(1) Happy Birthday, Archbishop Burke. Ad Multos Annos!

(2) A local nun looks back on imprisonment in a WWII camp:

“On Chinese New Year the sisters’ hearts skipped a beat when they were told they had been summoned to the office of the camp’s commander.

“We were told to come to the Japanese headquarters and we wondered what in the world was going to happen,” Sister Mathews said. “So we marched, I think it was a mile and a half. We had a soldier behind each one of us and two soldiers at the tail end (of the group). We wondered what in the world would happen when we got there…..”

(3) The Pope does not wear Prada.

(4) Bad tenured teachers are hard to fire:

MIDDLE ISLAND, N.Y. (AP) — Few people know better than school superintendent Allan Gerstenlauer that disciplining a tenured teacher can be a long and expensive process.

An English teacher in his Long Island district remains on the payroll, earning an annual salary of $113,559, even after pleading guilty earlier this month to drunken driving charges - her fifth DWI arrest in seven years.

…..The case illustrates a nagging problem in school districts in New York and elsewhere around the country: firing bad teachers. It is also part of the ongoing debate over education reform and the role tenure plays in the process.

Advocates for reform cite a list of egregious examples they say demonstrate why teacher tenure rules need to be overhauled.

In New York City, it often costs taxpayers $250,000 just to fire one incompetent teacher. Some teachers remain on the payroll even after being convicted of serious felonies, requiring districts to hold disciplinary hearings behind prison walls…..

(5) Chuck Colson reports on the legacy of radical feminism:

“Alice Walker, best known as the author of the novel The Color Purple, is one of the most renowned feminist authors and activists of her generation. She is also a mother, and that fact brought her public and private lives into direct conflict.

That is because Alice Walker’s brand of feminism was the kind that taught that “motherhood was about the worst thing that could happen to a woman.” So says her daughter, Rebecca, who suffered the consequences of that thinking. In a recent London Daily Mail article, Rebecca Walker reflected on the neglect she experienced with her divorced father across the country and her mother too busy for her, frequently leaving her alone for long periods as a teenager. With her mother’s knowledge-and even support-Rebecca became sexually active at 13 and had an abortion at 14. She was well aware that her mother thought of her as a burden…..”

(6) The NYTimes Magazine reports on Childless Europe:

“IT WAS A SPECTACULAR LATE-MAY AFTERNOON IN SOUTHERN ITALY, but the streets of Laviano - a gloriously situated hamlet ranged across a few folds in the mountains of the Campania region - were deserted.

…..The town has housing enough to support a population of 3,000, but fewer than 1,600 live here, and every year the number drops.

…..DEMOGRAPHICALLY SPEAKING, Laviano is not unique in Italy, or in Europe. In fact, it may be a harbinger. In the 1990s, European demographers began noticing a downward trend in population across the Continent and behind it a sharply falling birthrate. Non-number-crunchers largely ignored the information until a 2002 study by Italian, German and Spanish social scientists focused the data and gave policy makers across the European Union something to ponder…..”

(7) And our last news story of today: Washington Times blogger Julia Duin is onto what ought to be a red-hot story, Blacks Against Abortion. Don’t hold your breath. It’s the same old same old:

“I noticed two discordant events during Thursday’s pro-life demonstrations by black activists on Capitol Hill.

One was the lack of TV cameras. They said a Fox crew showed up early, then left on another assignment way before the demonstration began. But here you had folks wearing T-shirts with sayings on them like “black genocide” and carrying signs saying “Abortion is not a family value” and traipsing down SE Capitol Street in steamy weather between the Democratic National Committee HQ and the Republican National Committee building.

There were kids, there were pastors, there was quite the cross-section. It was colorful and in your face and there were folks like Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King, popping off gospel hymns every time she got near a mike. It was just the right stuff for good TV footage…..

But where were all the other media outlets and the networks? CNN? The wires? It’s like these folks did not exist.

…..The other discordance was The Mystery of the Blaring Car Alarm. There we all were: A few media and some 60 demonstrators in front of the DNC building. Just as speakers stepped up to the microphone, an alarm would blare from a beige Altima Nissan parked exactly across from the front entrance, making it impossible to hear the speaker.

At first, we all thought it was us media folks who were leaning on the car. But when the alarm began going off, as on cue, people began looking up toward the windows of the DNC building and muttering. The blaring had its own sense of timing; apparently the person operating it (and by the seventh or so time it was obvious SOMEONE was behind this) was interested in Martin Luther King, as the thing did not go off when Alveda was speaking…..”