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"Because too many people are not [ready to meet God]. They're just goofing off, laughing their way through life, like everything's a big joke. They don't pray, they don't trust God, they're not in Church on Sunday, they're in serious mortal sin, and they think they're going to be ready to meet God, and it does not work that way." . . .

The other day, deep in Rego Park, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens, Stanley Moscowitz and Walter Israel sat down at a Formica table for lunch at Ben's Best Kosher Deli on Queens Boulevard. Moscowitz, who's 53 and grew up in nearby Forest Hills, ordered first: matzo ball, tip of the tongue, roast beef, rye, Russian, onions and Dr. Brown's diet cherry drink. Israel ordered pastrami on rye bread. His son Jason ordered pastrami on white. In his defense, Jason did not ask for mayonnaise, but the combination of pastrami and white bread enjoys a certain...

After the mortgage business imploded last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one. The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people...

After World War II, the U.S. government invested an enormous amount of money in medicine; medical research, medical procedures and medical technologies. This investment made contemporary scientific medicine into American medicine, characterized by a continuing flow of new treatment possibilities. These advances raised all kinds of ethical questions. Some were personal and individual, others were social and political. Both type questions are addressed by a new academic discipline called bioethics. The first attempt to develop a scientific medicine took place in Greece in the 5th century B.C. It was called Hippocratic medicine. Closely linked with this first scientific medicine was...

Health Minister Nicola Roxon wants debate about the moral challenge as the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee plans trials to determine when costly drugs become ineffective and should no longer be dispensed.

This just in from an old friend who is a retired high ranking military officer who took HIS oath more seriously than the clowns in Washington and is as angry as most of the rest of us at the travesty unfolding before us. I've cleaned out the email addys and names to prevent ACORN from picketing or firebombing their homes. ******** Monday morning , I heard that our Rep. John Lewis (an unchallenged Civil Rights "icon" who, due to gerrymandering was given the N Atlanta, Fulton County and Sandy Springs district once represented by Dr. Tom Price) had called a...

Ezekiel Emmanuel, Rahm’s health-wonk brother, wants the nation’s seniors to just get on with it. Death, that is. Believing that older Americans have already had their fair share of time, he suggests that they be denied health care resources—out of a concern for justice, apparently. This, from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, sums it up: 'In a January article published in the British medical journal Lancet, Emanuel and his co-authors advocate a health rationing policy that discriminates against older people. They wrote, “Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination … Treating 65-year-olds differently because of...

Dr. John David Manning says it as plainly as it can be said.

HUNTINGTON BEACH – Colby Curtin, a 10-year-old with a rare form of cancer, was staying alive for one thing – a movie. From the minute Colby saw the previews to the Disney-Pixar movie Up, she was desperate to see it. Colby had been diagnosed with vascular cancer about three years ago, said her mother, Lisa Curtin, and at the beginning of this month it became apparent that she would die soon and was too ill to be moved to a theater to see the film. After a family friend made frantic calls to Pixar to help grant Colby her dying...

HUNTINGTON BEACH – Colby Curtin, a 10-year-old with a rare form of cancer, was staying alive for one thing – a movie. From the minute Colby saw the previews to the Disney-Pixar movie Up, she was desperate to see it. Colby had been diagnosed with vascular cancer about three years ago, said her mother, Lisa Curtin, and at the beginning of this month it became apparent that she would die soon and was too ill to be moved to a theater to see the film. After a family friend made frantic calls to Pixar to help grant Colby her dying...

So I’m reading the 9,324th story on the absolutely ridiculous “ethics complaint”against Sarah Palin, filed by operatives of the DNC, namely Sondra Tomkins, who is aided by Shannyn Moore, Jeanne Devon, and Linda Biegel. Standard boilerplate left wing lunacy. This time written by so-called “professor” Amanda Coyne, who runs the Alaska Dispatch, a small internet newser, that’s main purpose seems to be printing attacks against the Governor. Nothing surprising there, as Coyne has turned her hate into a cottage industry. Between her unbalanced and unhinged hate for Palin, she also spends time attacking Palin’s supporters, and filling the pages of...

My father died alone, surrounded by all of us who loved him. His beloved breath was labored for the last, long, eight hours of his life while we hung on every whisper of air that kept him alive. In the living room, my mother, brother, sister and I talked quietly about the past and a future without him. I'd known him all of my life. He was as familiar to me as my own face in the mirror each morning. His impending death was incomprehensible, even to a Christian soul. Funny, we intellectually expect the arrival of death someday, but...

"This is the place where bad times get sent to make them belong to somebody else, thus, it seems easy to agree about Detroit because the city embodies everything the rest of the country wants to get over." --Jerry Herron, AfterCulture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History (1993) Detroit My plane hadn't even finished descending through the snow-drizzly sheets of December gray, when already, I heard someone crack on it. "Ladies and Gentlemen," a Northwest flight attendant announced, "Welcome to lovely Detroit, the one and only home of the Detroit auto worker of America. Happiness is a way of travel,...

On Sunday, Chris O’Brien of the Silicon Valley Mercury News wrote about four dying Silicon Valley icons. For some reason, it wasn’t posted to the website Sunday or Monday, but it’s there now. He aptly summarizes the problems of three of these companies, and I recommend anyone interested in innovation (or the Valley) to read the analysis. In my reading, two of the companies are (effectively) single-product companies where their product is no longer compelling and increasingly no longer competitive. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) once was threatening Intel (INTC) on the performance front, and now they are asset stripping in...

VATICAN CITY, NOV. 4, 2008 (Zenit.org).- When facing death, one is forced to face reality and recognize things for what they are, says Benedict XVI. The Pope said this Monday upon presiding in St. Peter's Basilica at the traditional November Mass for the souls of cardinals and bishops who died over the course of the year. Members of the College of Cardinals concelebrated with the Holy Father. During the homily the Pontiff recalled the names of the 10 cardinals who passed away during the last 12 months: Stephen Fumio Hamao, Alfons Maria Stickler, Aloísio Lorscheider, Peter Poreku Dery, Adolfo Antonio...

Where's it worst? Ohio, according to our analysis, which racked up four of the 10 cities on our list: Youngstown, Canton, Dayton and Cleveland. The runner-up is Michigan, with two cities--Detroit and Flint--making the ranking.

HAVANA - Fidel Castro revealed Thursday that he thought he was dying when he fell ill in July 2006, and hastily made plans to give up power as doctors fought to save his life. "When I fell gravely ill the night of the 26th and dawn of the 27th of July, I thought that would be the end," the ailing 81-year-old wrote in an essay published on the front page of state newspapers. "And while the doctors fought for my life, the head aide of the Council of State read at my urging the text and I dictated the necessary...

A grandfather who went on a massive spending spree when doctors told him he would die is taking legal action against the NHS after learning he had been misdiagnosed. John Brandrick, from Newquay, Cornwall, was told he had pancreatic cancer two years ago after scans revealed a 7cm tumour. The 62-year-old said he was told by doctors at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Treliske that he only had a short time left to live. So he quit his job and stopped paying his mortgage, instead splashing out on a lavish lifestyle of hotels, restaurants and holidays. Then the hospital told...

Vitamin supplements taken by millions of people every day for their health could be increasing their risk of death a new Danish-led study suggests. The study is published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The international research team reviewed the published evidence on beta carotene, vitamin A, vitamin E, Vitamin C and selenium. The team was led by Dr Goran Bjelakovic, from Copenhagen University Hospital, Denmark. These dietary supplements are marketed as antioxidants and people take them in the hope they will improve health and guard against diseases like cancer and heart disease by eliminating the free radicals...

Just kind of a tribute to John Palka. Marine (ca. 1965), blues lover, cat lover. Ornery. Not religious. Chicago boy. Missed by those who knew him.

HAVANA - The ailing Fidel Castro is not dying but is recovering from an illness, his younger brother and Cuba's acting president said Sunday in response to rumors that the leader was on his deathbed. Raul Castro, who has been standing in for his brother since July 31, was responding to recent reports including one in Time magazine that said Castro apparently has terminal cancer. Castro is recovering from intestinal surgery but the lack of details from the Cuban government regarding the nature of his illness has sparked a number of rumors about his health. "He is not dying like...

From the desk of Paul Belien on Wed, 2006-09-20 23:11 Dr Koenraad Elst, one of Belgium’s best orientalists and an occasional contributor to this website (if I had time I would translate more of his Dutch-language contributions into English), told me last week that he thinks “Islam is in decline, despite its impressive demographic and military surge” – which according to Dr Elst is merely a “last upheaval.” He acknowledges, however, that this decline can take some time (at least in terms of the individual human life span) and that it is possible that Islam will succeed in becoming the...

The United States of America vs. Bill Keller How hard is it to be executive editor of the New York Times today? The White House calls him a traitor. He gets roasted every day on talk shows and blogs. The newsroom is losing faith. The paper is shrinking. And the worst part is that fighting back means overcoming his own nature... ...For a meeting without historical precedent, the president of the United States had called the Times to the White House to personally try to prevent a state secret from appearing in print—an exposé of the National Security Agency’s efforts...

As we took off from London for New York a few days ago, our three over-excited children asked if there was any chance of the plane being blown up. I explained that the likelihood of that happening was virtually zero, and wondered how we were going to maintain some semblance of order during the flight. One did not wish the sedate American passengers by whom we were surrounded to form the impression that British parents are unable or unwilling to impart the rudiments of good manners.

16th of June DEFEATING DEPRESSION PART 1 “Anxiety in the heart of man causes depression, but a good word makes it glad” Proverbs 12:25 Depression- from Webster’s New Unabridged Dictionary Low spirits, gloominess, dejection, sadness, a decrease in force, or activity, or amount, a decrease in functional activity. An emotional condition either normal or pathological characterized by discouragement, a feeling of inadequacy, the act of humbling abasement as a depression of pride. Abasement, reduction, sinking, fall, humiliation, dejection, melancholy. Major Depression Facts Major depression is the No.1 psychological disorder in the western world.(1) It is growing in all age groups,...

52wk Range: 21.58 - 35.00 Last Trade: 21.58

NO one with a heart would deny painkillers to a suffering patient whose death was near. But what if the drugs, besides easing pain, could also hasten death — could make “near” closer to “now”? It is a question the doctors and families of dying patients face every day. Much of the time, they are generous with drugs. The practice is generally considered acceptable, even if it does help end a life — provided that the intention is strictly to relieve pain, not cause death. Basically, it’s O.K. if you happen to grease the skids for poor old uncle as...

OUTDOOR COLUMN -- matthews-ONS -- 05jul06 Deer in peril by aqueduct, fencing work By JIM MATTHEWS Outdoor News Service A portion of the burro deer herd in Imperial and Riverside counties is being denied water during the scorching summer heat because of work being conducted by the Coachella Valley Water District (CVWD) on the Coachella Canal, located on the east side of the Salton Sea and Imperial Valley. The canal, which has delivered Colorado River water to farm fields in the Imperial Valley for decades, is being replaced with a concrete lined canal to eliminate leakage. This will increase the...

The old priest lay dying in the hospital. For years he had faithfully served the people of the nation's capital. He motioned for one of his aides to come near. "Yes father" said the aide. "I would really like to see Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton before I die", whispered the priest. "I'll see what I can do, father" replied the aide. The aide sent the request to the Senate and waited for a response. Soon the word arrived. Kennedy and Clinton would be delighted to visit the priest. As they went to the hospital, Clinton commented to Kennedy, "I...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Abu Musab al-Zarqawi could barely speak, but he struggled and tried to get away from American soldiers as he lay dying on a stretcher in the ruins of his hideout. The U.S. forces recognized his face, and knew they had the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. Initially, the U.S. military had said al-Zarqawi was killed outright. But Friday new details emerged of his final moments. For three years, al-Zarqawi orchestrated horrific acts of violence guided by his extremist vision of jihad, or holy war — first against the U.S. soldiers he considered occupiers of Arab lands, then...

Rather than running away from the police, an alleged shoplifter ended up running into them — with grave results. Scott Everette Blake, 46, of Mounds View allegedly tried to steal more than $200 in men's accessories Saturday night from a Marshalls store near the Northtown shopping center in Blaine, said Anoka County Sheriff's Detective Jeff Rokeh. Store security guards watched as he removed watches, wallets and key chains from their packaging, bit off the security tags and stuffed the items in his pockets, Rokeh said. The guards called Blaine police and asked them to stand by as Blake prepared to...

Media content is increasingly becoming "unbundled" from its physical distribution medium, such as CDs. This "disruptive" technology has led to different pricing models and lowered barriers to entry for content authors, creating a challenging business environment for publishers and media companies. Historically, information and entertainment content were captive to their physical distribution medium or distribution time. Given the technology of the past, consumers were forced to purchase and access content using the physical medium or schedule dictated by the content distributor. This resulted in "appointment-based" consumption. Today, this old model of consumption is vanishing, due to changes in three significant...

WASHINGTON - Columnist Art Buchwald is dying and enjoying every minute of it. Death was expected within weeks of his decision to reject blood-cleansing treatments that could prolong his life, yet he lives on. Neither Buchwald nor his doctors know why, he says. But it doesn't matter. The Pulitzer Prize-winning political satirist says he's not afraid of death, isn't depressed and is, in fact, having the time of his life. He spends his days writing columns from his room at a local hospice and reminiscing with friends from all stages of his storied life who visit daily. "It's a great...

NYC Kindergarteners To Be Taught About AIDS Image Kerri Lyon Reporting Save It Email this Article Email It Print this Article Print It (CBS) GLENDALE HIV and AIDS have been taught in New York City classrooms since 1987 with the lessons mandated by the state. But this year, the city has revamped the curriculum, and parents said that it was without their input. Parents have now seen what their kids will be learning, and they have a lot of questions about whether its appropriate in the classroom. Susan Petschauer's third grade son Andrew is getting his first lesson in the...

In a loud corner of the Bally's hotel convention floor, a dozen beefy, bare-chested men wearing chicken masks and black Lycra tights leapt from a wrestling ring onto the exhibition floor. It was a welcome distraction at the annual ShoWest convention this week, where the aim is to whip up enthusiasm among movie theater owners for the coming summer blockbusters. Theater owners and studios fret about smaller audiences, like this one for a 7 p.m. show of "The Hills Have Eyes" in Las Vegas on Monday. Readers Forum: Movies Deftly stepping to avoid a flying wrestler (part of the promotion...

Probe launched after hospital separates dying woman, husband Last Updated Wed, 22 Feb 2006 17:51:11 EST B.C. health officials are investigating after a woman died alone two days after being forcibly separated from her husband of 70 years, despite the family's pleas that she be allowed to spend her remaining time with him. Fanny Albo, 91, and her husband Al had both been in the acute care unit of Kootenay Boundary Regional Hospital in Trail, a city in southeastern B.C. about nine kilometres north of the border with the United States. "They brought her in on the gurney. They said,...

My Dad will be 84 on the 15th. of this month. He is one of the WWII vets still with us. The following email got me to thinking about him and how unique he has become and ever more so every day. He never talked much about the war and still doesn't until this day. About all he ever told me is that he drove a gasoline truck and that he spent a lot of time in North Africa and Italy. I know he won a bronze star because I saw it once. But other than that, he won't same...

SEMINOLE – Death and dying, hospice, palliative care, advanced directives, living wills and bereavement are among the end-of-life issues to be presented by the Applied Ethics Institute of St. Petersburg College at the college’s Digitorium on the Seminole Campus on Thursday, Nov. 17, 7 to 9 p.m. The free forum will be moderated by Mary Tittle, Ph.D., RN, College of Nursing, St. Petersburg College and begin with presentations from David A. Weiland, M.D., The Hospice of the Florida Suncoast; Patricia Thieleman, Ph.D., RN, College of Nursing, St. Petersburg College; and Hanna Osman, Ph.D., College of Public Health, University of South...

Let me tell you how we’re going to die. Twenty percent of us, according to a Rand Corp. study, are going to get cancer or another rapidly debilitating condition, and we’ll be dead within a year of getting the disease. Another 20 percent of us are going to suffer from some cardiac or respiratory failure. We’ll suffer years of worsening symptoms, a few life-threatening episodes, and then eventually die. But 40 percent of us will suffer from some form of dementia (most frequently Alzheimer’s disease or a disabling stroke). Our gradual, unrelenting path toward death will take eight or 10...

Bretons speak up to save their dying language By Colin Randall in Brest (Filed: 01/10/2005) They have their own schools, bilingual road signs, vibrant festivals and dubbed Perry Mason repeats on television. But even the most passionate champions of the Breton language admit that its survival is in question. A pupil in Relecq Kerhuon reads Tintin in Breton Native speakers are ageing, their numbers falling by 15,000 a year. And among those remaining, there is anger that the French government does more for Brittany's large influx of British settlers than for those campaigning to save Breton from extinction. Along the...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Thousands more bedraggled refugees were bused and airlifted to salvation Saturday, leaving the heart of New Orleans to the dead and dying, the elderly and frail stranded too many days without food, water or medical care.

WHICH American communities pay the highest price for the war in Iraq? A look at the demographics of soldiers killed reveals that Iraq is not the war of any one race or region. Rather, it is rural America's war. Altogether, a nearly equal percentage of Americans aged 18 to 54 live in counties with a million or more inhabitants as live in counties of 100,000 or fewer. And yet, of the soldiers who have died in Iraq, 342 came from densely populated counties while 536 came from smaller ones. Derived from Pentagon and census data, this chart shows the Iraqi...

MARINE CORPS RECRUIT DEPOT SAN DIEGO, Calif. (May 20, 2005) -- Four depot sergeants in dress blues came to the bedside of a dying Marine Raider Monday afternoon at Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center, Chula Vista, Calif. Color guard members Sgts. Machel M. Messias, Edgar I. Villa, Koami Fedy and Alejandro F. Galvez went to the center to fulfill the dying wish of Wallace Reid. Reid, who now has several life-threatening medical issues, has lived at the Veterans Home of California, near the center since 2001. Known as paratroopers of the sea, the Raiders were an elite World War II...

Wake up America . . . the alarm clock just went off and we keep turning over and going back to sleep. There's an "uprisin' on the horizon" and we refuse to face it. Sleeping through it might make it easier, but the end result will be devastating. We've had a lightning bolt cut through the very core of our foundation forming a crack so deep we could topple by our weight of indifference. This ship is listing badly; so tilted we may never be uprighted again. Our love affair with America is "breaking apart" because our foundation is cracking....

Access to Hospice Care: Expanding Boundaries, Overcoming Barriers, a report drawn from a three-year study of hospice access and values issues conducted by The Hastings Center and the National Hospice Work Group, a voluntary association of progressive hospices, was published as a Special Supplement accompanying the March/April 2003 issue of the bioethics journal, the Hastings Center Report... The report also offers a new vision of hospice, one that holds firm to many of the traditions and values of the past but finds new and more flexible ways to deliver care. The model of traditional hospice care as an independent and...

Six easy-to-treat infectious diseases account for the majority of deaths in young children in the developing world, according to a new report by researchers for the World Health Organization (WHO)........... ..........Better treatment would require political action that's just not there right now, however. "There is not yet the global conscience and political will to make it happen," Black said............ .........Moreover, Black noted that "the U.S. is among the worst countries in the world in terms of contributions to foreign assistance."

OP-ED COLUMNIST The core belief that social conservatives bring to cases like Terri Schiavo's is that the value of each individual life is intrinsic. The value of a life doesn't depend upon what a person can physically do, experience or achieve. The life of a comatose person or a fetus has the same dignity and worth as the life of a fully functioning adult. Social conservatives go on to say that if we make distinctions about the value of different lives, if we downgrade those who are physically alive but mentally incapacitated, if we say that some people can be...

Early on, I must confess, I didn’t take much interest in Terri Schiavo. All I’d heard was that she was a vegetable, brain-dead, totally unaware of her surroundings. I did hear rumors that her husband Michael wanted her taken off life-support because he could then inherit whatever remained of a very sizeable insurance settlement. But, so what? And so what if he was shacked up with some other woman and had sired two kids with her? No matter what a lout he might be, the only important question was whether Mrs. Schiavo would or would not be better off dead....

Before deploying earlier this year, Sergeant First Class David Salie was certain of two things: Serving in Iraq was the right thing to do and he wouldn't survive his tour. He shared that premonition with his wife weeks before he left. "He rolled over and looked at me and he said, 'D, I'm not coming back,'" recalls Deanna Salie. Sadly, David Salie's prediction came true. He was killed in a roadside bombing on Valentine's Day, just four days into his Iraq tour. His children and wife are now mourning a terrible loss. "I am a little mad at him for...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The aging Hubble Space Telescope (news - web sites) -- a path-breaking scientific instrument whose eye-catching images have won fans around the world -- would die in orbit under the 2006 budget for NASA (news - web sites) proposed on Monday. The U.S. space agency's total budget would rise 2.4 percent over 2005 to about $16.5 billion, but only $93 million would be spent on Hubble, with $75 million of that aimed at bringing the observatory down to Earth safely, NASA's comptroller said. While NASA's budget is only a tiny slice of the overall $2.5 trillion requested...