Doctors can help patients who ask for help to die even though they may not be ill but "suffering through living," concludes a three year inquiry commissioned by the Royal Dutch Medical Association. The report argues that no reason can be given to exclude situations of such suffering from a doctor's area of competence.

The conclusion has reopened a fierce debate over what constitutes grounds for requesting euthanasia, as it contradicts a landmark Supreme Court decision that a patient must have a "classifiable physical or mental condition." The 2002 ruling upheld a guilty verdict on a GP for helping his 86 year old patient die, even though he was not technically ill but obsessed with his physical decline and hopeless existence.

The Dutch euthanasia law does not specifically state that a patient must have a physical or mental condition, only that a patient must be "suffering hopelessly and unbearably."

At issue are two legal documents. One was authored by Gonzales, then the White House counsel, about the Geneva Conventions in January 2002. Reports always quote him as writing that the Geneva Conventions are "obsolete," as if he was unilaterally disavowing a U.S. treaty commitment. Not so. What he said was that Geneva does not apply to the members of a transnational murder gang. The conventions were crafted in the mid-20th century with conventional armies in mind. The idea was that members of such armies were guilty of nothing, and so should be afforded protections to make their captivity as comfortable as possible. Among those protections were that prisoners of war wouldn't be subject to interrogation.

This is the nub. Those who believe -- apparently as a theological matter -- that Geneva applies to al Qaeda must believe that its terrorists are entitled to dormitories, sports equipment, pay allowances and pretty much anything you remember from Hogan's Heroes. Most importantly, they can't be interrogated. This would kiss goodbye to the kind of intelligence that has led to the capture of important al Qaeda leaders.

All of this would be absurd. So, what Gonzales actually wrote is that the war on terror "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions requiring that captured enemy be afforded such things as commissary privileges, script (i.e., advances of monthly pay), athletic uniforms and scientific instruments."

Now Arafat is dead, Mahmoud Abbas is poised to succeed him, and the world is swooning again. Abbas, we are told, is the great hope, the moderate, the opponent of violence, the man who has said the intifada was counterproductive.

The peacemaker cometh. Once again, euphoria is in the air. Once again, no one wants to listen to what is being said.

Elections for the new Palestinian leader are on Sunday. Conveniently, this being a Palestinian election, we already know the winner....Some of the American and Israeli responses to Abbas are enough to make you weep. Spokesman at the U.S. Embassy in Israel: "We don't think it is useful to focus on every statement by every official; what's important is the process." Official in Prime Minister Sharon's office: "Words don't count in the Middle East; what counts are actions."

Have we learned nothing? In the Middle East, words are actions. Never more so than in an election campaign where your words define your platform and establish your mandate. Abbas is running practically unopposed and yet, on the question of both ends and means, he chooses to run as Yasser Arafat.

"Completely obliterating the terrorists' holiest of holies, rendering what is for them the world's most sacred spot a radioactive hole in the ground is retribution of biblical proportions -- and those are the only proportions that will do the job.

"Osama would have laughed off such a threat, given his view that Americans are wussies who cut and run after a few losses, such as Lebanon in 1983 and Somalia in 1993. Part of Bush's rationale for invading Afghanistan and Iraq -- obviously never expressed publicly -- was to convince Osama that his threat to nuke Mecca was real. Osama hates America just as much as ever, but he is laughing no more."

Wheeler says bin Laden is "playing poker with a Texas cowboy holding the nuclear aces," so there's nothing al-Qaida could do that could come remotely close to risking obliterating Mecca.

Writes Wheeler: "So far, Osama has decided not to see if GW is bluffing. Smart move."

Except for Newdow, all of the plaintiffs are identified in the complaint by pseudonyms to protect them from possible retaliation.

Some of the children assert that they don't believe in God and have suffered harassment or ostracism for objecting to the pledge.

In an interview Tuesday, a parent of one of the child plaintiffs said the third-grader has been aware of the pledge issue since Newdow's last case was in the news.

The child remarked at the time, "That's not right," and became "quite activist about it," the parent said.

The complaint identifies the child as a pantheist who doesn't believe in a personal God.

Throughout the United Kingdom, following the Christmas tsunami that killed at least 150,000 people and changed the lives of their surviving relatives forever, some are asking how a "loving" God, if He exists, could allow such a catastrophe to happen. Another question is, "Why do bad things happen to good people?"

The questions are mostly rhetorical, since by asking them, the questioners don't actually expect, or even desire, an answer. They are asked in an accusatory way, as if the questions themselves indict, try and convict as fools those who believe in God.

One counterquestion should be: Why do good things happen to bad people? The Scriptures say, "Only God is good." All humanity is diagnosed as "sinful" and "not righteous." Our desires are "only evil all the time." Look it up.

What about a "good God" allowing bad things? Death is the destination of all living organisms. Some die sooner than others. Shouldn't a "good God" provide a way to escape the grave? He has, but that requires faith, which critics and skeptics lack.

We read that "Prime Minister" Mahmoud Abbas is running in the elections on Sunday to succeed Yasser Arafat as "president" of "Palestine."

Excuse me, but prime minister, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, means the "head of the executive branch of government in states with a parliamentary system." Despite tens of thousands of references to Mr. Abbas as prime minister, he in not a single way fits this description.

Oh, and there is also the matter of there being no country called Palestine. Arab maps show it in place of Israel. The U.N. recognizes its existence. So too do certain telephone companies -- for example, France's Bouygues Telecom and Bell Canada. Nonetheless, no such place exists.

One can dismiss use of these terms as symptoms of the same unrealism that has undermined Palestinian Arab war efforts since 1948. But they also promote the Palestinian cause (a polite way of saying, "the destruction of Israel") in a vital way....Arabs may have fallen behind Israel in per capita income and advanced weaponry, but they lead by far on the semantic battlefield. Who, a century back, would have imagined Jews making the better soldiers and Arabs the better publicists?

The Bible leaves no room for doubting either the omnipotence or the benevolence of God. The God of the Bible is not a passive bystander, nor a deistic Creator who has withdrawn from His creation and is simply watching it unfold. Just as creation itself was a trinitarian event, so also the triune God reigns over His creation. There is not one atom or molecule in the entire cosmos that is not under the sovereign rule of God. As the Christian tradition has always affirmed, God's active lordship over the universe is the sole explanation for why the cosmos even holds together.

At the center of this universe is the fundamental fact of the supremacy of Jesus Christ. As the Apostle Paul argued in Colossians 1:15-17, "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities-all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together." Jesus Christ is the explanatory principle of the universe, and any effort to understand the creation apart from its Creator can lead only to confusion.

As a Christian, I cannot imagine any answer to the question of evil likely to satisfy an unbeliever; I can note, though, that--for all its urgency--Voltaire's version of the question is not in any proper sense "theological." The God of Voltaire's poem is a particular kind of "deist" God, who has shaped and ordered the world just as it now is, in accord with his exact intentions, and who presides over all its eventualities austerely attentive to a precise equilibrium between felicity and morality. Not that reckless Christians have not occasionally spoken in such terms; but this is not the Christian God.

The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death and evil have any ultimate meaning at all. Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to "powers" and "principalities"--spiritual and terrestrial--alien to God. In the Gospel of John, especially, the incarnate God enters a world at once his own and yet hostile to him--"He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not"--and his appearance within "this cosmos" is both an act of judgment and a rescue of the beauties of creation from the torments of fallen nature.

Whatever one makes of this story, it is no bland cosmic optimism. Yes, at the heart of the gospel is an ineradicable triumphalism, a conviction that the victory over evil and death has been won; but it is also a victory yet to come. As Paul says, all creation groans in anguished anticipation of the day when God's glory will transfigure all things. For now, we live amid a strife of darkness and light.

At a time when the medical community has been heartened by a decline in risky sexual behavior by teenagers, a different problem has crept up: More adult women are forgoing birth control, a trend that has experts puzzled -- and alarmed about a potential rise in unintended pregnancies....

Physicians, statisticians and advocates who specialize in reproductive health had several theories for the rise in unprotected sex. They pointed to possible factors such as gaps in sex education, the cost of birth control, declining insurance coverage, fears of possible side effects of contraceptives and personal attitudes about childbearing.

It is possible, said Paul Blumenthal, that many more women are trying to conceive and thus have stopped using contraception. But the Johns Hopkins University professor said it is more likely that more women have found the cost of birth control burdensome.

Many Democrats were disappointed by the results of the 2004 Presidential Election. Now, as the Inauguration approaches, some remain in a state of disbelief, while others feel that their voices will remain unheard and their needs unmet by the incoming administration. By wearing the Enlightened American wristband, these individuals band together in common voice declaring that they remain firm in their ideals, especially during this important political time.

In the heyday of musical comedy, they had "catalog songs" -- great long laundry lists of examples that all go to prove the same point -- that "You're The Top" or "These Foolish Things Remind Me Of You." That's the way it is with the world's opinion formers these days. Whatever happens anywhere on the planet all goes to prove the same central point -- the iniquity of America.

Outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell said a picture of PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas -- the frontrunner in upcoming Palestinian presidential elections -- campaigning on the shoulders of terrorists was "disturbing," but he said he didn't think it reflected Abbas' "overall approach to governing."

The photo shows Abbas being carried on the shoulders of his PLO al-Aksa Martyrs' Brigrades' terrorists, while campaigning in the Jenin refugee camp last week. Abbas was welcomed to the camp by the group's leader Zacharia Zubeida, who is at the top of Israel's most-wanted list.

"I know that what Mr. Abbas is doing is running for election and he has to reach out to all parts of the Palestinian community," Powell said during an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday.

"Even though that picture is disturbing, what he has been saying with respect to the need to end terror and the need to try to persuade all segments of the Palestinian population to move away from terror and to move toward this opportunity for peace, that I believe is his prevailing position," Powell said.

My favorite 20th century writer of fiction, Walker Percy, poured on the criticism in his next-to-last novel, "The Second Coming" (1980). He complained that the contemporary Christian is "nominal, lukewarm, hypocritical, sinful or, if fervent, generally offensive and fanatical. But he is not crazy." The unbeliever is, because of the "fatuity, blandness, incoherence, fakery and fatheadedness of his unbelief. He is in fact an insane person."...

The international news of 2004 once again showed how far from sanity this world resides. Iraq. Sudan. Israel. Afghanistan. Holland. China. Chechnya. Cuba. Nagorno Karabakh. On the surface, our domestic news is better. No terrorist attacks. No mass murders in schools or churches. But Percy's quiet terror continues: arteries to chalk, brain cells to mush, dust to dust.

This was a year in which many people sought the love of another. I feel extraordinarily blessed in my marriage, but hit television shows like "Sex and the City" and "Desperate Housewives," as well as Tom Wolfe's fine novel "I Am Charlotte Simmons," display the desperate desire for love that some sadly reduce to a desperate search for sex -- as if momentary excitement can substitute for years of contentment....

What's more striking is how the desperate search for horizontal love, person-to-person, is not matched by what should be an even more desperate search for vertical love, person-and-God.

A Supreme Court vacancy may soon ignite a controversy involving two entangled issues -- abortion, and the role of courts in this constitutional democracy. Herewith a statement the president might usefully make sometime, somewhere, to disentangle the issues:

"Because I think it is improper to ask how a prospective judicial nominee would vote on a specific question, I shall not know how my nominees would rule in the event -- an unlikely event -- that the court revisits the constitutional foundation of abortion rights established by Roe v. Wade in 1973. However, I will seek judicial nominees disinclined to concoct spurious constitutional mandates for their policy preferences, as I believe the justices did in Roe. On the other hand, the orderly development of constitutional law requires that justices be generally disposed to respect precedents, even dubious ones, if they have been repeatedly reaffirmed for decades.

"I believe abortion is wrong, but also that states should have, as they did until Roe, the power to set abortion policy. If states come to conclusions different than mine, so be it. But remember: Were Roe overturned, that would not make abortion illegal; it would merely re-empower states to regulate the practice. And restoring the legal conditions of 1973 would not restore the social context of 1973. Given public opinion today, when abortion is one of the most common surgical procedures, it is unlikely that any state would seriously impede first-trimester abortions, which are 89 percent of all abortions."