» Continued Part 2

=== Other News
22. Police foil terror plot to use sarin gas in London
23. Polygamists Assert Rights At Capitol
24. Student Cult Found In Lira
25. Father to sue NHS trust in sex abuse test case
26. Volusia spiritualists win zoning battle against church
27. The search for a virgin goddess gets harder

=== Death Penalty & Other Human Rights Violations
28. Death row on trial

=== Noted
29. Otherkin Come Out of the Closet
30. Believing in God is not a fad.

=== Other News

22. Police foil terror plot to use sarin gas in London
Sunday Telegraph (England), Feb. 18, 2001
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
A special branch raid on a house in London has exposed a terrorist plot to release the poisonous nerve gas sarin in Britain.

Senior police officers have confirmed to The Telegraph that detailed plans containing instructions on how to manufacture and deploy the poison, which kills in seconds, were discovered by detectives. They believed that a group was plotting to release the gas on the London underground in a copy of an attack in Japan that killed 12 people in 1995
(...)

Detectives are linking the plot with a major arms find in Germany in December last year when police in Frankfurt arrested four foreign nationals known to have had links to Saudi terrorist Osama Bin Laden.
(...)

Terrorist groups are increasingly keen to experiment with chemical weapons.

Sarin, which is 26 times more deadlier than cyanide, is particularly sought after because being odourless it is almost impossible to detect.

It was developed as a chemical weapon by the Nazis during the Second World War and its potential for terrorist use was realised in 1995 when the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo used it during an attack on an underground train. Twelve people were killed and more than 5,000 injured.

In 1999, as a direct result of the Tokyo attack, police in London established a unit to advise key installations on how best to safeguard themselves from a chemical attack.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


23. Polygamists Assert Rights At Capitol
The Salt Lake Tribune, Feb. 15, 2001
http://www.sltrib.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
Nearly 100 polygamists and their supporters packed a Capitol Hill hearing on an anti-polygamy bill Tuesday, a rare public assembly of plural families whose lifestyle was outlawed in Utah 105 years ago.
(...)

''We are people just like you. We love our children. We pay our taxes. We have a right to live our lives,'' said Owen Allred, the 87-year-old leader of the nation's second-largest polygamous church, the Apostolic United Brethren.

Allred encouraged Tuesday's strong showing against the bill during a Sunday sermon before his Bluffdale congregation. Roughly half the crowd followed Allred to the Capitol. Others belong to a loose underground of independent polygamists, a network that continues to thrive despite Utah's long effort to abolish polygamy.
(...)

Only four people in the crowd came to testify in favor of Sen. Ron Allen's measure, which targets marriages of young teens in polygamist communities by making it a third-degree felony for parents or pastors to condone or solemnize outlawed marriages.

''We want to help the children who have no voice and no choice,'' said Vicky Prunty, executive director of Tapestry Against Polygamy, a group of former polygamous wives whose lawyer, Douglas White, helped Allen, D-Stansbury Park, craft the legislation.

Tapestry has almost single-handedly revived a long-dormant practice in Utah of charging polygamists with bigamy, a trend that snared Juab County polygamist Tom Green, who awaits trial on four counts of bigamy and single counts of child sex abuse and criminal nonsupport.

Tapestry's members do not quibble: They want to end polygamy. But first they intend to rescue hundreds of abused women and children they say are trapped in Utah's male-dominated polygamous communities.
(...)

But by bending Utah's marriage statute so prosecutors can target parents and religious leaders, opponents say, Allen's Senate Bill 146 also threatens consenting adults who enter polygamous relationships and parents who teach plural marriage as religious doctrine.
(...)

At the very least, opponents asked Allen to delete two sections of SB146. The first would make it a felony for parents to encourage or promote outlawed marriages, including polygamy and same-sex unions. The second is a passage that makes it a felony for someone to officiate during outlawed marriages of consenting adults.

''We don't swallow [Allen's] stated intent,'' said plural wife Marianne Watson, one of Batchelor's two co-authors. ''We believe it opens the door to the [polygamy] raids of the 1800s and 1900s . . . a witch hunt this state can ill afford.''

After the meeting, Rep. Scott Daniels, D-Salt Lake City, said he will propose an amendment lowering the penalty for solemnizing an outlawed marriage from a felony to a misdemeanor.
(...)

With little time to explore each angle or listen to every person, the judiciary committee delayed further discussion and debate until Friday, when a vote is expected that could move the measure to the House floor. SB146 unanimously passed the Senate.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


24. Student Cult Found In Lira
The New Vision (Uganda), Feb. 19, 2001
http://www.newvision.co.ug/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
LIRA - Police have arrested five students of Loro Primary Teachers College on allegation of introducing a new religious cult in the school. The students were arrested on Tuesday from Dokolo sub-county where they were hiding and praying that Jesus would come on the February 14 to take them to heaven. The group has been taking water only.
[...entire item...]


25. Father to sue NHS trust in sex abuse test case
The Times (England), Feb. 18, 2001
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
A former SNP official who was accused of sexually abusing his daughter after she underwent controversial psychiatric treatment has lodged a &#pound;250,000 compensation claim in the court of session against a Scottish NHS trust and local authority in a landmark case.

The case of Jim Fairlie, a former deputy leader of the Scottish National party, which will be heard next month, will be the first of its kind in Britain involving the now widely discredited recovered memory therapy to be heard in a civil court.

If successful, it could open the floodgates for compensation claims running into millions of pounds. The British False Memory Society has 1,400 people listed on its database who claim they have been falsely accused of sexual abuse after adult children ''recovered memories''.

In 1995 Fairlie was accused by his daughter Katrina of sexual abuse. She also made allegations against 17 other men, including two Scottish MPs, who have never been named.
(...)

Margaret Jervis, legal adviser to the British False Memory Society, said the hearing in Edinburgh had potentially serious implications for hundreds of people who had been similarly accused.

''The stigma of allegations is such that it can have far-reaching effects,'' she said. ''Any rational analysis of these cases could conclude that these people have been wrongly accused.''
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


26. Volusia spiritualists win zoning battle against church
Associated Press, Feb. 15, 2001
http://www.naplesnews.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
DELAND - A community that has been home to spiritualists and psychics for over a century has convinced a zoning commission to deny evangelists from building a church in their midst.

Volusia County's Planning and Land Development Regulation Commission voted Tuesday against the construction of a new church near the heart of Cassadaga, home to mediums, psychics, and other spiritualists for more than 100 years.

County planners had supported the evangelists' push to build the church, saying the request met the county's zoning rules.

However, some commissioners said they voted against the proposal because Cassadaga is such a unique section of the county and that the new church could ruin the area's character.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


27. The search for a virgin goddess gets harder
Sydney Morning Herald, (Australia), Feb. 17, 2001
http://www.smh.com.au/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
A quest is under way for the next living Kumari goddess - a girl who could be as young as three or four.

She will replace the present Kumari, or virgin, who is 11 and retires this year.

Kumari goddesses usually retire when they reach puberty.

Officials said that selection of the new goddess was getting harder.

''It is difficult to get a candidate because parents are less keen on their daughters serving as Kumari,'' said Mr Tej Ratna Tamrakar, chief of the office that looks after ancient temples, monuments and cultural assets in the Himalayan kingdom, where about 90 per cent of the 23 million people are Hindus and 7 per cent are Buddhists.

The living goddesses are revered by people of both faiths as well as King Birendra, who is said to be an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu.

The role of the goddess is limited to appearing several times a day in a resplendent golden-coloured dress at an upstairs window of the temple and blessing devotees gathered below.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


=== Death Penalty & Other Human Rights Violations

28. Death row on trial
BBC, Feb. 16, 2001
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
Since it reintroduced the death penalty a quarter of a century ago, America has executed 695 people. Another 3,703 wait on death row. But a recent spate of releases of the wrongfully convicted has triggered alarm that America may be executing the innocent.

Stacey Delo and Laura Sullivan are former journalism students of America's Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois.

They were given a possible miscarriage of justice to investigate: the case of four young black men convicted in 1978 of a double murder and rape.
(...)

Finally they two students persuaded the men named in the police report they had discovered to confess. DNA tests clinched the case. The four wrongly convicted men were exonerated and released. But they had lost 18 years of their lives.

In 1973 the US Supreme Court struck down the death penalty on the ground that it was applied capriciously and unfairly, and therefore violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Three years later a more conservative court restored it. Since then more than ninety death row inmates have been proved to be innocent and freed - enough to make a growing number of Americans wonder aloud whether the system of capital punishment can be trusted to deliver justice.
(...)

Three things have prompted his U-turn: the murder rate in the 38 states that execute people is no lower than that of 12 states that have no capital punishment; life imprisonment without parole keeps murders off the streets while avoiding the finality of execution; and his fear that the state may have executed the innocent.

Chiefly its these narrow escapes from the electric chair and lethal injection that have fed America's debate about the death penalty.

What may in the end prove even more telling, however, is the result of a study by the Columbia School of Law in New York.

After examining every capital punishment case passing through the appeal courts between 1973 and 1995 its lawyers found that seven out of 10 death sentences were reversed because of serious error in the original trials.

To its authors the study suggests that America's capital punishment system is breaking down under the weight of its own mistakes. They point out that an appeals process burdened with the task of catching so much error is hugely expensive. Also it takes an inordinate amount of time.

Clearly nearly 70% of America's 3,700 death row inmates should never have been sent there. And although not more than about one in 10 will ever be executed, the wrongly sentenced are having to wait for anything from 10 to 18 years to be told of their fate. That's not unusual, and it is certainly cruel.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


=== Noted

29. Otherkin Come Out of the Closet
The Village Voice, Feb. 14 - 20, 2001
http://www.villagevoice.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
Magpie Hrafnsdottir, a young woman from Chicago, has extra ribs, right where wings would be, and sometimes she can feel those phantom wings ache. Something else is missing; Magpie has always believed she has a secret twin. ''I could feel her,'' she says. ''At age five, I angrily asked my mother where she was, demanded to see my twin sister.''

In college, she discovered the Internet and found a community of people who had the same dreams of past lives in a magical realm populated by elves, pixies, and other mythological creatures. Magpie and her friends don't have all the answers, but they know one thing: They're not human.

They're Otherkin, and they're trying to get back Home.
(...)

As kids, many say, they felt out of place in this world, even insisting to their parents that they were adopted. By their late teens, most Otherkin were involved in paganism, fantasy fiction, the Internet, or past-life regression. Once they ''awakened'' to their true nature, the next step was to hit listservs, chat rooms, and Web sites, looking for the others. Magpie, for one, runs the Otherkin Resource Center (or ORC, named after the baddies in The Lord of the Rings) at www.otherwonders.com/otherkin

Others found their way to the fold through New Age-style trancework, dreams, and even role-playing games.
(...)

The Otherkin are making a Romantic appeal for a better world and a better life. Rialian.com (http://www.rialian.com), the premier Otherkin Web site, features essays like ''A Call to Arts,'' which draws upon the authority of Nostradamus, the Bible, Pink Floyd, and Queen to argue the modern world is out of balance.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


30. Believing in God is not a fad.
Cox News Service, Feb. 9, 2001
http://www.coxnews.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
(...) Religious trends don't come and go as quickly as those in fashion or music, but they're more difficult to track because of the numbers involved and their relative lack of organization compared to an industry selling shoes or CDs. But many trends show up in traditional religious groups years later.
(...)

A handful of experts monitor movements among the millions of American faithful. With the help of a few, here's a look at 10 trends in religion today.

Contemporary styles of worship
Seen ballet in a worship service lately? How about a skit or a performance of a Backstreet Boys song?

If so, that means you're in on a major trend -- either with a new denomination or an older one trying to adapt. Experts expect both types to survive. Others, with their centuries-old services and hymnals your grandparents used, might be in for a surprise.

''Contemporary forms of worship are probably the hottest issue,'' Roozen said.

It's simply a matter of keeping up with the times and keeping in touch with the people.
(...)

Interdenominational and evangelical growth
So you're a Christian searching for a new church to check out. Something everybody's trying.

Open the phone book to evangelical or interdenominational. While most mainline Christian denominations are struggling to keep members, these groups are still growing and developing because they attract Baby Boomers and their kids.

Evangelical denominations, including Southern Baptists, appeal now because they tend toward the conservative and provide direct and simple answers to religious questions, one scholar said.

The interdenominational Seeker Movement, started in 1975 at Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago, appeals because it tries to promote Christianity in modern and non-threatening ways. They cater to beginning Christians, feature contemporary music and often include a ''how-to'' sermon, such as how to cope with anger.
(...)

More Mormons
Call the Mormon Church the one exception to the rule that established religious groups are struggling. This young church, formed about 170 years ago, has long been isolated but is starting to grow outside its stronghold of Utah.
(...)

Yearning for community
In South Florida, religious groups of all kinds and sizes report a growing need for small-group meetings and education.

Classes for new and lapsed Roman Catholics are especially popular, Bishop Anthony O'Connell said. ''The number of people interested in learning more about the church has substantially increased,'' O'Connell said.

Torah study hasn't been this active in 20 years, one rabbi said.

The Rev. Ray Underwood reports similar needs for small groups within his large Palm Beach Community Church, which is affiliated with the Seeker Movement.
(...)

More Muslims
But not as many more as some have reported. Some estimates have the number of Muslims in the United States nearly matching the 5.1 million Jews. But Gallup and other polling experts disagree.

Muslim temples are growing, but nearly all growth is attributed to immigration from Muslim countries such as India and Pakistan. The number of people converting and joining congregations remains small, Lindsay said.
(...)

Spirituality rising
Anyone who has watched ''''The Oprah Winfrey Show,'' with its daily ''Remembering Your Spirit'' segment, or read a women's magazine recently knows spirituality is in.

Statistics back that up. In 1994, a Gallup poll showed 58 percent of Americans felt ''the need to experience spiritual growth in the next year.'' By December 1998, that number had jumped to a whopping 82 percent. Pollsters were so surprised they ran the survey again -- and got identical results.
(...)

But 30 percent of Americans consider themselves ''spiritual but not religious'' meaning many define spirituality much more broadly, often without mentioning God. Oprah's segments, for example, often are rooted in traditional Christian ideas but branch beyond organized religious boundaries, touching the sacred and devotional and focusing on self-understanding.
(...)

Freedom of choice
With each generation since the baby boom, adults feel more free to abandon the religion they were raised on. Some choose other religions, but many adopt religious ideas as they see fit, perhaps picking a little Buddhism to go with their Sunday Mass and their mid-week yoga, experts say.
(...)

This freedom creates people who are difficult to categorize, experts say. In 1999, for example, 23 percent of born-again Christians said they also believe in reincarnation, which Lindsay called ''squarely at odds'' with the teachings of Christians.
(...)

Internet-fueled diversity
Diversity and choice are tightly intertwined since the Internet became a part of most Americans' lives. Anyone with questions about faith, spirituality, beliefs and specific religions can find hundreds of Web sites in a few keystrokes.

The answers on the Internet don't necessarily prompt many to resign from the Episcopal Church and join a Buddhist temple, but they do prompt study and even acceptance, particularly of Eastern religions.

Diversity and choice are tightly intertwined since the Internet became a part of most Americans' lives. Anyone with questions about faith, spirituality, beliefs and specific religions can find hundreds of Web sites in a few keystrokes.
(...)

Bookstore shelves and sales also prove average people are seeking much more than affirmation of their beliefs or a cursory look at world religions.
(...)

Search for mystery
After 20 years of turning to God for intellectual answers, many of the faithful are once again seeking the emotion and mystery of religion.

The solemn, pre-Vatican II Latin Mass is drawing young Roman Catholics; interest in the Kabbalah, which is Jewish mysticism, is growing. Pentecostalism is one of the few growing Christian denominations because it teaches that people can get in touch with the sacred by speaking in tongues, Cimino said.

''This new spirituality is expressive, subjective, experiential, relational,'' Roozen said. ''It's just a very different thing. It's more a religion of the heart.''
(...)

And the search for mysticism isn't limited to Christianity, Judaism, Muslim or Eastern religions, experts say.

''I think you definitely see parallels to Wicca seances and channeling through crystals,'' Roozen said.

More women in leadership
Women are joining men in pulpits, filling half of the seats in seminaries and taking on previously male roles in churches and synagogues. But they still don't head many congregations.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]

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