"The secretary-general strongly condemns all hostage-takings and killings of innocent civilians, which no cause can ever justify. He calls once again for the immediate release of all hostages in Iraq and appeals to all parties to adhere strictly to the fundamental precepts of human rights and respect for human life," said a statement from Annan's spokesman issued after the Nepali murders.

Poet Molly Birnbaum read aloud to a crowd of feminists gathered in New York's Central Park on Wednesday night, as part of a NOW event dubbed "Code Red: Stop the Bush Agenda Rally."

"Imagine a way to erase that night four years ago when you (President Bush) savagely raped every pandemic woman over and over with each vote you got, a thrust with each state you stole," Birnbaum said from the podium...."A smack with each bill you passed, a tear with each right you took until you left me disenfranchised with hands shackled and voice restrained. Thanks for that night, Mr. President, I can barely remember my tomorrows," Birnbaum said to applause.

"Unsafe abortion poses a serious threat to the health and lives of women all around the world, not just in Asia," Elizabeth Maguire, president of the Ipas group which works to protect women from unsafe abortions, told Reuters.

Unsafe abortion was recognized as a major public health concern at the ICPD when 179 members of the United Nations set goals to improve women’s reproductive health, education and rights and to increase family planning services to reduce unsafe abortions by 2015.

There aren't a lot of people like me -- not as many as you might think, anyway. Oh, you hear political commentators talk about "single-issue voters," by which they (almost always) mean voters for whom a candidate's position on abortion is the decisive or most important factor in how they will vote. There are plenty of these folk: By most estimates, they're between 5 and 10 percent of the electorate (and strongly favor -- by at least a 3-2 margin -- pro-life candidates)....

What's more, I understood that abortion's impact transcended the purely personal realm and had public consequences: A society that not only countenanced abortion-on-demand but made it a fundamental right would not and could not stop at the killing of unborn children. Eventually, every vulnerable member of that society would be at risk, in what Pope John Paul II calls "the culture of death."

I don't want to spoil the party at Madison Square Garden, but Giuliani's reference to a hijacked religion highlights the vulnerabilities of the American response to Islamic terror. In fact, Islam is not monolithic: No one -- not even Rudy -- can declare that something is "true Islam" and something else isn't, and have his decision accepted by the Islamic world. Therefore it is not enough for Giuliani and others to tell Americans that terrorists don't represent "true Islam." True moderate Muslims need to convince other Muslims that the terrorists are heretics. But instead, the radicals wear the mantle of Islamic purity virtually unchallenged.

If they haven't hijacked the religion, but have a legitimate claim to represent at least a broad tradition within Islam, it does no good -- and in fact will do serious harm -- to ignore or sugarcoat that fact. If Islamic teachings really sanction violence against unbelievers, that needs to be addressed by all, Muslim and non-Muslim, who claim to oppose terrorist activity. Only that will lead to concrete measures to deal with the situation.

"It's a movement that has been building," Krugman told the audience. 'The one thing I think that you really have to say is that people on the left -- the position formerly known as the center -- people like myself have been asleep for a long time. We just didn't take it seriously. We sat through all the Clinton scandals and said oh, you know, there's probably some funny stuff going on there [and] didn't understand the extent to which this movement was being built."

[A reader emails:]"I agree that the Bush girls are comely, and charming enough to get away with the most cringe-inducing lines last night (if only just); but for me, the voices would make them just a touch harder to take over the long run...and these voices are a puzzle, too. Didn't these girls grow up in Texas? Where's the drawl? (If it's there, it's faint enough that this resident of Georgia doesn't notice it.)

"This is actually one of my pet curiosities (#362, if I remember correctly): When did the voices of American young women get to be so universally, gratingly, nasally flat, all across the country? And why? Who stole away the huskier voices, the rounded deep-southern tones...the ability to use any vocal range and inflection at all?"

This reader is correct. My 11-yr-old daughter sounds exactly like every other 11-yr-old American female. There is, in fact, a very distinctive American-female voice developing. It's the "Valley girl" voice basically -- even though the Valley in question is 3,000 miles from where my daughter grew up.

In order to assuage the moral qualms of conflicted social conservatives, social liberals have created a whole new system of morality. Social liberals redefine right and wrong: It is right to value your friends and family, and wrong to condemn them for moral failings. According to the social left, in any pitched battle between traditional morality and friendship, those who side with traditional morality are morally wrong.

And so tolerance has become the new morality. Those who condemn homosexuality are morally wrong. Those who condemn prostitution are morally wrong. Those who condemn abortion are morally wrong. Tolerance is moral -- and traditional morality is simply intolerant. Moore rips the traditional morality crowd as a bunch of conspiratorial bigots: "Your people are up before dawn figuring out which minority group shouldn't be allowed to marry today."

The separation-of-church-and-state watchdogs have been barking rabidly at any sign of politicking or voter registration efforts by Republicans within shouting distance of a house of worship. On July 14, the Times published an editorial headlined "Onward G.O.P. Soldiers" on page A22. The apoplectic editorial writers inveighed against the Bush-Cheney campaign for "buttonholing Christian churches nationwide to serve as virtual party precincts in the Republican drive to turn out voters in November."...

None of this alleged concern about the supposedly undemocratic mixture of religion and politics was evident, however, in the Times' coverage of former president Bill Clinton's pulpit demagoguery at the far-left Riverside Church in New York City this past Sunday on behalf of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry....Yup. Before a crowd of 1,500 worshipers in upper Manhattan, Clinton slammed religious conservatives for their stance against homosexual marriage and abortion; attacked President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act (co-sponsored by Democratic Sen. Teddy Kennedy); derided the Bush tax cuts; questioned the Republicans' "healthy forest" initiative; and ridiculed the expansive Medicare prescription-drug-benefit program passed with support of both parties.

Would a Times reporter have approvingly described a sermon by a conservative preacher taking the opposite stance on the pulpit as "hard-hitting"?

After a conversation with a "transgender therapist," Winfrey then confronted Derek with his refusal to go along with his son's desire for a sex change. Coming out of a commercial break, Oprah told her audience: "And as I--I was saying to Derek during the commercial break, I was saying that this is your holiest hour. This will be your holiest hour as a parent, being able to allow your son to be himself and to love him as he is. Whatever that turns out to be, you know, that's where, where you will be challenged emotionally, spiritually and otherwise, I think."...

After all this, Winfrey celebrated what she called an "evolution" in social tolerance and cultural acceptance of the idea of a sex change, even among children. "I have seen such a change in the way parents parent, you know," Oprah declared, "even in the years that we've been here, 18 years, seeing such a--a difference--this generation, your generation, is so much more open to accepting children as they are instead of trying to--forcing whatever your own idea was."

This isn't "evolution," this is insanity. Oprah and her guests were involved in an absurd and horrific exercise in moral inanity. What culture can survive such a rebellion against the moral order? What devastation and destruction will be brought into the lives of young children before some level of sanity is reestablished?

Oh yes and amen! I have given up hope for the Episcopal Church after 22 years of membership.

The emerging denomination -- which will replace the conservative half of it -- is worthy of a look, but I have come to realize that God isn't impressed with our rituals, only with our hearts focused on Him, and our souls washed clean by His son.

the Republicans faced a daunting challenge. Pro-slavery Democrats condemned them as "fanatics" and "zealots" who sought to impose their religious scruples and moral values on others. Slaveholders demanded that they "mind their own business" and stay out of the "domestic" and "private" affairs of others. Defenders of a "right" to own slaves pointedly invited northern abolitionists to redirect their moral outrage towards the "wage slave" system in the north. "If you are against slavery," they in effect said, "then don't own a slave."

By the mid-1850s, polygamy, which had originally been the largely secret practice of the Mormon elite, had come out of the closet. Polygamists claimed that attacks on "plural marriage" were violations of their right to religious freedom. Later, some would bring lawsuits asking judges to invalidate laws against polygamy as unconstitutional. One of these cases would make it all the way to the Supreme Court. Apologists for polygamy denied that plural marriage was harmful to children, and challenged supporters of the ban on polygamy to prove that the existence of polygamous families in American society harmed their own monogamous marriages. They insisted that they merely wanted the right to be married in their own way and left alone.

But the Republicans stood their ground, refusing to be intimidated by the invective being hurled against them. They knew that polygamy and slavery were morally wrong and socially corrosive. And they were prepared to act on their moral convictions.

Yeah! Go team -- I love it that in the midst of 130,000 condoms, there were hundreds of thousands of virginity pledge cards -- what an awesome testimony!

Nuno Fernandes Thomaz, secretary of state for sea affairs, told Lusa that Portuguese authorities had informed the captain of the boat, the ship's agent and Dutch officials that the boat would not be allowed to enter Portuguese waters, Lusa said.

The boat belonging to the Women on Waves organisation had planned to dock on Saturday at Figuera da Foz, about 200 km (124 miles) north of Lisbon, the group said.

The floating clinic offers the abortion pill in international waters to women in countries where it is illegal or more restricted than the Netherlands.

For months the battle reports and casualty tolls from Iraq and Afghanistan have put war in the headlines, but Swedish and Canadian non-governmental groups tracking armed conflict globally find a general decline in numbers from peaks in the 1990s.

The authoritative Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in a 2004 Yearbook report obtained by The Associated Press in advance of publication, says 19 major armed conflicts were under way worldwide in 2003, a sharp drop from 33 wars counted in 1991.

The Canadian organization Project Ploughshares, using broader criteria to define armed conflict, says in its new annual report that the number of conflicts declined to 36 in 2003, from a peak of 44 in 1995.

The Archbishop also admitted to failing to live up to people's expectations, a reference to the disappointment many felt that he had not been more radical over his opposition to the war in Iraq.

He surprised some at the three-day Greenbelt festival in Cheltenham, Glos, by declaring that Muslims can go to heaven.

Dr Williams said that neither he nor any Christian could control access to heaven. "It is possible for God's spirit to cross boundaries," he said.

"I say this as someone who is quite happy to say that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, and no one comes to the Father except by Jesus. But how God leads people through Jesus to heaven, that can be quite varied, I think."

During a wide-ranging discussion, Dr Williams reflected his disappointment at the tone of the debate on homosexuality, and his dismay at the vitriol of many of the e-mails he had received.