More news from Boston: Catholic Charities, against orders from the acting Archbishop here, Richard Lennon, will accept a $35,000 donation from lay group Voice of the Faithful. The archdiocese regards the mere existence of an independant fundraising effort as a challenge to its authority, and had ordered Catholic Charities to turn down the money.

Lennon is following in the footsteps of his predecessor, the now-disgraced Cardinal Law, who ordered Catholic Charities to turn down an earlier $56,000 donation. That didn't work either.

Lennon has decided that he won't respond to this provocation by trying to fire the Catholic Charities board that accepted the money. Not yet. How magnanimous.

And it's the same thing from here to China, where the authorities have found an equally self-defeating way of asserting their own authority -- issuing casualty figures for SARS pneumonia so low that the doctors in the hospitals complain about it...