October 23, 1956 The Hungarian Revolution: impotent, poignant, personal.

Wall Street Opinion Journal Peter Nadas October 23, 2006

So, on that Tuesday afternoon, a single flow of humanity was moving down the avenues; they were coming on Váci Avenue, on Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Avenue, but on Marx Square many stopped in hesitation: Which way now? The piled-up streetcars stood motionless where they had gotten stuck in their tracks, with the lights burning in the empty compartments. There were about 80,000 people stranded around the edges of the square, on the banks of this vast intersection. They were singing, shouting demands, having visions, speechifying. A crowd, half a million strong, was already in front of the Parliament building. They demanded that the Russians go home, and clamored for Imre Nagy to make a speech.

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Economic hypochondria

Townhall.com George Will October 19, 2006

Recently Bill Clinton, at the British Labour Party’s annual conference, delivered what the Times of London described as a “relaxed, almost rambling” and “easy anecdotal” speech to an enthralled audience of leftists eager for evidence of American disappointments. Never a connoisseur of understatement, Clinton said America is “now outsourcing college-education jobs to India.”

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Orthodox Priest Beheading and Recent White House Omission

Religious News Service October 13, 2006

Lead to Call for American Protection of Pope and Ecumenical Patriarch Meeting in Turkey

Yesterday’s reported beheading of an Orthodox Priest and a recent White House omission during a meeting between President George W. Bush and Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan increased concerns about protecting the spiritual heads of the two largest Christian denominations, while in Turkey together. Catholicism’s Pope Benedict XVI and Orthodoxy’s Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew will be meeting in Turkey in late November. Turkey is the first Muslim country that Pope Benedict will visit. Until the year 1054, the Pope and Ecumenical Patriarch were presiding Patriarchs of the then-undivided Christian Church, in Rome and Constantinople.

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On 9/11, an inter-faith reality check

Jewish World Review Ira Rifkin September 11, 2006

He polished the prose of Muslim leaders so their views would be marketable. He invited them home to break bread. He even attacked his co-religionists in print for not being more realistic. No more.

In January 1985, the Los Angeles newspaper I worked for assigned me to the religion beat. My first story was a feature on what was then a new phenomenon in Southern California, a fully licensed Muslim parochial school.

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“Vegetative” Patient May Have Awareness

From Wesley Smith Blog:

Sophisticated brain scans of a woman diagnosed to be in a persistent vegetative state has revealed startling levels of activity. Indeed, it may indicate that she is aware.

The description of the patient in question is startlingly similar to Terri Schiavo: “Scientists don’t even agree on whether the woman had some real awareness–she seemed to follow, mentally, certain commands–or if her brain was responding more automatically to speech.”

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Teen Suicide Epidemic Puzzles the Netherlands: It Shouldn’t

From Wesley Smith email:

This is an excellent column by Colleen Carroll Campbell, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC). Apparently, a teenage “suicide craze” has hit the Netherlands and the government wonders why. But Campbell knows. The Dutch do “not seem to grasp the obvious,” she writes. “The law is a teacher and Dutch law has taught its young citizens well. The radical and sweeping embrace of suicide as an answer to the problem of human suffering, and the elevation of euthanasia to the status of a basic human right, has convinced Dutch teenagers that suicide must be a noble act, the kind that wins plaudits, prestige, and even legal protection.

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