Falwell goes to meet maker
May 16, 2007 - 9:41AMUS evangelist Jerry Falwell, a leader of the religious right who battled in the political arena against abortion and homosexuality, has died at age 73.
Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority as a conservative political force in 1979, was found unconscious in his office at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, and was taken to a nearby hospital. He had a history of congestive heart problems.
Falwell had no heartbeat when he was found by colleagues about 11.30am, said Dr Carl Moore, his personal physician.
He could not be resuscitated and was pronounced dead just over an hour later, Moore told a news conference.
Falwell was one of the most prominent figures in the religious right, a powerful movement that seeks to redraw public policy in the United States along evangelical Christian lines.
Fond of quipping that the Bible referred to "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve", Falwell provoked a storm of protest when he said gays, lesbians and health workers who provide abortions were partly to blame for the September 11 attacks.
"I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians ... all of them who have tried to secularise America, I point the finger in their face and say: you helped this happen," he said.
For decades, Falwell had been an influential conservative voice in politics.
Falwell founded the Thomas Road Baptist Church in his hometown of Lynchburg in 1956.
He went on to found Liberty University in 1971 - a conservative center of higher learning - and in 1979 started the Moral Majority organisation, which became a major vehicle for getting out the vote for the Republican Party.
He disbanded the Moral Majority in 1989, but it was resurrected as The Moral Majority Coalition, with an explicit political purpose, after President George Bush's re-election in 2004.
With his gray hair and heavy jowls, Falwell was a familiar face on the televangelist circuit, while his views on a range of social issues firmly placed him on the far right of the American political spectrum.
Falwell saw evil in a once-great America that he believed was in an advanced state of decay. He even went after a character in the hit children's TV show the Teletubbies whom he claimed donned pro-gay symbols, including a triangle.
"I think that in the early 1960s when Bible reading and prayer were expelled from the public square, I think that was a move in the wrong direction, it was a move towards secularisation," Falwell said in a February 2007 interview.
Born on August 11, 1933, Falwell said he was "born again" on January 20, 1952, the day he converted to Christ while a sophomore at Lynchburg College in Virginia.
Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley recalled Falwell's long influence on US politics.
"He became a leading voice by the time of Ronald Reagan's emergence in 1980 and the whole concept of family values was adopted by the Republican Party," Brinkley told Fox News.
"There's not a conservative in America that hasn't taken Jerry Falwell seriously. Liberty University's become a bellwether spot, a place where if you're going to be a real conservative and get the conservative vote, you have to go spend a day with the Reverend Falwell."
Reutershttp://www.smh.com.au/news/world/falwell-goes-to-meet-maker/2007/05/16/1178995197564.htmlWoman survives weekend in car wreck
Wednesday May 16 06:00 AEST
By ninemsn staffA woman has survived two nights trapped in her mangled car without any food or water after it rolled on a remote stretch of outback highway in the Northern Territory.
It is believed the vehicle flipped several times as it ran off the Stuart Highway into nearby scrub after the woman fell asleep at the wheel.
Police said the 36-year-old woman was lucky to be alive following the accident about 150km north of Tennant Creek near Renner Springs on Friday night.
She was trapped in the wrecked Toyota Echo unable to move, with no food or water, until a couple from Queensland discovered her on Sunday morning, the Northern Territory News reports.
Ted and Myra McGrath, from Mackay, had stopped at the Renner Springs Roadhouse on their way to Darwin for a holiday when they overheard a road train driver mention that he had noticed a car wreck.
The tourists told the driver they would check it out on their way north.
"As we drove north, we had actually gone straight past the car as it was so far off the road and hidden in the bush," Ted McGrath, 67, told the newspaper.
"We went back and you could only see the skid marks on the road. I got out and it was very rocky terrain. When I saw the car I was shocked and thought to myself that no-one would have survived. It was so smashed up. Her belongings were scattered right along the way."
The couple were amazed when they began to hear the injured woman's cries for help.
"But then as I was approaching the car, I heard a voice say, 'Is there someone there?'," McGrath continued.
"I said 'yes' and she asked if I could help her as she had been there for about three days."
"She was very thankful and grateful that we came along.
"She wasn't panicking, but she was trapped and said she could no longer feel her right leg and couldn't move her left leg."
Ted called the police using a two-way radio in his car while his wife talked to the woman.
"It would have been horrific for her," he said. "There would have been hundreds of cars go by and she would not have been able to yell out to them that she was there."
The woman is believed to have been driving alone from Darwin to Alice Springs for a job interview.
When police arrived she was conscious and in a stable condition and was taken to Tennant Creek Hospital.
Police spokesman Nathan Finn said the woman was lucky to be alive.
"The car actually didn't require jaws of life. The car was that badly damaged that the roof just peeled off by hand," he told ABC Radio.
The woman was later airlifted to Royal Adelaide Hospital in a serious but stable condition.
Investigations into the cause of the crash are continuing.
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=267513Bali bomber escapes Philippine blockade
Wednesday May 16 11:03 AESTThe suspected mastermind of the deadly 2002 Bali bombings has likely given thousands of Philippine troops the slip.
It has forced them to shift their hunt to another island in the remote south of the country.
Lieutenant Colonel Bartolome Bacarro said there were strong indications Dulmatin, a leader of regional Islamic militant group Jemaah Islamiah (JI), had escaped Jolo island and moved to a smaller nearby isle despite a naval blockade.
"I cannot disclose his exact location but there had been sightings of Dulmatin somewhere in the western Mindanao area," Bacarro told reporters, four days after the militant's four children were found on an island in the southernmost tip of the archipelago.
"Our troops are confident they are on the right track."
Dulmatin's children, aged from two to nine years, were discovered on Simunul island when soldiers raided a suspected rebel hideout after a tip from local residents.
Dulmatin was not at the camp but army officials have said privately he was likely nearby.
The militant, who has a $US10 million ($A12 million) bounty on his head from the US State Department, is a senior member of JI, a militant network that seeks an Islamic superstate in parts of South-East Asia.
Philippine security officials have said Dulmatin and another suspect in the Bali bombing, Umar Patek, were part of a group of up to 10 JI members hiding on Jolo and training local Muslim militant group, Abu Sayyaf, in bomb-making.
Abu Sayyaf has been blamed for the worst militant attack in the south of the mainly Roman Catholic country, the 2004 bombing of a ferry near Manila that killed more than 100 people.
The 2002 Bali bombings, blamed on JI, killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.
Since August, about 8,000 soldiers, backed by US advisers and equipment, have been deployed on Jolo to flush out about 400 Abu Sayyaf rebels and their JI allies.
©AAP 2007http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=267568 
Logged
'oh and by the way Jerry... there's no room for you in Heaven' 
