The second small asteroid to pass near Earth in a single day will make its closest approach later today, scientists say.

The approximately 30-foot (10-meter) asteroid, dubbed 2010 RF12, will pass within about 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers) of Earth at 5:12 p.m. ET.

About 12 hours earlier, at 5:51 a.m. ET, a 50-foot (15-meter) asteroid called 2010 RX30 passed within about 154,000 miles (248,000 kilometers) of our planet—roughly halfway between Earth and the moon.

Both asteroids’ paths are too far away to endanger Earth or any satellites, said Lindley Johnson, program executive for the Near-Earth Object Program at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/09/100908-asteroids-earth-nasa-catalina-sky-survey-science-space/

“So far, I’ve lost eight women from my shelter,” Hina Jilani says. “One went out for a job in town, she left our shelter, got on a bus – and was gunned down by her brother. Her name was Shagofta, she was in her late twenties. She had already married the man she loved but the parents had disapproved. Her brother got straight off the bus and went to the police station and gave himself up. But his father – Shagofta’s father – ‘forgave’ him. So he was let off. And nothing happened.”

Ms Jilani is a tough, brave lawyer with a harsh way of describing the “honour killing” – the murder – of young women. She has to be tough, given the death threats she’s received from Pakistan’s Islamists. She speaks with contempt for the families who murder their women – with even more contempt for the police and the judges who allow the killers to go free. Pakistan has the grotesque reputation of being one of the leading “honour-killing” countries in the world.

“Some of the women in our Dastak shelter in Lahore left us after assurances from their families that they would not be harmed,” Ms Jilani says. “We always tell the women not to accept these assurances. In the Lahore High Court, I was sitting there when the judge was insisting that a women from our shelter should go back to her parents. The more the judge insisted, the more the woman resisted. He made her sit in his chambers and then in the court. And then, as she left the High Court gate, they shot her down. The judge said nothing.”

Continues: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-relatives-with-blood-on-their-hands-2073142.html

Critics of the free-school programme say it will reinforce a two-tier education system, with pushy middle-class parents far more likely to set up schools than those living in areas of social deprivation where better schools are desperately needed. Detractors also say religious groups and private schools will be the first to jump on the free-school model because they already have the know-how, experience and resources. They believe their fears were reinforced with the announcement of the first 16 schools, five of which were faith schools (two Jewish, one Hindu and one Sikh in addition to St Luke’s).

Aware that his flagship education policy could be derided as something that will only benefit the middle classes and the religious, Mr Gove is said to have told civil servants to hold back all but the most exceptional applications from faith groups that applied to be part of the September 2011 tranche.

Under current policy guidelines, which could of course change over the coming months, any faith group that wants to set up a free school will also have to reserve 50 per cent of its places to students of different faiths or no faith at all.

During the election campaign, the Conservatives said they hoped 3,000 free schools would be opened over the next 10 years, creating 220,000 new places with plans for 20,985 places in the first year of government alone. But budget restrictions now make those figures look hugely optimistic even though Mr Gove stressed the 16 were just the start of a programme which would be rolled out over the coming months. He told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show that there had been 700 enquiries about opening free schools, 100 of which had led to applications being made to the Department of Education. Education officials are expecting a further 50 free schools to open in 2012, and 100 the following year.

This week’s announcement had the secularists up in arms. Andrew Copson, chief executive of the British Humanist Association, believes free schools will allow religious communities to set “unregulated faith schools” and says the Government must resist the temptation to reduce the 50 per cent quota. “[Free schools] will give [religious groups] complete power over the curriculum while unburdening them from the need to raise their own funds,” he says. “Very few parents have the time, resources or local influence to set up a new school, but religious groups often have all of these.” He adds: “While the 50 per cent rule for free schools doesn’t go nearly far enough, it is at least an indication that Mr Gove believes religious discrimination should be curbed. By contrast, the recent lobbying campaign by religious groups demonstrates that many support segregation over inclusion. Mr Gove should cease trying to appease the religious lobby and instead use his powers to introduce open admissions policies for all schools.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/schools/why-were-starting-our-own-school-2074088.html

Every person is entitled to claim the right to religion, and to manifest it in community with others by “teaching, practice, worship and observance”. The corollary of this right – expressed in these words in the Universal Declaration and every convention on human rights – is that churches must be free to propound the tenets of their respective faiths but always (and this is a condition explicitly imposed by all such conventions) subject to laws necessary in a democracy to protect public interests and the rights and freedoms of others.

Church leaders and personnel are not only subject, like everyone else, to the laws of the nation where they live, for breaches of which they can be prosecuted or sued for damages, but to international criminal law – a law under which some political and military leaders and several priests and nuns have been convicted and severely sentenced for crimes against humanity. The psychological influence over their followers that is entrusted to any priest is both potent and capable of abuse (dramatically illustrated in the video of Orthodox priests blessing Serb soldiers before they executed their innocent victims at Srebrenica).

So spiritual office can provide no immunity: “benefit of clergy” has long been abolished in Britain, where the first principle of the rule of law is that formulated by Dr Thomas Fuller in 1733: “Be you ever so high, the law is above you”. As Lord Bingham explained it earlier this year, “If you maltreat a penguin in the London zoo, you do not escape prosecution because you are the Archbishop of Canterbury.”

How, then, can one religious leader be above all laws, whether national or international and whether civil or criminal?

Continues: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/faith/the-pope-witness-for-the-prosecution-2072954.html

I want to appeal to Britain’s Roman Catholics now, in the final days before Joseph Ratzinger’s state visit begins. I know that you are overwhelmingly decent people. You are opposed to covering up the rape of children. You are opposed to telling Africans that condoms “increase the problem” of HIV/Aids. You are opposed to labelling gay people “evil”. The vast majority of you, if you witnessed any of these acts, would be disgusted, and speak out. Yet over the next fortnight, many of you will nonetheless turn out to cheer for a Pope who has unrepentantly done all these things.

I believe you are much better people than this man. It is my conviction that if you impartially review the evidence of the suffering he has inflicted on your fellow Catholics, you will stand in solidarity with them – and join the protesters.

Some people think Ratzinger’s critics are holding him responsible for acts that were carried out before he became Pope, simply because he is the head of the institution involved. This is an error. For over 25 years, Ratzinger was personally in charge of the Sacred Congregation for the Defender of the Faith, the part of the Vatican responsible for enforcing Catholic canonical law across the world, including on sexual abuse. He is a notorious micro-manager who, it is said, insisted every salient document cross his desk. Hans Küng, a former friend of Ratzinger’s, says: “No one in the whole of the Catholic Church knew as much about abuse cases as this Pope.”

Continues: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-catholics-its-you-this-pope-has-abused-2074029.html

Johann Hari will be speaking at Relief-o-Matic comedy night presented by the British Humanist Association as part of the Protest the Pope campaign on Monday.

Most shockingly, the Pope is accused of colluding with the cover-up of child sex abuse by priests. Even today, he has not handed the Vatican’s bulging sex abuse files to the police.

Part of Benedict’s visit to Britain is being funded by the taxpayer. A Comres poll found that 77 per cent of the public oppose us footing the bill.

After all, we don’t fund visits by other religious leaders, such as the Chief Rabbi of Israel. Why should the Pope receive privileged financial support from our taxes?

Benedict’s defenders point out that he is a head of state. But heads of state are normally leaders of countries. The Vatican is not a country and it is not recognised as a country by the UN. Benedict is only a head of state because the antisemitic fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, granted this status to Pope’s in 1929, as part of a treaty with the Vatican. It is a legacy of fascism and an historical anomaly.

By all means let Catholics welcome the Pope to Britain and fund his visit. But I don’t think he should be honoured with a state visit at the taxpayer’s expense.

Full article: http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/comment/37968/comment-why-should-i-pay-pope

Peter Tatchell will present The Trouble with the Pope, Channel 4, Monday September 13 at 8pm.

An archbishop is to meet leading campaigners against the pope this week to tell them to “show respect” to Catholics celebrating his visit to London.

Scotland Yard has brokered the meeting between the Archbishop of Southwark, Peter Smith, a senior figure in the Catholic church, and the organisers of a campaign against Pope Benedict XVI‘s visit.

Smith said today he had no intention of infringing the rights of those intending to protest against the papal visit. But he said he planned to use the encounter to encourage them not to become overly confrontational.

“I’ve always said, thank God in this country we have free speech,” he said. “They are perfectly entitled to protest. What I would ask of all of them is to do so in a dignified way, which does not disrupt the joy of the Catholic community in welcoming the pope. I hope they would show respect to those of us who do have [religious] convictions.”

Smith denied that he requested the meeting. But a Metropolitan police memorandum seen by the Guardian states that the request came from Smith.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/06/archbishop-to-meet-pope-protesters

An online poll of 2,005 adults has shown 77% do not agree that the taxpayer should help shoulder the bill for the four-day trip even though it is a state visit.

A similar proportion – 76% – rejected taxpayer funding for the visit on the grounds that he is a religious figure.

…

Paul Wolley, director of Theos, said: “The British public clearly has a problem with the funding of the papal visit, although this could be because they are unaware that in addition to being a religious leader Pope Benedict is also a head of state.”

He said only a relatively small proportion of people were actively opposed to the visit and the public was disengaged rather than hostile.

Mr Wolley said it was also striking that the public agreed so strongly with Pope Benedict’s social teaching, adding that it showed “real potential for the church to connect with the public”.

Andrew Copson, a spokesman for Protest the Pope and chief executive of the British Humanist Association, said: “It is hardly news that a lot of people in Britain care about the environment, social responsibility and human rights – these are important shared values for religious and non-religious people alike in this country and we don’t need religious leaders to teach them to us.

“The Protest the Pope campaign is not against the Pope coming to the UK as a religious leader, with the religious organisation of which he is the head footing the bill.

“Our opposition is to the visit being a state visit, with the British people footing the bill. This poll makes clear that most people agree with us.”

Full article: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/uk/britons-say-taxpayer-should-not-fund-popes-visit-14933547.html

The British Humanist Association is a founding member of the Protest the Pope campaign, demonstrating against the official nature of the Pope’s state visit. The Pope arrives next week.

The experts warn that the world could run out of helium within 25 to 30 years, potentially spelling disaster for hospitals, whose MRI scanners are cooled by the gas in liquid form, and anti-terrorist authorities who rely on helium for their radiation monitors, as well as the millions of children who love to watch their helium-filled balloons float into the sky.

Helium is made either by the nuclear fusion process of the Sun, or by the slow and steady radioactive decay of terrestrial rock, which accounts for all of the Earth’s store of the gas. There is no way of manufacturing it artificially, and practically all of the world’s reserves have been derived as a by-product from the extraction of natural gas, mostly in the giant oil- and gasfields of the American South-west, which historically have had the highest helium concentrations.

Liquid helium is critical for cooling cooling infrared detectors, nuclear reactors and the machinery of wind tunnels. The space industry uses it in sensitive satellite equipment and spacecraft, and Nasa uses helium in huge quantities to purge the potentially explosive fuel from its rockets.

In the form of its isotope helium-3, helium is also crucial for research into the next generation of clean, waste-free nuclear reactors powered by nuclear fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the Sun.

Despite the critical role that the gas plays in the modern world, it is being depleted as an unprecedented rate and reserves could dwindle to virtually nothing within a generation, warns Nobel laureate Robert Richardson, professor of physics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Full article: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/why-the-world-is-running-out-of-helium-2059357.html

Hawking’s “mind of God” was never anything more than a metaphor for an understanding of the universe which is complete and objective. Indeed, it has been evident for some time that Hawking does not believe in anything like the traditional God of religion. “You can call the laws of science ‘God’ if you like,” he told Channel 4 earlier this year, “but it wouldn’t be a personal God that you could meet, and ask questions.”

This reflects an inconvenient truth about science that religion would prefer to ignore. For although it is true that science doesn’t rule out a role for religion in providing meaning, or a God who kick-started the whole universe off in the first place, it does leave presumed dead in the water anything like the God most people over history have believed in: one who is closely involved in his creation, who intervenes in our lives, and with whom we can have a personal relationship. In short, there is no room in the universe of Hawking or most other scientists for the activist God of the Bible. That’s why so few leading scientists are religious in any traditional sense.

This point is often overlooked by apologists who grasp at any straw science will hold out for them.

Full article: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/julian-baggini-if-science-has-not-actually-killed-god-it-has-rendered-him-unrecognisable-2070125.html

Schools offering training in etiquette and fine dining in Bradford, compulsory Latin in London, and lessons for all children in a musical instrument in Bedford were approved today by the government as part of a radical experiment in English education.

A new wave of free schools founded by parents, teachers or private firms will open in England next September, under plans announced by the education secretary, Michael Gove.

…

There is a distinctly religious strand to the first wave, with seven of the 16 having faith affiliations. Among those expected to open next September will be two Jewish schools in London, a Hindu school in Leicester, a Sikh school in Birmingham and three with a Christian ethos.

Andrew Copson, chief executive of the British Humanist Association, said he was concerned this would lead to wider social divides.

“Since the government has made only token gestures to limit religious discrimination in the admissions criteria of free schools, we will see greater segregation and deeper divisions within communities.”

The new schools, many more of which are expected to be approved in coming years, could also pose a challenge to the teaching unions because they emphasise raising standards through longer hours and more flexible teaching. Both methods could prove contentious.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/sep/06/new-free-schools-next-year

I woke up as usual yesterday in the “geopolitical epicentre of the culture of death” – and very pleasant it was. I fed the cats, read the papers and carried an espresso into the back garden, congratulating myself on being a citizen of a country that doesn’t stone women to death, hang gay men from cranes or murder people who change their religion. I mean, how great is that? I love living in the “selfish, hedonistic wasteland” that is London – both quotes come from one Edmund Adamus, who is apparently a senior British Catholic and an adviser to the Archbishop of Westminster – and I just wish more nations would follow our example.

Frankly, I’m tired of hearing religious bigots running down this country. For all its faults – crap public transport, Nick Clegg popping up everywhere and a national obsession with Simon Cowell – Britain is still one of the most civilised places in the world to live. It’s not Iran, where prisoners are subjected to rape and mock executions; it isn’t Saudi Arabia either, despite Mr Adamus’s downright peculiar belief that we’re more anti-Catholic than the Chinese or the Saudis. (Might I suggest he tries walking along a street in Riyadh carrying a crucifix and a Bible?) The Catholic Church has picked up this habit of dissing secular culture from hardline Muslims, who dislike pretty much the same things: gay relationships, equal rights for women and the freedom to mock religion.

Those of us who aren’t religious conservatives have had to fight every step of the way to create this modern, tolerant, secular Britain, and it’s easy to forget that many of the improvements are very recent. I can just remember the last hangings in British prisons, as well as a time when having an “illegitimate” baby brought shame on a woman and homosexuality was still illegal; even as recently as 10 years ago, when the current Foreign Secretary William Hague was Conservative leader, the party opposed the repeal of an iconic piece of anti-gay legislation known as Section 28.

So it’s good to have this wake-up from Mr Adamus, director of pastoral affairs at the diocese of Westminster, about the need to defend secular values.

Continues: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/joan-smith/joan-smith-in-defence-of-modern-britain-2067886.html

God did not create the universe, Stephen Hawking revealed yesterday. In the flurry of publicity preceding his new book, The Grand Design, to be published next week, he does some serious dissing of the Almighty, declaring him/her/it irrelevant. The point is, he says, that our universe followed inevitably from the laws of nature. But, we might ask, where did they come from?

It is perhaps a bit rich for Hawking to make God redundant after granting him/her/it a celebrity cameo at the end of his multi-million selling A Brief History of Time. In his famous conclusion to the book, Hawking wrote that if scientists could find the most fundamental laws of nature “then we should know the mind of God”. To be fair, he was writing metaphorically – we all know what he meant.

He now suggests that the search for this particular Holy Grail is over, now that scientists have come up with a type of theory, known as M-theory, that may describe the behaviour of all the fundamental particles and force, and even account for the very birth of the universe. If this theory is backed up by experiment, it might perhaps replace all religious accounts of creation – in Hawking’s capacious mind, it already has.

Continues: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/7979211/Has-Stephen-Hawking-ended-the-God-debate.html

Cardinal Keith O’Brien said the BBC’s news coverage is contaminated by “a radically secular and socially liberal mindset”.

The Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh said the corporation’s intolerance of religion is equivalent to its “massive” political bias against the Conservatives in the 1980s.

He also accused the corporation of plotting a “hatchet job” on the Vatican in a documentary aboutclerical sex abuse on the eve of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain.

Cardinal O’Brien believes that atheists like Professor Richard Dawkins are given a disproportionate amount of airtime while mainstream Christian views are marginalised.

Continues: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/7982601/Catholic-church-accuses-BBC-of-anti-Christian-bias.html

The British Humanist Association campaigns for fair representation from the BBC. The BHA wants an end to the privileged status and position of religions and religious broadcasting by the BBC.

Last night, I attended a debate entitled “The Papal visit should not be a State Visit” at London’s Conway Hall, organised by the Central London Humanist Group, along with the BHA and the South Place Ethical Society. Speaking for the motion were the prominent atheist philosopher AC Grayling and the tireless human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, while the two Catholics contesting the motion were the journalist and former press secretary to the Archbishop of Westminster, Austen Ivereigh, and the Benedictine monk Father Christopher Jamison, who appeared on the TV series The Monastery. Ivereigh and Jamison were representing Catholic Voices, a group of 20 speakers formed to put the Catholic side of the debate in the media in the run up to the Papal Visit to the UK, which takes place from 16-19 September.

Polly Toynbee, Guardian columnist and president of the BHA, chaired the debate and it was perhaps a sign of what was to come that the first mention of the Papal Visit during her introduction drew a boo from one member of the audience. After Toynbee had laid out the format – eight minutes for each speaker, followed by audience questions (with no vote, because that would just reflect who had happened to turn up) – we were straight into the debate.

Continues: http://blog.newhumanist.org.uk/2010/09/protest-pope-debate-righteous.html

The British Humanist Association is a founding member of the Protest the Pope campaign, demonstrating against the official nature of the Pope’s state visit later this month.

The Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement (LGCM) said that it wanted papal critics – who are voicing their opposition to this month’s state visit for a number of reasons, including the Vatican’s rejection of equal rights for homosexuals – to “disagree with respect”.

It said that it would hold a prayer vigil, not a protest, so the pope could see the faces of those he spoke against, and become aware that his “homophobic comments affect real people”.

It said: “The Protest the Pope coalition of secularist groups has opposed the trip and promised noisy protests, but progressive Christians believe that this is unhelpful and counterproductive.”

But its call for restraint went unheeded, with Protest the Pope refusing to change its strategy.

Andrew Copson, from the British Humanist Association, said that the LGCM statement failed to recognise that Protest the Pope objected to the state aspect of the visit, not the pastoral or religious one. “As a religious leader and a citizen of Europe, we have said he is obviously entitled to visit.

“As a head of a state which many see as enormously destructive of human rights and equality on the international stage it is legitimate and morally right to question him, and the idea that heads of states should receive automatic ‘respect’ because they also happen to be religious leaders we see as entirely mistaken.”

Full story: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/sep/01/lesbian-gay-christian-pope-visit

The British Humanist Association is a founding member of the Protest the Pope campaign, demonstrating against the official nature of the Pope’s state visit later this month.

The whole problem with RE lessons is not that they exist but that they amount to religious instruction in some schools. There is no basis for allowing state-funded schools to indoctrinate their pupils, even if that is what their parents want. They can provide this in optional after-school (or lunchtime) classes or clubs. They could even have something on a Sunday where children are taught to be believers. They could call it Sunday School!

The recognition that RE lessons can be proselytising is reflected in the right that parents have to withdraw their children from these lessons. In contrast, they can’t withdraw their children from biology lessons even if they have profound religious objections to their being taught about sexual reproduction or evolution – these subjects are recognised as non-proselytising.

Secularists like me believe that RE is a valid subject for study in the curriculum but should be about what different religions (and other world views like humanism) believe; it should not be about what ought to be believed. So Catholic schools should be allowed to use RE lessons to teach that the Catholic church opposes contraception and believes that homosexuality is a sin, but not that the children ought to believe those things. The lessons should set out contrasting views on that subject.

Full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/political-science/2010/aug/27/science-teaching-religious-education-re

In the Aug. 26 Nature, [E. O.] Wilson and two Harvard colleagues argue that the concept of kin selection is “limited” and “unnecessary.” And they propose steps for the evolution of ants, honeybees and other highly social species with such altruistic behaviors by just the broad “survival of the fittest” forces of natural selection without specifically invoking the power of kinship.

In recent years, Wilson has argued that the close family ties in ant colonies and other highly social groups may be consequences, rather than causes, of the evolution of such extreme social forms. In the new paper he combines his perspective with two co-authors’ mathematical critique of the methods used to calculate kinship effects, arguing that the techniques are as unnecessarily complicated as Ptolemaic astronomy.

“Babylonian astronomers look up in the heavens, and they see the planets moving in ‘epicycles,’” says paper co-author and mathematical biologist Martin Nowak. “But if you put the sun in the center, there are no epicycles.”

Some kin selection adherents are firing back that, even with new math, the challenge itself is old-fashioned. “This is such a tired old debate,” says Ben Oldroyd of the University of Sydney, who studies social insects.

Full article: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/evolution-scrap/

A NASA astronaut on the Space Shuttle Endeavor brought space back down to Earth. Astronaut Don Pettit took over 85 time-lapsed videos of Earth from his stint on the International Space Station to highlight features of the changing planet.

“There is phenomenology that happens on a timescale that you can’t see in real time,” he said. “It occurred to me that making time-lapse movies on the space station would bring out things that you normally don’t observe.”

More at http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/astronaut-time-lapse-videos/

The issue over representation in the National Interfaith Week is not whether humanism is or is not a religion, it is whether people with different beliefs are enabled to get to know one another and live well together. One of the principal aims of the 2009 National Interfaith Week was “to increase understanding between people of religious and non-religious belief”.

This is an important aim: the non-religious form a very significant group in Leicester, and nationally over half the adult population says that religion is not at all important in their everyday life.

It seems entirely reasonable that humanists and secularists, in helping to respond, should approach existing organisations, and in Leicester the Council of Faiths is important. It must be said, however, that in its present form, with its objectives and mission restricted by its constitution to the promotion of faiths, and membership even more restricted, it is not best suited to the wider task. Loughborough Council of Faiths is not so restricted.

… In fact the [Leicester] Secular Society is not atheist, though many of its members, particularly the humanist ones, are atheists.

The society has a long history of standing up for freedom of religion and belief.

Full letter: http://www.thisisleicestershire.co.uk/letters/Misconstruing-secular-agenda/article-2575065-detail/article.html