FaithWorld

(People walk past the entrance to the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris February 8, 2013. REUTERS/Charles Platiau )

An 78-year-old French far-right activist committed suicide at the altar of the Notre Dame cathedral on Tuesday by shooting himself in the mouth, three days after a law legalizing same-sex marriage came into effect.

Police evacuated the cathedral, one of Paris’ biggest tourist draws, after Dominique Venner – a historian known for his hard-right political essays and a fierce opponent of gay marriage – shot himself, sending tourists fleeing in panic.

Venner made no declaration as he shot himself around mid-afternoon, a police source said. He carried a letter on his person, but its contents were not released to the media.

A May 21 entry on his blog page appealed to readers to join a march planned for Sunday against the Socialist government’s gay-marriage law, which came into force at the weekend.

(A combo photo shows a detail view of the damaged Michelangelo’s Pieta and it after restoration works at the Vatican. Musei Vaticani/Handout via Reuters)

Forty-one years ago, a crazed Hungarian named Laszlo Toth jumped an altar railing in St. Peter’s Basilica and dealt 12 hammer blows to Michelangelo’s Pieta, severely damaging the Renaissance masterpiece.

To mark the attack on May 21, 1972, the Vatican Museums held a day-long seminar on Tuesday on the statue, the incident, and what subsequently became one of the most delicate and controversial art restorations in history.

(Pope Francis speaks as he leads a Pentecost vigil mass in Saint Peter’s Square at the Vatican May 18, 2013. REUTERS/Stefano Rellandini)

Pope Francis shared personal moments with 200,000 people on Saturday, telling them he sometimes nods off while praying at the end of a long day and that it “breaks my heart” that the death of a homeless person is not news.

Francis, who has made straight talk and simplicity a hallmark of his papacy, made his unscripted comments in answers to questions by four people at a huge international gathering of Catholic associations in St. Peter’s Square.

(An Afghan woman in a burqa walks along a road on a windy day on the outskirts of Kabul April 16, 2013. REUTERS/Mohammad Ismail )

Afghanistan’s parliament failed to pass a law on Saturday banning violence against women, a severe blow to progress made in women’s rights in the conservative Muslim country since the Islamist Taliban was toppled over a decade ago.

President Hamid Karzai approved the law by decree in 2009 and parliament’s endorsement was required. But a rift between conservative and more secular members of the assembly resulted in debate being deferred to a later date.

Security worker opens the door of a government job center as people wait to enter in Marbella, Spain, December 2, 2011. REUTERS/Jon Nazca

In the nearly five years since the worst financial crash since the Great Depression, the remedy for the world’s economic doldrums has swung from full-on Keynesianism to unforgiving austerity and back.

The initial Keynesian response halted the collapse in economic activity. But it was soon met by borrowers’ remorse in the shape of paying down debt and raising taxes without delay. In the last year, full-throttle austerity has fallen out of favor with those charged with monitoring the world economy.

(Israeli policemen detain an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man during a demonstration against plans to enlist men from their community into the military, near the recruitment offices in Jerusalem May 16, 2013. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun)

Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews protested in Jerusalem on Thursday against plans to enlist men from their community into the military, a proposal supported by the secular majority pushing for a more equal share of the burden on Israeli society.

A sea of black coats – the traditional attire of ultra-Orthodox men – engulfed Jerusalem streets near the city’s military draft bureau where the crowd heard rabbis warn that army service would irreparably harm their way of life.

(Villepinte prison guard Blaise Gangbazo walks on grounds overlooking the prison facilities in Villepinte, April 24, 2013. REUTERS/Jacky Naegelen )

In France, the path to radical Islam often begins with a minor offence that throws a young man into an overcrowded, violent jail and produces a hardened convert ready for jihad.

With the country on heightened security alert since January when French troops began fighting al Qaeda-linked Islamists in Mali, authorities are increasingly worried about home-grown militants emerging from France’s own jails.

(Rohingya Muslims look through the gates of a house in a village where many displaced by violence found shelter, near Sittwe April 27, 2013.  REUTERS/Damir Sagolj )

A 16-year-old Muslim boy lay dying on a thin metal table. Bitten by a rabid dog a month ago, he convulsed and drooled as his parents wedged a stick between his teeth to stop him from biting off his tongue.

Swift treatment might have saved Waadulae. But there are no doctors, painkillers or vaccines in this primitive hospital near Sittwe, capital of Rakhine State in western Myanmar. It is a lonely medical outpost that serves about 85,300 displaced people, almost all of them Muslims who lost their homes in fighting with Buddhist mobs last year.

(A researcher works in his laboratory at the Institute for Stem cell Therapy and Exploration of Monogenic Diseases (I-Stem) in Evry, near Paris November 27, 2009. REUTERS/Gareth Watkins )

U.S. scientists’ assertion that the advance in therapeutic cloning announced on Wednesday could not and would not pave the way to cloning a baby did little to assuage critics of the research.  The research “will lead inexorably to cloning to produce a live born child,” said bioethicist O. Carter Snead, professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic University in Indiana.

The new study used techniques similar to those that created Dolly, the cloned sheep, in Scotland in 1996. Scientists at Oregon Health & Science University and the Oregon National Primate Research Center slipped an adult skin cell into a human egg whose genetic material had been removed. After several innovations that allowed them to succeed where other scientists had failed for 15 years, they got the egg to divide and reproduce much like a fertilized egg, even though no sperm had gone near it.

(Bonobo apes, primates unique to Congo and humankind’s closest relative, groom one another at a sanctuary just outside the capital Kinshasa, October 31, 2006. REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly)

For biologist Frans de Waal, a peaceful species of great ape in Africa is a mirror of humanity and a living argument that empathy and cooperation are far from unique to mankind.

“The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism among the Primates”, argues that both traits may be evolved behaviours based on his studies of the bonobo, which is found only in the jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and other primates.