Stolen Innocence: Death penalty foes make easy marks for vicious murderers

Wall Street Opinion Journal BRIDGET JOHNSON Wednesday, January 18, 2006

“This man might be innocent; this man is due to die,” blared the May 18, 1992, cover of Time magazine. “Roger Keith Coleman was convicted of killing his sister-in-law in 1982. The courts have refused to hear the evidence that could save him.” Accompanying the text was a full-cover photo of a shackled Coleman, looking morose in prison garb.

Before Coleman was sent to the electric chair two days later for the rape, stabbing and near-beheading of 19-year-old Wanda McCoy, his protestations of innocence had put an anti-death-penalty PR machine firmly in his corner. This man with a previous history of attempted rape became a cause célèbre telling his woeful tale of justice gone awry. “An innocent man is going to be murdered tonight,” he declared before his electrocution.

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Euthanasia: doctors aid 3,000 deaths

The Guardian Sarah Boseley Wednesday January 18, 2006

First UK study provokes furore

Doctors in the UK were responsible for the deaths, through euthanasia, of nearly 3,000 people last year, it was revealed yesterday in the first authoritative study of the decisions they take when faced with terminally-ill patients. More than 170,000 patients, almost a third of all deaths, had treatment withdrawn or withheld which would have hastened their demise.

The figures, extrapolated from the study, show rates of euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide which are significantly lower than anywhere else in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, where similar studies have been done. The numbers immediately provoked controversy.

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Churches could face IRS probe

Pastors Parsley, Johnson exploited pulpits to play politics, ministers’ complaint alleges
Monday, January 16, 2006
Mike Harden and Joe Hallett
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

ADAM CAIRNS | DISPATCH
Eric Williams, senior pastor of North Congregational United Church of Christ, tallies up petitions that ask the IRS to investigate political-campaign activities of two central Ohio churches.

The complaint alleges churchsponsored events have
showcased Republican gubernatorial candidate J. Kenneth Blackwell.

The Rev. Rod Parsley, left, and the Rev. Russell Johnson have been accused of using their churches for partisan politics.

More than 30 local pastors last night officially accused two evangelical megachurches of illegal political activities.

In a rare and potentially explosive action, the moderate ministers signed a complaint asking the Internal Revenue Service to investigate World Harvest Church of Columbus and Fairfield Christian Church of Lancaster and determine if their tax-exempt status should be revoked.

The grievance claims that the Rev. Rod Parsley of World Harvest Church and the Rev. Russell Johnson of Fairfield Christian Church improperly used their churches and affiliated entities — the Center for Moral Clarity, Ohio Restoration Project and Reformation Ohio — for partisan politics, including supporting the Republican gubernatorial candidacy of Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.

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‘Gay horse’ case dropped

ANGUS HOWARTH

AN OXFORD University student who called a policeman’s horse “gay” will not be prosecuted.

But police stood by their decision to take him to court for “homophobic comments” after the Crown Prosecution Service yesterday dropped the case.

Sam Brown, 21, from Belfast, approached the mounted officer during a night out in Oxford after his final exams last May, and said: “Excuse me, do you realise your horse is gay?” Moments later, two police cars appeared and he was arrested under the Public Order Act.more

The Lion in Winter: Why ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’ is Winning Over America

How did a movie about crusaders, a sacrificial lion and talking beavers gross $67 million in its opening weekend? The not-so-unlikely marriage of Hollywood and C.S. Lewis.

By John Zmirak

What did you do this past weekend? I spent part of mine in a Times Square theater full of adult Manhattanites at a movie with talking beavers. And a perky 8-year-old English girl with crooked teeth. And a cute widdle goat boy named Tumnus. No hunks on screen, no babes, and nary a kiss. The only “hot” woman in the movie was a six-foot-plus satanic witch with blonde dredlocks, and a kinky habit of torturing centaurs. The film’s stars were teens and children, but there wasn’t one kid in the audience. Nor were these moviegoers bused in from some Evangelical church—there were too many women wearing black, holding hands with Nader voters. I wondered aloud if this was a bunch of stoners—but sniffed around in vain for a whiff of the banished herb. Nobody snorted at the moments of outright Christian allegory, or scoffed at the galloping satyrs. Only one person even got up to go to the bathroom. These urbanites sat, spellbound, for more than two hours, some with tears on their cheeks, and at the end they burst into applause. At last I had to face the fact: New Yorkers are into Narnia.

So are Americans: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe made $67 million in its opening weekend, covering almost half its costs, and received glowing reviews from most major papers, including the Logos-phobic New York Times. (Only the lowbrow New York Post and drab suburban Newsday disagreed.) Ladies and gentlemen, what we have here is a hit—and the prospect of six more Narnia movies, to compete with the Harry Potter franchise and drive C.S. Lewis all the way up the bestseller lists. Look for Lewis sections to spring up in the bookstores, crowding up against the Tolkien shelves, in a veritable onslaught of Oxford Christian whimsy. It helps that so many of the writers who review the movies grew up on the Narnia books, and still remember fondly the moments of imaginative epiphany they provoked.

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Pope attacks “culture of death” at first baptisms

Reuters Crispian Balmer Sun Jan 8, 2006 9:40 AM ET172

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Benedict performed the first baptisms of his pontificate on Sunday, using the occasion to launch an impassioned denunciation of irresponsible sex and a “culture of death” that he said pervaded the modern world.

Pope Benedict, abandoning his prepared sermon, compared the wild excesses of the ancient Roman empire to 21st century society and urged people to rediscover their faith.

“In our times we need to say ‘no’ to the largely dominant culture of death,” Benedict said during his improvised homily in the frescoed Sistine Chapel where he was elected Pope last April.

“(There is) an anti-culture demonstrated by the flight to drugs, by the flight from reality, by illusions, by false happiness … displayed in sexuality which has become pure pleasure devoid of responsibility,” he added.

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Saddam’s Terror Training Camps

What the documents captured from the former Iraqi regime reveal–and why they should all be made public.
by Stephen F. Hayes
01/16/2006, Volume 011, Issue 17

THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

The secret training took place primarily at three camps–in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak–and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria’s GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. According to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing.

The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million “exploitable items” captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. They include handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, floppy discs, and computer hard drives. Taken together, this collection could give U.S. intelligence officials and policymakers an inside look at the activities of the former Iraqi regime in the months and years before the Iraq war.
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Materialistic Moral Compasses

American Vision Eric Rauch

Liberal politics is at a crossroads. Humanism is being attacked by way of the Intelligent Design movement. If biological Darwinism can be shown to be nothing more than a philosophy that gives meaning to the facts, then, by implication, humanists are left in the lake without a paddle. The Darwinists hold fast to their “first principles” as tenaciously as most Christians, and yet we are the ones who get ridiculed for having a “silly, wishful-thinking faith.” Two recent articles by British authors exemplify this point forcefully.

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Soul Man: Leon Kass sounds a warning about the perils of biotechnology

Wall Street Opinion Journal BRET STEPHENS Saturday, January 7, 2006

WASHINGTON–Leon Kass is willing–reluctantly willing–to indulge a request. I have asked him to refresh our interview of several weeks ago by reflecting on the case of Hwang Woo Suk, the internationally celebrated South Korean researcher who recently admitted to fabricating cloned stem cells. Dr. Kass thinks that a decennial White House conference on aging might make for an equally timely news peg. Health and longevity; dementia and death; euthanasia and living wills; performance enhancement and life-prolonging genetic manipulations–these are the subjects that really engage the mind of this 66-year-old physician and ethicist (and former philosophy professor of mine). As for embryos, stem cells, cloning and the uses and abuses thereof, they are “not the most profound of subjects,” he told me over a pot of tea in the kitchen of his Washington apartment. “The embryo question is really about the means. The real question has to do with the ends to which we put this.”

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Patriach Bartholomew in Tarpon Springs

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew is in Tarpon Springs, Florida for the feast day of Epiphany this week. I was up there yesterday for a welcoming Doxology at St. Nicholas Cathedral, the church in Tarpon. He will lead liturgy tomorrow, throw the cross into Spring Bayou during the blessing of the waters, and make the usuals rounds of meetings, banquets, etc. that accompany these visits.

Some of the events will be televised: Patriachal visit.