercely proud of its devotion to teaching and admirably willing to boast of students whose interests are “wonderfully weird” — you’ll find those exact words on its website. Wonderfully weird, perhaps, but the Allegheny alumni I know also are wonderfully intelligent and sensible, so it is no surprise that the Allegheny idea is simple: “Nastiness, Name-calling and Negativity” (the title of the college’s ground-breaking new report) are bad, and civility and compromise are good.

The report emerges from a Zogby International poll of the nation that shows the better angels of America’s nature at work among the public if not among its politicians. The poll shows that 95 percent of Americans want civility in politics; 87 percent want political disagreement to be respectful; 70 percent want compromise, even on the most divisive issues.

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The arrival of Continuing Indaba on the Internet as part of the Anglican Communion web site makes visible the preparatory work already in hand for the series of pilot conversations between dioceses from different parts of the Communion to take place during 2010 and 2011.

Visitors to the new site will find an outline of the project,, which explains its origins as located within an African conversational method for resolving real or potential conflict through mutual listening and debate. The process emerges from the Indaba-style format used at the 2008 Lambeth Conference which is now being expanded to enhance the world-wide Anglican Communion in its quest to intensify relationships in the cause of shared mission.

These pages carry news of the initial series of ”˜hub’ meetings around the world during late 2009 and early 2010 whose remit is to develop resources which can guide and inform the model conversations between participants from dioceses from across the world.

There is also a growing library of the resource papers generated from and through the ”˜hubs’ in order to make them as widely available as possible for those wishing to follow the development of the Continuing Indaba conversations planned for 2010 and 2011….

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A leading Anglo-Catholic source contacts me this morning naming several English Catholic bishops whom he thinks were in Rome for this summit. He confirms that “very few people on our side” (ie, the C of E) knew it was happening.]

A fascinating update on the Ordinariate story tonight from Jonathan Wynne-Jones: the Church of England bishops of Fulham, Richborough and Ebbsfleet have basically said yes to the Pope’s offer. They were at the Vatican last week to discuss the details, apparently. The RC Bishops of England and Wales are hopelessly divided on the Ordinariate scheme, so Bishops John Broadhurst, Keith Newton and Andrew Burnham have gone to the top. Very wise.

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In a move likely to raise tensions between the two Churches, a group of Church of England bishops met last week with advisers of Pope Benedict XVI to set in motion steps that would allow priests to convert to Catholicism en masse.

They are set to resign their orders in opposition to the introduction of women bishops and to lead an exodus of Anglican clerics to the Catholic Church despite Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, urging them not to leave.

It would be the first time for nearly 20 years that large numbers of priests have crossed from the Church of England to Rome, and comes only weeks ahead of a crucial General Synod debate on making women bishops.

The Sunday Telegraph has learnt that bishops travelled to the Holy See last week to hold face to face discussions with senior members of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the most powerful of the Vatican’s departments.

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1. S.E., you make no bones about being an atheist. Why defend Christianity against the liberal media?

I think being an atheist or a nonbeliever makes me the perfect candidate to address this issue, because I approach it entirely objectively. My agenda here isn’t to prop up my own belief system, but to defend others’ rights to believe in something I don’t, and more importantly, to demand a more responsible, representative press.

2. You say Christians are the only acceptable people for the media to make fun of. Expound on that.

Hollywood started treating Christianity like it was some kind of social disease decades ago. These days, it’s practically company policy in Hollywood to mock Christianity as hopelessly uncool and unsophisticated. The liberal media has, in the past 10 years or so, joined in the action. I think they’ve both been so successful in promoting that message in the popular culture, because Christians represent a vast majority — and majorities get complacent. But, if Christian America doesn’t stand up to the liberal media and demand more respect, they might not be a majority in the future.

3. Why do you think the mainstream media feel the need to target Christian America?

Two reasons: One, it’s a way of getting at conservatism. If they can effectively paint Christians as dangerous fanatics, it’s just a skip away from painting conservatives as dangerous fanatics.

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Police combed through a charred SUV and a crude assortment of explosives Sunday for clues to a failed Times Square bombing as a monitoring group reported that the Pakistani Taliban had claimed responsibility for the terrorist threat.

An intelligence monitoring group released a one-minute video allegedly from the Pakistani Taliban, in which it claimed responsibility for the failed bombing in a smoking SUV left parked in the city on Saturday night, clearing thousands of tourists and theatergoers from the city’s busiest district.

The U.S.-based SITE intelligence group, which monitors militant websites, said the Pakistani Taliban claims the attack is revenge for the death of its leader Baitullah Mehsud and the recent killings of the top leaders of al-Qaida in Iraq. Images of the slain militants are shown as an unidentified voice recites the message. English subtitles are at the bottom of the screen.

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