My “Beyond Satire” meter is, once again, registering in the red zone. I’m not sure why this story made the news; maybe because we’re talking Britain and not India or China. Women are being granted illegal abortions by doctors based on the sex of their unborn baby, an undercover investigation by The Daily Telegraph reveals. [...]

Coming in the wake of last month’s looting and burning riots in British cities, a UN report pinpointing materialism as a particularly British blight was bound to make the country sit up and take notice. The youths who rampaged through the streets of London and Birmingham seemed to both covet material goods and despise them [...]

  Facebook can be useful. Browsing through its weekly birthday update, I learned that Nick Tonti-Filippini, a bioethicist who serves on various Australian government committees and teaches at a Catholic institute in Melbourne, turns 55 today. Some of those years must have gone slowly for him, as he is chronically ill. Fortunately, he has the [...]

It's always something of a shock to me when an art critic I respect starts talking about politics.  What startles me is how quickly someone who is intelligent, cultured, and well-educated can sound downright stupid.  Such is the case with the New York Times' Michael Kimmelman. On the front page of today's Art section, Kimmelman [...]

Happy Christmas Eve! Things might be a little quiet around here today, as the InsideCatholic staff goes about its last-minute preparations for tomorrow (please tell me I'm not the only one who still has presents left to buy?...). In the meantime, below are a few quick holiday links to tide you over. And from all [...]

Jeremy Warner, assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph and prominent British economics journalist, has a message for liberal economist Paul Krugman: Please shut up. The occasion for the remark -- and come on, we've all been thinking it -- was Krugman's recent and wholly unsolicited criticism of Britain's deficit reduction plan. Professor Krugman suggests that [...]

(From PhysOrg.com): Researchers from Cambridge University in the UK have been able to communicate with brain-injured patients in "locked states" commonly referred to as persistent vegetative states (PVS). They predict such patients will soon be able to communicate and perhaps even move themselves around in motorized wheelchairs. This is huge.  I can't imagine the frustration [...]

In Ross Douthat's Sunday New York Times column, he explains why -- despite the insistence that the Church today is irrelevant for failing to keep up with the times -- hundreds of thousands of Catholics came out for the UK papal visit: [I]n turning out for their beleaguered pope, Britain’s Catholics acknowledged something essential about [...]

Benedict's visit to the UK is already underway, and the coverage began on his flight over, with the pope's customary habit of answering written questions from journalists -- a practice that tends to set the tone for the first day of reporting. As with several of Benedict's recent state visits, one of those questions dealt [...]

Over at Catholic Culture, Phil Lawler offers five things we can expect from Benedict's trip to the UK (which begins tomorrow). Among things like the "nasty rhetoric" and criticism of the organizers that we've already seen, one item stood out -- and gave me hope for the visit: 4. Expect the unexpected  Pope Benedict has [...]