Author: Richard Chonak

“The very attempt to clone a human being is evil,” said Stanley M. Hauerwas, a professor of theological ethics at Duke University. “That the allegedly cloned child is to be called Eve confirms the god-like stature these people so desperately seek.”
Update: Among the parents preparing to give birth to more clones are “a pair of lesbians from northern Europe, couples from North America and Asia who seek to clone dead children from cells recovered before the deaths, and a second Asian couple….”

After Christmas morning mass, a woman kisses a lifelike statue of the Baby Jesus, in St. Catherine’s church inside the compound of the Church of the Nativity, traditionally believed to be birthplace of Jesus Christ, in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, Wednesday, Dec. 25, 2002. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

A San Francisco supervisor is proposing a new law to regulate psychics, fortune tellers, and other soothsayers. I rather like the Old Testament’s way of regulating them, but this idea is better than nothing: it’s a sort of consumer-protection rule to set some limit on the foolishness of gullible people.
And you might expect ethical, responsible psychics to welcome the idea of strengthening standards in their field, but you would be mistaken:

The San Francisco Yellow Pages list no fewer than 105 psychics, 20 spiritual consultants and 17 astrologers. None of them seemed happy about the proposal.
“What a rip-off,” said Dionysia, Goddess of Light and Direction. “It’s just the city, capitalizing on folks trying to make a living. [District Attorney] Terence Hallinan wouldn’t know a psychic if it hit him on the head.”

Jeff Miller has a funny weblog but its URL of http://jeff_miller.blogspot.com isn’t quite right, according to the Internet standard RFC 1738. The host name in a URL may contain letters, digits, and hyphens, but not underscores (“_”).
If your URL is illegal, then browsers that comply with the standards — e.g., Mozilla — can’t display it. So if you’re setting up a site through Blogspot or some other provider, please avoid this mistake.

…so she ordered a halt to major criminal trials for the week.
Bexar County [TX] District Attorney Susan Reed … says the best time of year to bring cases to trial is around the U.S. income tax deadline of April 15.
“There’s no doubt about it,” Reed said. “Jurors are good and angry.”