The Assemblies of God church general council approved a controversial resolution Thursday giving its 33,000 ministers more authority to marry people who have been divorced. Under current church law, ministers can only marry church members who were divorced because of adultery or abandonment. The resolution was approved by a show of hands by the 3,734 delegates to the church's biennial convention in Washington. "This is not a statement in favor of divorce," said the Rev. Michael Jackson of Janesville, Wis., who sponsored the resolution. Instead, Jackson said, the resolution empowers pastors to make their own decisions about who should marry. Charles Ess, a religion professor at Drury University, said the vote "recognizes that people make mistakes."

After female quail watched a fight between two males they were put in the same cage with the combatants. Virgin females preferred the winner but the females with some sexual experience tended to choose the loser.

The census found that Florida, Pennsylvania and West Virginia had higher proportions of people 65 and older. But many of their elderly die in their 60's and 70's; North Dakotans tend to keep aging. The census found 162 North Dakotans 100 or older, also near the top among states in relation to the total population.

These North Dakotans may be biological artifacts, the recipes for their health beyond bottling or replication by baby-boom office dwellers in big cities and suburbs. Clean air; going slow; patience; a low-cost, low-stress economy for all but active younger farmers; decades of heavy lifting outdoors; keeping an eye out for one another; long stable marriages; an absence of sharp differences in income and wealth all may contribute, people here speculate.

More than half of fathers-to-be attend antenatal classes with their partners and nearly all plan to be at their child's birth, says a new survey. But despite men's enthusiasm for parenthood, many could miss out on parental rights. The poll of 2,000 pregnant women and their partners found 52 per cent of men went to birth preparation classes. Only two per cent said they would not be at the birth. But many men do not realise that until new laws come in at the end of 2004, unless they are married to the mother of their child, they will not automatically be guaranteed parental rights."

Women's groups and political movements have expressed disappointment over a recent Syariah Court decision that the pronouncement of divorce via short messaging service (SMS) is legitimate ... �We are not against males pronouncing divorce, but there are more ethical ways of doing it. When marriages are solemnised in a traditional and Islamic way, it is unfair for divorce to be uttered in an unethical manner,� said Julita Ilhani. On July 24, the court ruled that Shamsudin had divorced Azida Fazlina when he sent an SMS stating kalau engkau tak keluar dari rumah mak bapak engkau, jatuh talak tiga (if you don't leave your parents� house, you will be divorced). Umno Youth exco member Shamsul Najmi said although pronouncement of divorce via SMS was valid, men should use it properly by uttering their intention to end the marriage tactfully and courteously. �Information technology is fast developing. It is not surprising that people use various means including e-mails and teleconferencing to pronounce their divorce.� However, the bigger issue was that the society seemed to disregard good manners, he said ... Women�s Aid Organisation (WAO) executive director Ivy Josiah said pronouncement of divorce through SMS was a distant, anonymous and callous way for husbands to inform their wives of their intention to end the marriage. She said the SMS method did not allow conciliations between the parties to salvage the marriage, which was unfair. �We are against any form of unilateral divorce where women have no say in reaching a solution to marital problems.�

Casting aside calls to legalize gay marriages, President Bush said Wednesday that he supports a law that would define marriage as a union between a woman and a man. "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman and I believe we ought to codify that one way or the other and we have lawyers looking at the best way to do that," the president said at a wide-ranging news conference at the White House Rose Garden.

Kurtz wants to argue that advocates of gay marriage are really trying to destroy the institution, rather than join it, and that this is fueled by a far left agenda in the gay community. What Kurtz doesn't acknowledge is that there has been a long debate among gays about marriage rights and those of us who took the conservative position, despite enormous pressure and vitriol from our peers, have largely won the argument.

True, a small number of relatively conservative gay spokesmen do consider the social effects of gay matrimony, insisting that they will be beneficent, that homosexual unions will become more stable. Yet another faction of gay rights advocates actually favors gay marriage as a step toward the abolition of marriage itself.

Meet the Volkers of Andover, Minn., and their blended, extended family:

There's Paul, who is divorced from Sandy. Together, they have three kids -- Katrina, 16, Chelsea, 15, and Sean, 13 -- and a joint custody situation that switches the children from household to household each week.

Then there's Dara Wegener Volker, Paul's second wife, who has a daughter, Emilee, 9. Dara shares custody with her ex-husband, David Velander, who has standard visitation rights: one night a week, every other weekend, some holidays. He lives 52 minutes away (on a good traffic day) with his second wife and the child they have together.

Emilee, meanwhile, came to Dara and David in an open adoption, so they're all still in contact with her birth mother, who lives in Chicago.