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In the wake of the lifting of the papal excommunication of the SSPX bishops and other flaps this past winter, the way the Vatican handles public relations and communications has been the subject of much media scrutiny.
One of the more interesting stories regarding stem cell research is one that has been woefully under-reported. Even though scientists have been performing embryo-destructive stem cell research for a decade, there are no clinically available treatments that have resulted from the research. In the past two years, however, scientists have discovered ways of inducing pluripotent stem cells that many see as more promising.
So The New York Times covered Archbishop Timothy Dolan’s first Mass in New York. This is a good thing. Depending on when and how you accessed the article, its headline was either:
The details were numbingly horrible from the start: a 4 year old girl, the subject of a bitter custody battle, witnessed her father gunned down in front of her in a Queens, New York park. Both her parents were doctors and both were immigrants from Russia.
Who is going to represent the United States as ambassador to the Holy See? In a government headed by a President who is favors abortion rights and has opened the door to broader use of embryonic stem cells for research, this question is getting a lot of attention, both from advocacy organizations and from the press.
There has been a slew of coverage of Miss California’s statements that she does not support gay marriage laws and her belief that her comments resulted in a missed chance at being crowned Miss USA. For a summary of the in depth, extensive coverage of the incident, and to make sure I don’t misconstrue any of the critical details of this factually sensitive story, here is a summary from the Associated Press:
The National Institutes of Health posted their draft guidelines for the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research last Friday. When President Barack Obama announced his new embryonic stem cell funding policy in March, he said guidelines would be set by the NIH. The new draft guidelines can definitely be changed in response to responses received during the comment period or through promised legislative action, but here’s how they stand now:
I rarely post my weekly Scripps Howard New Service column here at GetReligion, but this week is a unique situation.
Today’s Times of London has a major story on a reconciliation program in Northern Ireland that has brought together Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants, including a woman who had prepared to be a suicide bomber. Here is the beginning of the story:
