From Catholic News Service:

The Chinese government reportedly will not allow visitors to bring religious objects such as rosary beads or holy water when they travel to Beijing for the Olympic Games next year.

The report on restrictions did not clearly indicate whether visitors would be allowed to bring Bibles into China. Nor was there any indication whether the host nation would allow Olympic teams to bring chaplains– a practice that many countries have followed regularly.

asks Greg Mankiw.  The academy is too liberal and t’s jut not fair!

That’s true, really: when I think of the historically marginalized, I think of African Americans, women, Native Americans, and CEO’s.

Army on army:

As the war grinds through its fifth year, Fort Leavenworth has become a front line in the military’s tension and soul-searching over Iraq. Here on the bluffs above the Missouri River rising young officers are on a different kind of journey — an outspoken re-examination of their role in Iraq.

Discussions between a New York Times reporter and dozens of young majors in five Leavenworth classrooms over two days — all unusual for their frankness in an Army that has traditionally presented a facade of solidarity to the outside world — showed a divide in opinion. Officers were split over whether Mr. Rumsfeld, the military leaders or both deserved blame for what they said were the major errors in the war: sending in a small invasion force and failing to plan properly for the occupation.

But the consensus was that not even after Vietnam was the Army’s internal criticism as harsh or the second-guessing so painful, and that airing the arguments on the record, as sanctioned by Leavenworth’s senior commanders, was part of a concerted effort to force change.

Sort of.  Tom Perotta, noted novelist, has a new book on the abstinence movement.  It took the whole article, but the NYT finally acknwoledged they can be, er, unpleasant to evangelicals:

He said he had no idea how an evangelical Christian audience would respond to the book. One character in particular, the aggressively pious Pastor Dennis, seems in some respects to fit a typical liberal perception of an evangelical preacher. But Mr. Perrotta said he actually admired the character’s integrity and authentic caring for Tim. Above all Pastor Dennis is not a hypocrite, Mr. Perrotta said. “Like a lot of secular Americans after that first wave of evangelical televangelists crashed and burned, like Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Faye, there was this sense of, ‘I know who those people are, they’re just a bunch of hypocrites,’” he said. “It took me a long time to understand that a lot of them were completely genuine.

After the abstinence rally in Wayne, Jason Burtt, the national director of Silver Ring Thing, the organization that mounted the event, approached Mr. Perrotta in the lobby and started chatting with him about the novel. When Mr. Perrotta explained the plot, Mr. Burtt said he didn’t believe in coercing teachers. “It is so unconvincing when someone in school is forced to teach abstinence if they don’t believe it,” Mr. Burtt said.

As he prepared to drive back to his mother’s house, Mr. Perrotta said he was struck by how courteous and nonconfrontational Mr. Burtt had been. Over all, he said, evangelical Christian culture seems mostly polite, as well as extremely un-ironic. In response, “a certain kind of collegiate irony is like a reflex,” Mr. Perrotta said. “And it’s a reflex of superiority and condescension. It just wells up. But when I write, I try to quiet it down.”

Apparently, making abortion illegal doesn’t decrease the amount of abortions that happen worldwide.  It’s very dangerous for women, and it’s, well, a bad scene.

While the Guttmacher Institute cosponsored this research, and they’re quite pro-choice, they’re also pretty committed to accurate data, and this work was published in Lancet, an extremely well-respected medical journal.

This is well worth discussing:

The researchers used national data for 2003 from countries where abortion was legal and therefore tallied. W.H.O. scientists estimated abortion rates from countries where it was outlawed, using data on hospital admissions for abortion complications, interviews with local family planning experts and surveys of women in those countries.

The wealth of information that comes out of the study provides some striking lessons, the researchers said. In Uganda, where abortion is illegal and sex education programs focus only on abstinence, the estimated abortion rate was 54 per 1,000 women in 2003, more than twice the rate in the United States, 21 per 1,000 in that year. The lowest rate, 12 per 1,000, was in Western Europe, with legal abortion and widely available contraception.

The Bush administration’s multibillion-dollar campaign against H.I.V./AIDS in Africa has directed money to programs that promote abstinence before marriage, and to condoms only as a last resort. It has prohibited the use of American money to support overseas family planning groups that provide abortions or promote abortion as a method of family planning.

Worldwide, the annual number of abortions appeared to have declined between 1995, the last year such a broad study was conducted, and 2003, from an estimated 46 million to 42 million, the study concluded. The 1995 study, by the Guttmacher Institute, had far less data on countries where abortion was illegal.

Some countries, like South Africa, have undergone substantial transitions in abortion laws in that time. The procedure was made legal in South Africa in 1996, leading to a 90 percent decrease in mortality among women who had abortions, some studies have found.

Abortion is illegal in most of Africa, though. It is the second-leading cause of death among women admitted to hospitals in Ethiopia, its Health Ministry has said. It is the cause of 13 percent of maternal deaths at hospitals in Nigeria, recent studies have found.

Corporate Finance.  This makes a lot of sense–of course, in the long run, truth helps everyone, but in the short run, having a scientist claim your product is great (or at least, is not harmful, or is necessary, or whatever) is great for business.

So how to stop the conflict of interest?  Well, it’s tricky:

Is all this truly harmful to science? Some experts argue that corporate support is actually beneficial because it provides enhanced funding for R&D, speeds the transfer of new knowledge to industry, and boosts economic growth. “It isn’t enough to create new knowledge,” says Richard Zare, a professor of chemistry at Stanford University. “You need to transfer that knowledge for the betterment of society. That’s why I don’t want to set up this conflict of interest problem to such a heightened level of hysteria whereby you can’t get universities cooperating with industry.”

Even many industry leaders worry that the current mix of private and public funding is out of balance, however. In 2005, a panel of National Academies (the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine) that included both industry and academic members (including Zare) concluded that corporate R&D “cannot and should not replace federal R&D.” (pdf) Norman Augustine, the panel’s chairman and a former CEO at Lockheed Martin, noted that market pressures have compelled industry to put nearly all its investment into applied research, not the riskier basic science that drives innovation 10 to 15 years out.

Others fear that if the balance tips too far, the “public interest” side of the science system—known for its commitment to independence and objectivity—will atrophy. Earlier this year, former FDA commissioner Jane Henney remarked that “it’s getting much more difficult to get that pure person with no conflicts at all. . . . The question becomes both one of disclosure and how much of a conflict you can have and still be seen as an objective and knowledgeable reviewer of information.” More than half the scientists at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who responded to a survey conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientists in 2005 agreed that “commercial interests have inappropriately induced the reversal or withdrawal of scientific conclusions or decisions through political intervention.”

It’s a good question, and the fellah who runs this website doesn’t think so.

So, in Turkey, there was this Armenian Genocide.  But admitting that happened, well, that’s bad.  It makes the power-that-be in Turkey angry.  And so when the House passed a totally symbolic resolution against it, well…

The Associated Press reported that the Armenian president, Robert Kocharian, today welcomed the resolution but also urged Turkey to join in talks with Armenia to restore bilateral relations.

The House decision rebuffed an intense campaign by the White House and earlier warnings from Turkey’s government that the vote would gravely strain its relations with the United States.

The vote was nonbinding and so largely symbolic, but its consequences could reach far beyond bilateral relations and spill into the war in Iraq.

Turkish officials and lawmakers warned that if the resolution was approved by the full House, they would reconsider supporting the American war effort, which includes permission to ship essential supplies through Turkey and northern Iraq.

–I have to agree with First Things on Ayn Rand.

And obviously her ringing defense of personal and economic liberty was not, even in the 1940s, alien to the American cultural mainstream. What made Rand’s works controversial, then and now, was their unashamed elitism and atheism—their contempt for the values and attitudes held by most human beings who must make their way through the real world with the usual sets of weaknesses and strengths.

Rand hated religion as much as she hated communism; for her Christianity was, of course, the religion of fools and slaves. Rand’s “marginalia,” culled from the books in her library and published in 1998, are particularly revealing: The woman who despised emotionalism and valued reason above all became, when faced with C.S. Lewis, like one of those “literary guys” faced with Mickey Spillane. Lewis, Rand averred, was a “driveling non-entity,” a “mediocrity,” and “scum.”

Still, Atlas Shrugged, you’ve heard countless times, is a classic, and apparently it’s soon to be a major motion picture starring Angelina Jolie. And so, finally, you’re ready to give it a go—all 1,168 pages.

This time at Holy Cross:

A Massachusetts bishop has strongly criticized a Jesuit-run college in his diocese, hinting that he could withdraw the school’s recognition as a Catholic institution.

Bishop Robert McManus of Worcester issued a statement on October 10, responding to protests from lay Catholics about plans for a conference at the College of the Holy Cross in which Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts will make presentations. Siding with the pro-life protestors, Bishop McManus disclosed that he had urged Holy Cross to cancel the conference plans.

The organizations participating in the scheduled event, the bishop said, “promote positions on artificial contraception and abortion that are contrary to the moral teachings of the Catholic Church.” Saying that the Church’s position on key issues involving respect for life is “manifestly clear,” he questioned why a Catholic school would offer these groups a forum. The bishop warned that the conference could create a “situation of offering scandal understood in its proper theological sense, i.e. an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil.” By canceling the conference, he said, Holy Cross would not infringe upon academic freedom, but would “make unambiguously clear the Catholic identity and mission of the College of the Holy Cross.”