Twenty years ago this week J.R. was shot on "Dallas." Also Archbishop Oscar Romero.

A lesbian couple legally marries in Britain. One was born a boy and has since had a sex change operation. By the same loophole, somewhere there is a woman Catholic priest who I haven't heard anything about in five years. Do they still have catacombs under the Vatican?

The pope was in Israel, in an event that didn't require one-tenth of the news coverage it received. Vis a vis the Holocaust, he asked today, "How could man have such utter contempt for man?" He added that the Catholic church usually prefers that utter contempt be directed towards women.

To some people, the issue of the papacy's silence on fascism in the 1930s might bring up the question of what it has to say about the rise of the fascists in Austria. Well, there's a story in tomorrow's London Times about a bishop in Austria who did in fact speak out and has been forced to go into hiding in the face of a hate campaign, out of fear for the safety of her children. The Times didn't say what the bishop's religion was, but I'm betting not Catholic.

Interestingly, the pope evidently thinks that Jesus was born 2,000 years ago.

He stood next to Arafat, the only other world leader with a really atrocious command of the English language who nonetheless insists on speaking in English.

Clinton is still on the sub-continent. His trip to a Bangladeshi village was called off because of concerns his helicopter would be shot down by missiles which were those originally given to the Afghans by the US to kill Russians.

Mississippi becomes the second state to ban adoption by homosexuals. It occurs to me that I don't know how you define homosexuality in a legal sense. Florida was the first.