Pickled brain to return to village

From the Telegraph:

The pickled brain of a 19th-century Italian anarchist, which has been on display in a glass jar in Rome since his death, is finally set to return home.
Giovanni Passannante, a cook, gained notoriety for lunging at Umberto I, the king of Italy, with a three-inch kitchen knife during a royal visit to Naples in 1878.
The then 28-year-old Passannante missed his target, and gouged the prime minister instead. He was arrested and sent to the prison island of Elba. After a decade of solitary confinement, he was judged to be insane and was transferred to an asylum.
When he died in 1910, his body was fed to pigs, but his brain was preserved so that it could be studied for signs of innate criminality.
The brain is currently on view at Rome’s crime museum, but will be transported to his home town of Savoia di Lucania, in the deep south of the country, on May 11.

Teacher asks students to make her coffin

From the Telegraph:

A Dutch primary school teacher dying of cancer is overseeing one last project among her pupils: they are making her coffin.
Eri van den Biggelaar, 40, has just a few weeks to live after being diagnosed last year with an aggressive form of cervical cancer.
She asked the woodwork teacher, a friend, to build a coffin for her. "Why don't you let the children make it?" replied Erik van Dijk.
Now pupils who normally plane wood for baskets and place mats have been helping with the finishing touches. They have already sawed more than 100 narrow boards and glued them together. Only the lid needs to be completed.
The coffin now stands in the middle of one of the classrooms.
Although Miss Biggelaar can no longer teach she has looked at sketches of the coffin and is being kept up to date about it by pupils, aged between four and 11, who visit her at home.
"Life and death belong together," she said. "The children realised that when I explained it to them. I didn't want to be morbid about it, I wanted them to help me.
"I told them: 'Where I will go is much nicer than this world.' "

I, for one, approve. Modern society shields itself, and children in particular, from the realities of death. A sober contemplation of mortalilty is central to the Christian wolrd-view.