Free Republic

It’s the summer of talking about the summer of ‘68. And back during that infamous summer, there was sex — an encyclical on sex, that is: Humanae Vitae, from Pope Paul VI, issued on July 25. Its message is being heard and misheard as much now as then. It would be for the benefit of all — Catholics and non-Catholics alike — to give it a 40th-anniversary look. Even Jessica Valenti, author of the new book He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know, might find it more helpful than she’ll care to...

VIRGINIA, June 27, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In a research brief this month, Bradford Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia, analyzed three national studies in order to discover if "there is any evidence that religion is playing a role in encouraging a strong family orientation among contemporary American men?"   His research led him to conclude that men who regularly attend Christian services are engaged in happier and stronger marriages and are more involved in the lives of their children than men who do not. "70 percent of husbands who attend church regularly report they are 'very happy'...

Supreme Court justices take an oath promising to "faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties . . . of the Supreme Court of the United States under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God." They do not take an oath to "faithfully and impartially perform all duties . . . except when personally offended, or when having pangs of empathy for the poor or trying to be a standup guy or gal." Listening to Barack Obama, you may think they do. And though the Bush administration cared little for the Constitution, the next...

SEC Charges Fidelity, Executives and Employees for Improperly Accepting Lavish Gifts Paid For by Brokers. Washington, D.C., March 5, 2008 - The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged fund manager Fidelity Investments and 13 current or former employees including high-ranking executives for improperly accepting more than $1.6 million in travel, entertainment, and other gifts paid for by outside brokers courting the massive trading business Fidelity generates on behalf of the mutual funds it manages. In a settled Order against Fidelity, the SEC charged that the firm failed to seek "best execution" — the most favorable terms reasonably available — for...

July 26, 2007 (Computerworld) A senior database administrator at a subsidiary of Fidelity National Information Services who was responsible for defining and enforcing data access rights at the firm took data belonging to as many as 8.5 million consumers -- not 2.3 million, as originally disclosed by the company. The new number was disclosed yesterday in filings by Fidelity National with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The company warned of the possibility that even more data may have been compromised in the breach. Jacksonville, Fla.-based Fidelity National, which is not connected with the more widely known mutual funds...

It's hard to believe that, in 2007, you can put 1,000 adults in one room and nobody is divorced. But that was the scene yesterday in the polished magnificence of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Northeast Washington, where more than 500 married couples from throughout Maryland and the District gathered to renew their wedding vows. And these weren't vows they had originally made five or 10 years ago. We're talking Olympic-level marriage achievement here. The ceremony for Catholic couples, hosted by the Archdiocese of Washington, was for couples who had been married 25 years...

What is your experience with either the newsletter, or Weber Asset Management? Thanks. http://www.fidelitymonitor.com/ http://www.weberasset.com/

22 March 2007, 13:47 To love somebody else’s husband is not Christian - Miss Universe winner Oxana Fyodorova Moscow, March 22, Interfax - Romantic feeling to someone who already has a family is contrary to the Christian commandments, the Miss Universe 2002 winner, TV presenter and actress Oxana Fyodorova thinks. ‘To love somebody else’s husband is not for me, it is not Christian! I would never consider mine a man who is already in relationship with another woman,’ Fyodorova said in her interview for Komsomolskaya Pravda daily published on Thursday. She told some married men attempted to court her. ‘I...

Blue-eyed men prefer blue-eyed women, apparently because eye color can help reveal whether their partner has been faithful, researchers said on Monday. "Before you request a paternity test, spend a few minutes looking at your child's eye color," Bruno Laeng and colleagues at the University of Tromso in Norway said in the study. Under the laws of genetics, two parents with blue eyes will always have blue-eyed children, it said. So a blue-eyed man can know his blue-eyed wife or partner has cheated on him if their child has brown eyes. "Blue-eyed men may have unconsciously learned to value a...

TORONTO, Canada, August 14, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Canada’s largest city, Toronto, is currently playing host to many of the world’s most influential movers and shakers as the world’s largest international AIDS conference gets underway. For the next five days approximately 24,000 delegates, including the “Double-Bill” – Bill Gates and Bill Clinton – will attend numerous seminars and speeches, all in an ostensible attempt to combat what Gates and other conference attendees are calling “public enemy No. 1”—AIDS. The general flavour of the conference, however, was made abundantly clear during Gates’ opening remarks, where the thousands of delegates violently booed one...

Something unusual is going on at Fidelity this election year. Employees at the conservative firm are on track to double their donations to the Democratic Party. And they’re not alone in the investment world. Overall, the Democrats are likely to bag their biggest share of Wall Street bucks this election since they held power back in 1994. The figures are tracked by the nonpartisan think-tank The Center for Responsive Politics. The facts? For the 2002 mid-term elections, Fidelity staff, their families and the company’s Political Action Committee donated $159,262 in total to Democrats at the federal level. So far, in...

Last month, The New York Times published a 2,000-word, front-page dissection of Bill and Hillary Clinton's marriage. It contained no real news, few named sources, and plenty of gossip masquerading as political coverage. Observing that the Clintons typically spend 14 days of each month together--hardly unusual for a couple that includes a senator and a peripatetic former president--the Times opted for the half-empty conclusion that the two lead "largely separate lives." The story also made an oblique reference to a Canadian politician named Belinda Stronach, the significance of which would likely be grasped only by insiders and people who read...

Broken promises are serious business. Every parent has heard the familiar childhood lament, “But you promised!” More often than not, the scene is highly emotional with bitter tears and anguish that rips your heart out. Sometimes there is blazing anger or hostility. All parents who have experienced such scenes mentally kick themselves for having created impossible expectations. Thankfully, relationships don’t require perfection, but they do have to be based upon honesty and trust. There is a limit to the broken promises a relationship can absorb. Since we all stand in need of God’s forgiveness, there is no better time to...

New year, new job? Click here for thousands of tech vacancies.Given the recent spate of laptop losses affecting major companies, many of you have wondered why the likes of Fidelity and Ernst & Young would let crucial customer information leave their own servers and desktops in the first place. Well, in Fidelity's case, we've learned that the company had a really important demo to perform - one that apparently required it to load 200,000 HP workers' personal information on a laptop. The Register has obtained a copy of the FAQ that HP handed out to employees to explain the data...

No Fidelity to Hub: Up to 1,500 employees to exitBy Scott Van Voorhis and Jay Fitzgerald Friday, January 6, 2006 - Updated: 12:14 AM EST The Hub’s battered job base buckled yesterday, with Fidelity Investments confirming plans to export jobs to Rhode Island in a move that could pull as many as 1,500 workers out of downtown Boston.       The move by one of Boston’s oldest and largest employers, first reported in yesterday’s Herald, will eventually send 800 workers to a new building in the works on Fidelity’s growing, Smithfield, R.I., campus. In the meantime, 400 of those workers...

An old friend asked me to join him for lunch the other day. Although we’d stayed in touch over the years we had not had the opportunity to sit down together for years so this was something not to be missed. Because of my friend’s tight schedule we met at his office and it was both strange and reassuring to walk up the steps of his place of business. It had begun to snow heavily and already young men were busy shoveling off the sidewalk and strewing salt afterwards. My friend is Lieutenant General Dave Petraeus now commanding the Combined...

I was very impressed that Sam Alito had hired a clerk from Ave Maria Law School, which only recently opened. What a big feather in the law school's cap to have graduated someone who clerked for a future Supreme Court justice! So, I went to check just how well Ave Maria is being ranked as a law school. Surprisingly, it has (by my measure, which I detail following) already surpassed Georgetown University and has University of Notre Dame in its sites, as it strives to become the top Catholic law school in the country... as it remains the nation's most...

As anyone involved in the 12-Step recovery culture knows: "Denial is not a river in Egypt." It does, however, appear to be a river flowing through present-day Western Culture. A recent study from the Journal Sexually Transmitted Infections showed that one in 100 American deaths is related to sexual behavior. Sexual ideologues from Planned Parenthood to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) relentlessly pound away with frantic urgency on the need to dump condoms and contraceptives into American high schools and developing countries. Yet, as was recently noted in this publication, the Philippines seems to be doing just fine with an...

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Promoting condoms has failed to stem the spread of AIDS and may have increased promiscuity, the Roman Catholic Church in South Africa says, sparking criticism from AIDS activists. Cardinal Wilfred Napier said there was simply no evidence that promoting condoms had worked, citing the fact that as a contraceptive, they come with a failure rate which implies they probably do not always stop HIV transmission. "Can you show me one example where condoms have stopped the spread of AIDS?," he said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. "If you look at South Africa, millions have been spent...

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope John Paul on Saturday stressed that the Roman Catholic Church believed abstinence and fidelity within marriage, and not condoms, were the best way to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. The Pope's words, spoken to a new ambassador to the Vatican, took on an added significance being his first direct comment on the controversial topic since a Catholic official in Spain this week appeared to question the Church's stand against condoms. "The Holy See ... believes prevention through education about the sacredness of life and the correct practice of sexuality, that is chastity and faithfulness, is...

SALT LAKE CITY- Utah is justly famous for its big families, with cousins piled on cousins, uncles from here to Tuesday, and roots stretching back to the Mormon pioneer days. And what once appeared to be a regional quirk is increasingly viewed by scientists as something more: a near-perfect laboratory, arrived at by complete accident, for the study of human kinship. Mormon genes are hot. Utah DNA is being used for an international study that seeks to identify chromosomes linked to diseases like asthma and diabetes. Other researchers are studying how the genes for left-handedness or longevity or even the...

In what has to be one of the most flagrant examples of cultural decline, Newsweek’s current cover story is called “The Secret Lives of Wives” and not only does it degrade the publication’s integrity, it also casts aspersions on a sizable number of married women in the United States. The gist of the expose is that more and more married women are cheating on their husbands than ever before. What makes the piece most offensive is its cheerleader tone. You can almost hear the writers screaming “You go girl!” to one another as they type it out. Frankly, we should...

How to tell a duck from a foxThinking with the Church as we look toward November "If it quacks like a duck and looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it's probably a duck. A fox can claim to be a duck all day long. But he's still a fox." We've all heard that saying, or some version of it, a thousand times. The reason is simple: It's true. Our actions prove who we are. If a gulf exists between what we say, how we look and what we do, we're not living in a spirit of truth....

September 29By Gerry DalyPublished September 26, 2001In any social movement there is a vanguard and a mass. On one side, the vanguard, are groups of people who are more resolute and committed, better organized and able to take a leading role in the struggle, and on the other side, the mass, are larger numbers of people who participate in the struggle or are involved simply by their social position, but are less committed or well-placed in relation to the struggle, and will participate only in the decisive moments, which in fact change history. The Marxist theory of the vanguard, in ...

Hillary's Marital Fidelity Claim Challenged Former Arkansas State Trooper L.D. Brown has challenged U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton's claim yesterday that she has always remained faithful to her husband, ex-president Bill Clinton. The senator was pressed on her own record of marital fidelity during a book signing at a Manhattan Barnes & Noble. At first she declined to answer the question, but then insisted, "Yes." However, three years ago, Brown, a now-retired lawman who guarded Mrs. Clinton in the 1980s, revealed in his own book, "Crossfire: Witness in the Clinton Investigation," that she once tried to proposition him. "I have struggled...

Dear Friend of TVC: This Thursday, May 1st, the U.S. House of Representatives will be voting on amendments to H.R. 1298, a global AIDS bill that will provide $15 billion dollars to fight AIDS during the next five years. TVC is urging you to contact your U.S. Representative immediately and ask that he or she vote YES on two key amendments: Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA) is offering an amendment that requires that 33% of direct U.S. aid should go to abstinence-until-marriage programs. The nation of Uganda has emphasized abstinence and marital faithfulness and it has actually reduced the spread of...

KAMPALA, Jul 23, 02 (LSN.ca/CWNews.com) - Uganda may be on its way to wiping out AIDS by using a strategy based on chastity and fidelity, according to findings in a Harvard University study. The Harvard study credits abstinence education with "significant effectiveness in reducing AIDS in Uganda ... with the HIV infection rate dropping 50 percent between the years 1992 and 2000." Uganda uses billboards, radio announcements, and chastity-based curricula to promote abstinence and faithfulness. The result has been a gradual, steady drop in HIV infection rates. If the report is welcomed honestly and with a real commitment to reduce...