The Vatican newspaper has published an article saying ‘intelligent design’ is not science and that teaching it alongside evolutionary theory in school classrooms only creates confusion. The article in Tuesday’s editions of L’Osservatore Romano was the latest in a series of interventions by Vatican officials – including the pope – on the issue that has dominated headlines in the United States. The author, Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, laid out the scientific rationale for Darwin’s theory of evolution, saying that in the scientific world, biological evolution ‘represents the interpretative key of the history of life on Earth.’ He lamented that certain American ‘creationists’ had brought the debate back to the ‘dogmatic’ 1800s, and said their arguments weren’t science but ideology. ‘This isn’t how science is done,’ he wrote. ‘If the model proposed by Darwin is deemed insufficient, one should look for another, but it’s not correct from a methodological point of view to take oneself away from the scientific field pretending to do science.’ Intelligent design ‘doesn’t belong to science and the pretext that it be taught as a scientific theory alongside Darwin’s explanation is unjustified,’ he wrote. […]
NEW YORK – While the national abortion debate is now focused on the Supreme Court, both sides expect crucial battles to unfold this year on the state level. Lawmakers in two states are proposing broad abortion bans they hope will eventually win approval from a reconfigured, more conservative high court. Legislators elsewhere are seeking to tighten a range of abortion restrictions; one leading liberal advocacy group gave 19 states a failing grade on reproductive rights in a national status report issued Wednesday. It’s a picking away at our freedom and privacy, legislature by legislature, law by law, with the ultimate goal of overturning Roe v. Wade, said Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. Among the states getting F’s in NARAL’s report are Indiana and Ohio, where conservative lawmakers are introducing bills to ban abortion outright. They hope their measures become law and then face legal challenges that lead to a Supreme Court reconsideration of the 1973 Roe ruling that established abortion rights nationwide. It is time to return the abortion issue to the states, said Mark Harrington, executive director of the Center for Bio Ethical Reform Midwest and a supporter of the proposed Ohio ban. […]
NEW YORK — A U.S. avian flu pandemic on the scale of one that took place in 1918 could take the lives of an estimated 1.9 million people and cost the life insurance industry $133 billion in extra death claims, according to a study released on Tuesday. A moderate influenza outbreak, based on similar events in 1957 and 1968, could cause 209,000 deaths, according to a report released by the Insurance Information Institute (I.I.I.), which cites data from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. That compares with a typical year when 36,000 Americans die from the flu. The moderate outbreak scenario could cost the life insurance industry $31 billion in extra death claims, the I.I.I. said. Companies affected by an outbreak would include the largest U.S. life insurers as measured by revenues such as MetLife Inc., Prudential Financial Inc. and New York Life Insurance. Some insurers have been preparing investors for potential bird flu outcomes. For example, the world’s largest insurance company by market value and a major U.S. life insurer, American International Group Inc. said in its last quarterly earnings report that “an outbreak of a pandemic disease, such as the Avian Influenza […]
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration overstepped its authority when it barred doctors from helping terminally ill patients die in the only state that allows physician-assisted suicide, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday. In a stinging defeat for the administration, the high court ruled by a 6-3 vote that then-Attorney General John Ashcroft wrongly interpreted a federal law in 2001 to bar distribution of controlled drugs to assist suicides, disregarding the Oregon law authorizing it. “It is difficult to defend the attorney general’s declaration that the statute impliedly criminalizes physician-assisted suicide,” Justice Anthony Kennedy said for the court majority. The court’s most conservative members — Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and new Chief Justice John Roberts, who was appointed by President George W. Bush — dissented. Roberts, in his first dissent, did not write an opinion. The Oregon law, called the Death with Dignity Act, was twice approved by the state’s voters. The only state law in the nation allowing doctor-assisted suicide, it has been used by more than 200 people since it took effect in 1997. Under Oregon law, terminally ill patients who want to end their lives with a physician’s help must […]
Thirty years ago, the scientist James Lovelock worked out that the Earth possessed a planetary-scale control system which kept the environment fit for life. He called it Gaia, and the theory has become widely accepted. Now, he believes mankind’s abuse of the environment is making that mechanism work against us. His astonishing conclusion – that climate change is already insoluble, and life on Earth will never be the same again. The world has already passed the point of no return for climate change, and civilisation as we know it is now unlikely to survive, according to James Lovelock, the scientist and green guru who conceived the idea of Gaia – the Earth which keeps itself fit for life. In a profoundly pessimistic new assessment, published in today’s Independent, Professor Lovelock suggests that efforts to counter global warming cannot succeed, and that, in effect, it is already too late. The world and human society face disaster to a worse extent, and on a faster timescale, than almost anybody realises, he believes. He writes: ” Before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
