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BRITISH historian David Irving now acknowledges Nazi gas chambers existed, and admits some of his past statements could be interpreted as denying people were gassed. On the day before Irving faces a court hearing, his lawyer Elmar Kresbach said the historian had "changed some of the views he is so famous for". "He told me: 'Look, there was a certain period when I drew conclusions from individual sources which are maybe provocative or could be misinterpreted or could be even wrong'," Mr Kresbach said. Prosecutors this week charged Irving, 67, with denying the Holocaust, which is a crime under Austrian...

BOSTON - Massachusetts' attorney general is launching an investigation into several supermarkets that stayed open opened on Thanksgiving in defiance of the state's Puritan-era Blue Laws. The laws were passed in the 1600s to keep colonists at home or in church on Sundays. Parts of the laws, such as the ban on Sunday liquor sales, have been repealed, but a prohibition on most stores doing business on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day, has not. "If these stores want to open, there's a way to do it: Change the law," David Guano, a spokesman for Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly,...

Pastor Åke Green July 20, 2003 - Borgholm, Sweden *Translator’s notes: This is a translation into contemporary American English of the Swedish sermon transcript. Corresponding Bible quotations are taken from the NIV (New International Version). The accuracy of the Bible quotes in Swedish are not verified against a Swedish Bible, but they all compare well to the NIV. Implied or omitted words and translation comments are in [brackets].Translation team: Anders Falk, of Falk Productions, Culver City, CA Debra Sandstrom, freelancer, Coeur d’Alene, ID EDITOR'S NOTE: The Swedish Bible of 1917 which Pastor Green used in his sermon best matches...

'Inclusive' name change needles N.S. tree growerCBC News November 23, 2005 A spruce tree grower in Nova Scotia isn't happy his 16-metre Christmas tree has become a "holiday" tree in Massachusetts. Every fall, the province sends a tree to Boston as a thank-you gift for the help the New England city gave Halifax after the devastating 1917 ship explosion that levelled parts of Nova Scotia's capital. Officials with Boston's parks department decided it would be less offensive to some people and generally more inclusive if the word "Christmas" was dropped when they referred to the tree. "A lot of people...

NEW YORK (AP) -- A gay man charged with helping his lover loot a wealthy school district has asked a judge to rule that state law protecting spouses from having to testify against each other also applies to same-sex partners. Stephen Signorelli, fighting charges that he stole at least $219,000 from the Roslyn, New York, school district, is seeking to bar testimony by his longtime companion, Frank Tassone, the district's former superintendent. Auditors say that in all, $11.2 million was taken from the Long Island district, and state Comptroller Alan Hevesi has called the case "the largest, most remarkable, most...

ABU DHABI — Senior officials have condemned the queer acts practised by 26 youth at a gay party held in a hotel in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday night. A group of 26 men, many of whom were dressed in female outfits and the rest in Arab attire, were arrested by the police on Wednesday following a tip-off that such a party was being held. Speaking to Khaleej Times, experts, educationists and men of law have called on parents to play their role and give importance to the role of schools and national associations in inculcating the teachings of Islam and...

Following a recent interview for yet another documentary on pornography, I thought of so many things I should have said about pornography. I had discussed its role as producing impotence, robbing men of their manhood. I had addressed its psychopharmacology as an "erototoxin." I had documented its presence in adultery, divorce, rape, child sex abuse and incest. Civility, humanity, I said, has always hung by the thinnest of threads. We allow ourselves to be coarsened at the greatest risk. Life in the last five decades should have proven to us all – or at least to any hominoid with a...

How's this for a clever rhyme? "Jews are here, Jews are there | Jews are almost everywhere | filling up the darkest places | evil looks upon their faces." Originally published as a column in The Times of London. I've always distrusted both a) cretins who believe in the inherent goodness of children, and b) people who write poems. So imagine my delight when I read in the singularly excellent newsletter of the Middle East commentator Tom Gross about a piece of verse published in the new collection "Great Minds," a collection of poems by 11- to 18-year-olds, which is...

BRUNSWICK, Maine --Firefighters will be allowed to erect a memorial that features a poem with a reference to God and language that some town councilors viewed as sexist. The poem, "A Fireman's Prayer," was written in 1959 by Kansas firefighter A.W. Linn and is found on memorials across the country.

The scholar who exposed fraud and exploitation in the work of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey is blowing the whistle on the E! cable channel's new "reality" show about Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and his three live-in girlfriends. Judith Reisman, author of "Kinsey: Crime and Consequences" and a soon-to-be-released new title, "Kinsey's Attic: How One Man's Pathology Changed the World," says "Girls Next Door" is Hollywood's latest and boldest attempt to normalize pornography in our culture. The author, who served as a consultant to the U.S. Justice Department on obscenity issues, is angry the network is investing so much time in...

Now that the hints about joining a convent don't seem to be gaining any traction (seemed like a perfectly logical alternative to me) we are confronting the issue of a teenage girl going out with boys. In case you haven't been following the news, it is a scary prospect. Oh, right, you say, like there hasn't always been some drinking and sex in high school. And that's true. What I don't remember is having an ambulance gurney show up at a high school dance to wheel out a student suffering from alcohol poisoning, as happened recently at Albany High School....

Disputed Questions. A Catholic Philosopher Argues for RelativismIt's Dario Antiseri. He explains his theses in the official magazine of the Catholic University of Milan. And he is criticizing, at bottom, Benedict XVI's positions on relativism, nihilism, and the natural law by Sandro Magister ROMA, November 3, 2005 – After the first few months of the new pontificate, the general impression is that no one within the Church is seriously criticizing the central theses – philosophical and theological – of Benedict XVI’s preaching. But that's not the way it is. One Catholic philosopher has disputed one of the main points of...

Traditional sexuality morality — meaning sexual restraint, particularly for women — was based on that connection between sex and conception: it evolved to protect paternity and patrimony. Now the connection has all but disappeared, as has patrimony, and the less connection, the less restraint and the more empty the morality. For this reason Christian moralists and others are doomed to failure with their quixotic hopes of getting people to say no to sex or to save themselves for married monogamy; they might as well try to put a genie back in his lamp. Because higamous, hogamous we are mostly not...

Efforts to push Western pansexual attitudes and behavior onto African Anglican provinces, is meeting with vigorous resistance and has stalled in at least two jurisdictions. Ugandan archbishop Henry Luke Orombi has vigorously opposed attempts to allow the openly American Lesbigay organization Integrity into his province, and told VirtueOnline when he was in Philadelphia recently, "While Integrity has a beach head in Uganda we have cut off Bishop Christopher Ssenyonjo for organizing the group here. He has been banned from preaching and we will not let him function with us." Other African archbishops including Nigerian Primate Peter Akinola and Kenyan Archbishop...

During Israel’s dramatic eviction of its settlers, it went almost unnoticed that on Aug. 15, armed men in Gaza kidnapped a soundman who worked for a French state television station. I’ll bet you’ve already assumed the kidnappers were Arab Muslims. Shame on you. And yes you’re right, they were. The week before, three foreign workers were kidnapped by members of Fatah, founded by the late Yasser Arafat. “Fatah” means “conquest by means of holy war.” No matter what our political views, we all agree on two things: 1) Israel and the West on the whole follow the norms of civilization;...

During Israel’s dramatic eviction of its settlers, it went almost unnoticed that on Aug. 15, armed men in Gaza kidnapped a soundman who worked for a French state television station. I’ll bet you’ve already assumed the kidnappers were Arab Muslims. Shame on you. And yes you’re right, they were. The week before, three foreign workers were kidnapped by members of Fatah, founded by the late Yasser Arafat. “Fatah” means “conquest by means of holy war.” No matter what our political views, we all agree on two things: 1) Israel and the West on the whole follow the norms of civilization;...

During Israel’s dramatic eviction of its settlers, it went almost unnoticed that on Aug. 15, armed men in Gaza kidnapped a soundman who worked for a French state television station. I’ll bet you’ve already assumed the kidnappers were Arab Muslims. Shame on you. And yes you’re right, they were. The week before, three foreign workers were kidnapped by members of Fatah, founded by the late Yasser Arafat. “Fatah” means “conquest by means of holy war.” No matter what our political views, we all agree on two things: 1) Israel and the West on the whole follow the norms of civilization;...

"Utopians are people who dream about ensuring for mankind the position of pensioner and who are convinced that this position is so splendid that no sacrifices... are too great to achieve it," he writes. But the communist fantasy can be realized only through ruthlessness, and this is always so: There is no "reason to expect that it can ever come true, except in the cruel form of despotism," he explains, adding, as somone with firsthand knowledge of communism at work, "and despotism is a desparate simulation of paradise." "Evil, I contend, is... a stubborn and unredeemable fact," he avers. Why...

PERHAPS genius can be perceived no way but kaleidoscopically, with interpretation endlessly rearranging the same bright shards. Who was Nietzsche? ''Listen!'' he shouts at the beginning of ''Ecce Homo,'' and the italics are naturally his, he being the emperor of vehemency. ''For I am such and such a person. For heaven's sake do not confound me with anyone else.'' The chapter titles then explain even more about him: ''Why I Am So Wise,'' ''Why I Am So Clever,'' ''Why I Write Such Excellent Books.'' Our immediate reaction, as he might have intended, is to suspect the wisdom, cleverness and excellence...

"And yet for my husband and me, it seems that marriage simply adds a new category of potential suitors: the couple with a crush on us." -- David Valdes Greenwood ------------------------------------------------------ COUPLING Four's a Crowd Breaking up with one person is hard enough. But when it's a couple you want to avoid, it can get ugly. By David Valdes Greenwood | July 24, 2005 Once you marry, you think you are safely removed from the perils of dating. And yet for my husband and me, it seems that marriage simply adds a new category of potential suitors: the couple with...