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  • Wes Bloomquist •
  • Originally published January 16, 2009 at 5:04 p.m., updated January 16, 2009 at 5:04 p.m.

ATLANTA - A coalition of activists is planning to protest The King Center's choice of the Rev. Rick Warren as keynote speaker on the federal observance of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday.

The Monday event in Georgia is the day before the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama, who has chosen Warren to give the inaugural invocation. Warren had backed the recent Proposition 8 ballot measure banning same-sex marriage in his home state of California.

Warren, pastor of the 20,000-member Saddleback Church in Southern California and author of the best-selling "The Purpose Driven Life," will appear on Monday at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King preached from 1960 until his death in 1968.

NEW YORK - Barack Obama and his message of change will get a ringing endorsement on Inauguration Day with 12 "change ringing" bells at a church near ground zero.

The full peal, which lasts three hours, has been rarely heard in New York City since the bells were installed three years ago at Trinity Church in lower Manhattan.

Jeremy Bates, a Manhattan lawyer and former Obama campaign worker, will be among the 12 skilled ringers who will pull on sturdy ropes in the bell tower to mark the historic occasion.

"Change ringing is a way that we express the joy of our community, and I think much of the nation is joyous about this inauguration," he said.

Change ringing is far more common outside the United States. Most cathedrals in England have sets of 12 bells like the one at Trinity, which is the largest set in this country.

The centuries-old method produces a rich and complex combination of sounds with endless permutations of tonal patterns that have no recognizable melody.

On Tuesday, the ringers will climb 100 steps of a narrow, spiral stone staircase and a 20-foot metal ladder to a tiny change-ringing room, 20 feet below the belfry of the venerable Episcopal church not far from the World Trade Center site.

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan - Kyrgyzstan has shrugged off U.S. concerns and adopted an amended law that will strengthen state control over religious groups, government media reported.

The revised legislation will strongly curtail missionary ac tivity in the impoverished, mostly Muslim Central Asian nation. It prohibits the dissemination of religious literature in public places and requires religious communities to register more than 200 adult members before they can operate legally.

President Kurmanbek Bakiyev signed the legislation Monday, state newspaper Slovo Kyrgyzstana said, and it took effect immediately.

His approval came days after several prominent U.S. lawmakers said the legislation would "severely restrict freedom of religion" and urged a veto.

The law bans private religious teaching at all levels of education - outlawing private religious schools - while providing for the inclusion of religious education in public schools, said lawmaker Zainidin Kurmanov, one its authors.

VATICAN CITY - Italy's rabbis are pulling out of the Italian Catholic Church's annual celebration of Judaism, saying recent decisions by Pope Benedict XVI were negating 50 years of interfaith progress.

The chief rabbi of Venice, Elia Enrico Richetti, cited the pope's decision to restore a prayer for the conversion of Jews deemed offensive to Jews in Easter Week services of the old Latin Mass.

In an article published Tuesday in the Italian Jesuit magazine Popoli, Richetti said the Assembly of Italian Rabbis felt the prayer, and subsequent comments by church officials about the controversy, showed a lack of respect that was necessary for dialogue to continue.

"If we add to this the recent positions taken by the pope about dialogue, said to be useless because the superiority of the Christian faith is proven anyway, then it's evident that we're heading toward the cancellation of the last 50 years of church history," he wrote.

Bishop Vincenzo Paglia, who heads the Italian bishops' commission on interreligious dialogue, said the history of Jewish-Catholic relations cannot just be "canceled," the ANSA news agency reported.

"If there are difficulties, which undoubtedly there are in Italy, they should become an occasion to recast the dialogue even more strongly," ANSA quoted him as saying.



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