Australia outlaws pro-euthanasia TV advert

Australia has outlawed a television advertisement in favour of euthanasia - the first in many years to challenge a legal ban on the practice.

In the advert, a gaunt-looking actor speaks of intolerable suffering and urges the government to listen to those who wanted to die with dignity.

Regulators say it promotes suicide, which is illegal in Australia.

The group behind the campaign, Exit International, told the BBC it would fight for its reinstatement.

In the banned advertisement, an actor plays a man reflecting on his life and of being struck down by a terminal illness, while pleading to be allowed to die with dignity:

"I chose to marry Tina, have two great kids. I chose to always drive a Ford. What I didn't choose was being terminally ill. I didn't choose to starve to death because eating is like swallowing razor blades.

"And I certainly didn't choose to have to watch my family go through it with me. I've made my final choice. I just need the government to listen."

Read the Article

At Lincoln Memorial, a Call for Religious Rebirth

WASHINGTON — An enormous and impassioned crowd rallied at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial this weekend, summoned by Glenn Beck, a conservative broadcaster who called for a religious rebirth in America at the site where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech exactly 47 years earlier.

“Something that is beyond man is happening,” Mr. Beck told the crowd, in what was part religious revival and part history lecture. “America today begins to turn back to God.”

The rally organized by Mr. Beck, a Fox News broadcaster who has been sharply critical of President Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats, had been attacked as dishonoring the memory of Dr. King by being set on the anniversary of his speech. Despite Mr. Beck’s protestations, his event and a much smaller and mainly black counter-rally seemed to underscore the country’s racial and political fissures.

Critics have suggested that Mr. Beck was trying to energize conservatives for the midterm elections in November. Mainstream Republican leaders remain skittish about the group emerging on their right — and the influence it displayed in primary elections Tuesday — and had little to say about the Beck event.

But in an interview aired Sunday, Mr. Beck denied any political motivation — or political aspiration — and shrugged off conservatives’ suggestions that his ability to mobilize so large a crowd made him presidential material.

“There’s nothing we can do that will solve the problems that we have and keep the peace unless we solve it through God,” he told “Fox News Sunday.”

Read the Article

Catholic Government

This remarkable film is posted on Pharyngula, where most of the commenters are understandably debating whether it can possibly be genuine. My first thought, too, was that it must be a hoax. Surely nobody could be quite so blatantly arrogant, saying more or less explicitly that 'Nobody should be allowed to vote unless they agree with me!' But this bulletin seems to provide corroborating evidence that Michael Voris is a bona fide Catholic activist, not a satirist lampooning Catholic idiocy and arrogance. -Richard Dawkins.

WOW!

UK government axes its sustainability watchdog

The UK government is to stop funding the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), its independent environmental watchdog and advisory body.

Set up by the Labour government in 2000, the SDC is among a number of green bodies to be abolished.

The news comes on the day the SDC, with a budget of £3m, published a report saying Whitehall had saved £60-70m as a result of introducing green measures.

Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman announced the details in a statement.

"This government is committed to being the greenest government ever, and the Structural Reform Plan published last week sets out how Defra (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) will play its part in achieving this," she said.

Read the Article

BBC: Science aids economy

UK Science Minister David Willetts is to say that there is an economic case for Britain to have a strong research base.

In his first major speech on science at the Royal Institution, Mr Willetts is to argue the case for scientific research in an age of austerity.

Under the previous government spending on science doubled in real terms.

This made the UK second only to the US in terms of the quality of its research, according to some measures.

This is a factor which draws many hi-tech companies to base themselves in the UK.

Mr Willetts is to say that he values the research base - and understands its importance to the economy.

Read the Article

UK 'will push EU on CO2 targets'

The UK government will push the EU to move to a higher target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. It will urge the EU to cut emissions by 30% from 1990 levels by 2020, rather than the current 20% target, partly through more support for renewables.

A higher proportion of tax revenues will come from environmental taxes.

In 2009, EU leaders endorsed two targets for greenhouse gas emissions - 20%, rising to 30% in the event of a global deal on climate change.

That failed to materialise at December's Copenhagen summit.

But the recession has lowered emissions across the continent, making the higher target more easily achievable.

Environment groups have been lobbying governments to move to 30% immediately, to re-stake the EU's claim for global leadership on climate change - a call that the coalition has now endorsed.

Only problem is the conservative-Lib Dem coalition also confirmed there would be a free vote on fox-hunting and that badger culling was back on the agenda for England