another chink in the wall

A senior Vatican cardinal has joined the growing number of influential Catholic Church figures questioning the official Vatican ban on condom use.

Cardinal Georges Cottier is one of Pope John Paul II's preferred theologians.

So eyebrows were raised this week when he was quoted as saying the use of condoms may be legitimate to stop the spread of Aids in poor countries.

The cardinal said there was moral justification for condom use under certain circumstances to counter Aids.

Churchmen are arguing with increasing frequency that the traditional blanket ban on the use of condoms is no longer valid.

Cardinal Cottier said it was no longer a question only of allowing the transmission of life, but of actively preventing the transmission of death to a sexual partner.


full story at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4226489.stm

just a quick update

Not much to tell here, other than that I've spent the time since I got home this evening (and some around 4 this morning when I couldn't sleep) checking to see if there were spyware or viruses on my machine that could account for a sudden drop in bandwidth, finding there weren't, wondering about neighboring wireless users stealing bwidth, and installing WEP encryption on our WAP and setting all four of our computers with the new keys. Magically, the bandwidth is back and all the computers seem to be working OK. :-) I may also have found a signal-boosting option as well that may help the remote PCs work a little faster. Still one more trick up my sleeve there.

Poor N is still in the clutches of the evil Duc d'Influenza; she was very sweet and called me this afternoon, just to let me know all was as well as could be expected and that she lacked for nothing. I don't know how I can miss her this much when I saw her just yesterday morning, but I do. It's awful! (insert self-mocking smile) I'll live though; I'm not the one who's sick, after all (though this afternoon has seen the arrival of a sinisterly unwelcome sore throat...) She, poor dear, is trying hard not to panic about how much work she's missing. Gosh I hate it when someone I love is sick and there's *nothing* I can do to help except not pester them while they're trying to rest and do my best to be entertaining and cheer them up when I do have a chance to talk. Just got to keep concentrating on how much fun we had over the weekend before the duc's arrival and what lovely times we'll have when he (and his evil minions, if I'm correct in suspecting their presence) have been driven off.

Peter wasn't able to make it over this evening, but we agreed we're going to try to join the Mordheim campaign that the Ironfist League is putting on. Sort of a small-scale tabletop game; each player runs a band of adventurers looking for treasure in a ruined city of the Empire (a psuedo-HREish Reformation-era fantasy kingdom).