Hundreds of churches are preparing events to coincide with the release next month of the film version of the novel, to help congregations understand why the version of events that appears in the book is untrue. The Da Vinci Code is based on the premise that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had a child, leading to a secret bloodline that was suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church and was the Holy Grail of legend.

Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said that conspiracy theories would not undermine the truth of the Gospel. Dr Thomas Wright, the Bishop of Durham, said that an “ethically confused, navel- gazing society” had made Dan Brown’s novel a bestseller.

Police shoot dead driver of "stolen car" at roadblock. A man was shot dead by police in Northern Ireland yesterday at a checkpoint set up to stop a suspected stolen car.
An officer opened fire after a silver BMW reached the roadblock in Ballynahinch, Co Down, 20 miles south of Belfast. Another three men and two women in the car were taken for questioning.

An officer opened fire after a silver BMW reached the roadblock in Ballynahinch, Co Down, 20 miles south of Belfast. Another three men and two women in the car were taken for questioning.
Nuala O’Loan, the Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman, announced an inquiry to establish whether the shooting was necessary to protect lives.
The BMW is believed to have travelled from Ballykinlar, about 12 miles away, and was heading for Belfast, according to reports. Officers had set up a checkpoint outside a police station in the town centre.
Police fired several shots, witnesses said. It was not clear whether the driver had tried to go through the roadblock. His body lay several feet from the car, a witness said. A priest from a nearby Roman Catholic church was called to the driver as he lay in the road.
Security sources later disclosed that the man was shot while he was still in the car. It is understood that his body was taken outside so that he could receive first aid.

In the ongoing battle of the nerds between Caltech and MIT, the latest volley has been fired from a 130-year-old cannon.
Actually, the latest volley is a cannon.
Massachusetts pranksters, posing as professional movers, stole the beloved Fleming Cannon — traditionally fired at each year's commencement — from the Pasadena campus last week.
On Thursday it popped up, pointed toward Pasadena and adorned with an oversized Massachusetts Institute of Technology school ring, at the Cambridge campus next to a plaque referring to Caltech as "its previous owners."
The plaque explained that the students created the phony "Howe & Ser Moving Company" and used fake work-order forms to get past Caltech campus security guards. After that, a real shipping company toted the 2-ton relic across the country.
The heist continues a long-running rivalry. Last year, Caltech students went to Cambridge to give prospective MIT students T-shirts that looked official. But on the back, they read: "Because not everyone can go to Caltech."
As for the cannon, it has traveled before. Twenty years ago, 11 Harvey Mudd College students spirited it off to Claremont.

THE most senior British agent to have been exposed as having worked at the heart of Sinn Fein was found murdered at his home last night.
Denis Donaldson had been shot in the head, execution-style, inside the primitive cottage in Glenties, Co Donegal, where he had been living since he was dramatically outed as a spy in December.

Tracked down by an Irish newspaper last month to a cottage in Co Donegal, Mr Donaldson was said to appear gaunt and chastened by his change of circumstances. For years he had been liked, as much by journalists as by fellow republicans, for his humour, sharp mind and evident pleasure in the finer things in life. Little did anybody realise that he had been working for British Intelligence and the Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Branch for more than 20 years. That a man as trusted and apparently committed to the republican cause as Mr Donaldson could have been spying for the British for so many years posed the pertinent question: “If Denis, then who else?” Mr Donaldson was an East Belfast Catholic who joined the IRA as a teenager. He served a prison sentence for bombing a distillery and forged a close alliance with Mr Adams’s “kitchen cabinet”, a team who went on to reshape the Provisional IRA into the most lethal and efficient terrorist organisation in Western Europe.

British spy Denis Donaldson was warned by police in the Irish Republic his life was in danger weeks before he was murdered, it has emerged. Even though the 56-year-old former Sinn Fein official believed he was safe living in an isolated, run down cottage in Co Donegal despite betraying his colleagues for more than 20 years, he was gunned down in a house belonging to his son-in-law Ciaran Kearney. As Gardai mounted one of the biggest operations seen in the county questioning motorists at roadblocks, they vowed to leave no stone unturned in hunting down the Belfast man's killers.

This month, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach becomes a family-adviser-on-the-road hosting a reality TV show, "Shalom in the Home," scheduled for prime-time broadcast on The Learning Channel.