Southern Baptist urges home-schooling

A prominent Southern Baptist is asking the national convention to consider a resolution recommending parents remove their children from what he calls "godless" and "anti-Christian" public schools. The resolution, coauthored by T. C. Pinckney, publisher of a Baptist newsletter in Alexandria, Va., urges parents to home-school their children or send them to Christian schools. (AP)

TEXAS

Dragging victim's tombstone desecrated

JASPER -- The tombstone of a black man who was dragged to his death was found broken, with an obscenity and racial epithet carved into a metal plate on the bottom of the stone, police said. "We hoped he could rest in peace," said Stella Byrd, the mother of 1998 dragging victim James Byrd Jr. "They've done enough to him already." Two people at the Jasper City Cemetery tending to a relative's gravesite yesterday afternoon noticed the damage, police said. (AP)

Illinois

Two Chicago-area clerics charged

CHICAGO -- Federal prosecutors in Chicago yesterday charged two clerics with theft in two unrelated cases. The Rev. Arthur LaPore, 56, pastor of St. Anthony's Roman Catholic Church in Joliet, hosted fund-raising spaghetti dinners at his church and kept some of the proceeds, they said. Bishop William Ellis, 61, of the Apostolic Pentecostal Church in Chicago, was accused of skimming at least $1,000 a week from collections. (Reuters)