:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 11.05.2005 ::
:: "Intelligent design case draws to close" ::
Reuters.uk
HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania - One attorney accused a witness of lying on Friday during closing arguments in the trial over whether U.S. public schools should teach the theory of intelligent design.
U.S. District Judge John Jones said he wants to decide by year's end the case that addresses whether a Pennsylvania school district violated the U.S. Constitution when it introduced intelligent design -- a theory that competes with evolution -- into science classes.
The first legal challenge to the teaching of intelligent design is being watched in at least 30 states where Christian conservatives are planning similar initiatives.
Attorney Eric Rothschild, arguing for 11 parents who sued the Dover, Pennsylvania, Area School District and oppose the theory's inclusion in the curriculum, told the court that intelligent design was creationism in disguise.
He said it was introduced by Christians on the school board whose agenda was clearly religious.
He accused former school board member William Buckingham of lying when Buckingham testified he had mistakenly spoken in favor of creationism in a television interview because he had never been interviewed before and felt "like a deer in the headlights."
"That was no deer in the headlights," Rothschild said. "That deer was wearing shades and was totally at ease."
Intelligent design holds that some aspects of nature are so complex they must have been the work of an unnamed intelligent creator instead of the result of natural selection, as argued by Charles Darwin in his 1859 theory of evolution.
Intelligent design foes say it is a thinly disguised form of creationism -- the belief that God created the world as described in the Bible -- whose teaching in public schools has been outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court as a violation of the constitutional separation of church and state.
The nonjury courtroom drama over man's origins is reminiscent of the famous Scopes Monkey trial, when lawyers squared off in a courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925.
Read more here.
posted by me
:: 3:44:00 PM [+] ::
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