Three British Muslims were found guilty today of conspiracy to murder thousands of passengers and crew in an unprecedented airline bomb plot that could have proved as deadly as the 9/11 attacks.

After a retrial at Woolwich Crown Court, jurors found the ringleader, Abdulla Ahmed, and two other men, Assad Sarwar and Tanvir Hussain, guilty of plotting to use liquid bombs to blow up airliners en route from Heathrow to the United States.

Another defendant, Umar Islam, was found guilty of a more general charge of conspiracy to murder because jurors could not decide whether he knew of the specific targets in the plot three years ago.

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While some preachers may frown upon the use of cell phones and laptops in church on Sundays, one Katy-area pastor is encouraging people to keep their wireless devises on so they connect through the Internet and social networking sites during a new service.

Starting Sept. 12, Church of the Holy Apostles, 1225 West Grand Parkway South, will kick off its first Saturday evening service called The Gathering Place. The 6 p.m. service will feature the same elements of traditional church including music, preaching, communion and prayer as well as an interactive component that will allow members and visitors to ask questions or make comments via the Internet.

“There’s a virtual community out there and we’re going to tap into how that might work for the church,” said Rev. Darrel Proffitt, the church’s lead pastor. “It’s more than just a virtual interactive service where you can ask questions through Twitter and Facebook, but will encourage people to develop a community throughout the week.”

Social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have allowed people to stay in touch with friends and family, even celebrities and political officials, while keeping up with what they’re doing at the moment. By posting frequent updates to their sites, people stay connected and informed instantaneously.

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With donations slowing, religious groups across the theological spectrum are reporting millions of dollars in reduced income that is resulting in staff layoffs and program cuts.

Jewish and Christian seminaries also are feeling the pinch. Eight seminaries for the nation’s largest Lutheran denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, are undergoing staff reductions and budget cuts.

In Los Angeles, consideration was given this spring to closing the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, a seminary serving the Jewish Reform movement. Ultimately, college officials opted to keep the campus open, but only after cutting staff and entering into cooperative arrangements with other institutions and seminaries.

But college officials confirmed there is ongoing discussion of how millions more could be saved, including preliminary talks about selling the campus to the adjacent USC and leasing it back.

Meanwhile, 69 long-term foreign missionaries and 350 short-term missionaries for the Southern Baptist Convention will remain home this year because of reduced giving by local congregations to the denomination’s cooperative program. Southern Baptist officials also report a $29-million drop in an annual Christmas offering on which half the program’s budget depends.

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In other words, the VA (a relatively small government health program which serves a small, well defined population) is not a terribly good proxy for a nationwide single payer health system that would have to provide universal health care to everyone. Bruce’s point, which Klein missed entirely in his haste to commence chest thumping, is that if two much smaller government health care programs (the VA and Army medical system) are riddled with inefficiency, waste, and bureaucratic bungling, what on earth makes Klein think a system many times larger is a good idea? Since I’m piling on, there’s a reason military families call TRICARE, “Try to get care”. To paraphrase the last president who tried to foist national health care on the American public, “It’s the Bureaucracy, Stupid”….

The Internet makes people lazy. They don’t bother to read posts carefully, nor do they read the supporting links in their entirety. We’ve all been guilty of doing that. I’ve done it on occasion. And when that was pointed out to me, I acknowledged it. Is Klein big enough to do that?

What [Ezra] Klein and many others who commented on these posts also don’t consider is an inconvenient little fact that blows his suggestion that the VA is an appropriate example for how national single payer might work right out of the water….

no single class of VA eligible veterans receives most of their health care through the VA. In other words, the bulk of their health care needs are met outside the VA system.

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Q. Could you please tell me if there are any Anglican nuns in our area? Perhaps there would be convents in some of our larger neighboring cities. I remember many years ago seeing a picture of Queen Elizabeth’s mother-in-law in the habit of an Anglican nun, walking with her son, Prince Philip. I’m certain there are sisters in England belonging to these Church of England religious orders.

— R.C., of Trenton

A. Guess I had never really thought about it before, but it may surprise some to learn that the Roman Catholic Church doesn’t have a lock on convents and monasteries. Monasticism always has been a fixture of the Eastern Orthodox and Buddhism. The Lutherans have a monastery and retreat house in Oxford, Mich.

And, almost since the time that the Episcopal Church planted its Anglican roots in the United States, the church’s monastic communities started springing up around the country.

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From here:

On this weekend, when we rest from our usual labors, loving Father, we pray for all who shoulder the tasks of human labor””in the marketplace, in factories and offices, in the professions, and in family living.

We thank you, Lord, for the gift and opportunity of work; may our efforts always be pure of heart, for the good of others and the glory of your name.

We lift up to you all who long for just employment and those who work to defend the rights and needs of workers everywhere.

May those of us who are now retired always remember that we still make a valuable contribution to our Church and our world by our prayers and deeds of charity.

May our working and our resting all give praise to you until the day we share together in eternal rest with all our departed in your Kingdom as you live and reign Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

A grass-roots Episcopal group wants to question Bishop William Love on whether he intends to lead the Albany diocese out of the Episcopal Church.

Albany Via Media, a group of moderate to liberal Episcopalians, is lining up parishioners to attend Love’s seven meetings around the diocese in September and October.

“We are trying to have members asking the question at every meeting,” said Clair Touby of Saranac Lake, president of Albany Via Media.

Love will visit St. Paul’s Church, 58 Third St., Troy, at 6:30 p.m., Tuesday for evening prayer and to discuss the Episcopal Church’s General Convention in July in Anaheim, Calif.

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Watch the whole video.

An attack on the village of Wernyol in the Jonglei State in South Sudan has left 47 dead, including the Archdeacon of Wernyol, the Ven Joseph Mabior Garang.

On the morning of Aug 28 approximately 1,000 gunmen attacked the village “coming to take the cattle, and to loot and steal,” Maj Gen Kuol Diem Kuol of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) told Al-Jazeera.

“There was only a small police force based in Wernyol, and they were soon overrun, but nearby SPLA platoons heard the shooting and rushed to the area” and restored order, Gen Kuol said.

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The confrontation distracted from one of the hallmark victories in Boise State’s history. The No. 14 Broncos defeated the No. 16 Ducks, 19-8, a victory that is likely to place them in the top 10 next week and make the team a serious contender for a Bowl Championship Series game. The Ducks, meanwhile, face difficult games against Purdue and Utah the next two weeks. Blount struggled against Boise State, finishing with minus-5 yards on eight carries. Boise State’s Billy Winn had the night’s defensive highlight when he slammed Blount into the ground for a safety in the second quarter.

After the game, Winn called Blount’s punch a “cheap shot,” adding: “Their actions speak for their team. Something like that shows you what they’re being coached. If they were coached better than that, he wouldn’t have thrown that punch.”

William Friday, a longtime critic of the commercialization of college sports and the founding co-chair of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, said the altercation showed something else. “What you’re seeing here is an example of the pressure and the stress that comes in when you get this kind of tinder box,” he said. “It’s the pressure of winning at almost any price.”

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“We’re so glad to see the clubs go, but I’m guardedly optimistic,” said Susan Finley, co-founder of the Flatiron Alliance, which long battled Limelight and its troubled replacement, Club Avalon. “We’ve been lied to so many times.”

Residents are worried that the mall is “one big dodge to get a club going there,” said Board 5 Landmarks Chairman Howard Mendes, whose committee recommended rejecting the proposal.

He pointed to a large empty space in the floor plan that would be “perfect for dancing,” and to the continued ownership of real-estate developer Ben Ashkenazy, who rented the 163-year-old former Episcopal church at Sixth Avenue and 20th Street to Gatien.

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For all the grumbling you do about your weekly grocery bill, the fact is you’ve never had it so good, at least in terms of what you pay for every calorie you eat. According to the USDA, Americans spend less than 10% of their incomes on food, down from 18% in 1966. Those savings begin with the remarkable success of one crop: corn. Corn is king on the American farm, with production passing 12 billion bu. annually, up from 4 billion bu. as recently as 1970. When we eat a cheeseburger, a Chicken McNugget, or drink soda, we’re eating the corn that grows on vast, monocrop fields in Midwestern states like Iowa.

But cheap food is not free food, and corn comes with hidden costs. The crop is heavily fertilized ”” both with chemicals like nitrogen and with subsidies from Washington. Over the past decade, the Federal Government has poured more than $50 billion into the corn industry, keeping prices for the crop ”” at least until corn ethanol skewed the market ”” artificially low. That’s why McDonald’s can sell you a Big Mac, fries and a Coke for around $5 ”” a bargain, given that the meal contains nearly 1,200 calories, more than half the daily recommended requirement for adults. “Taxpayer subsidies basically underwrite cheap grain, and that’s what the factory-farming system for meat is entirely dependent on,” says Gurian-Sherman. (See the 10 worst fast food meals.)

So what’s wrong with cheap food and cheap meat ”” especially in a world in which more than 1 billion people go hungry? A lot. For one thing, not all food is equally inexpensive; fruits and vegetables don’t receive the same price supports as grains. A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit. With the backing of the government, farmers are producing more calories ”” some 500 more per person per day since the 1970s ”” but too many are unhealthy calories. Given that, it’s no surprise we’re so fat; it simply costs too much to be thin.

Our expanding girth is just one consequence of mainstream farming. Another is chemicals.

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Barack Obama is committing the same mistakes made by policymakers during the Great Depression, according to a new study endorsed by Nobel laureate James Buchanan.

His policies even have the potential to consign the US to a similar fate as Argentina, which suffered a painful and humiliating slide from first to Third World status last century, the paper says.

There are “troubling similarities” between the US President’s actions since taking office and those which in the 1930s sent the US and much of the world spiralling into the worst economic collapse in recorded history, says the new pamphlet, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs.

In particular, the authors, economists Charles Rowley of George Mason University and Nathanael Smith of the Locke Institute, claim that the White House’s plans to pour hundreds of billions of dollars of cash into the economy will undermine it in the long run. They say that by employing deficit spending and increased state intervention President Obama will ultimately hamper the long-term growth potential of the US economy and may risk delaying full economic recovery by several years.

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Please note the headline above is the one used in the print edition–KSH.

Financial innovation can be good, of course, by lowering the cost of borrowing for everyone, giving consumers more investment choices and, more broadly, by helping the economy to grow. And the proponents of securitizing life settlements say it would benefit people who want to cash out their policies while they are alive.

But some are dismayed by Wall Street’s quick return to its old ways, chasing profits with complicated new products.

“It’s bittersweet,” said James D. Cox, a professor of corporate and securities law at Duke University. “The sweet part is there are investors interested in exotic products created by underwriters who make large fees and rating agencies who then get paid to confer ratings. The bitter part is it’s a return to the good old days.”

Indeed, what is good for Wall Street could be bad for the insurance industry, and perhaps for customers, too. That is because policyholders often let their life insurance lapse before they die, for a variety of reasons ”” their children grow up and no longer need the financial protection, or the premiums become too expensive. When that happens, the insurer does not have to make a payout.

Read it all. This story, along with the preceding one, were on the front page of yesterday’s Times.

In the small trailer her family rented over the summer, 9-year-old Charity Crowell picked out the green and purple outfit she would wear on the first day of school. She vowed to try harder and bring her grades back up from the C’s she got last spring ”” a dismal semester when her parents lost their jobs and car and the family was evicted and migrated through friends’ houses and a motel.

Charity is one child in a national surge of homeless schoolchildren that is driven by relentless unemployment and foreclosures. The rise, to more than one million students without stable housing by last spring, has tested budget-battered school districts as they try to carry out their responsibilities ”” and the federal mandate ”” to salvage education for children whose lives are filled with insecurity and turmoil.

The instability can be ruinous to schooling, educators say, adding multiple moves and lost class time to the inherent distress of homelessness. And so in accord with federal law, the Buncombe County district, where Charity attends, provides special bus service to shelters, motels, doubled-up houses, trailer parks and RV campgrounds to help children stay in their familiar schools as the families move about.

Still, Charity said of her last semester, “I couldn’t go to sleep, I was worried about all the stuff,” and she often nodded off in class.

Caught this one last night on the plane. I keep thinking of the boy in the story who takes the bus one and one half hours to school one way. That’s a long time. Read it all.

The Knights have also helped to heal the pain of parents of aborted children. Working with Project Rachel, the Knights have sponsored two conferences on the effect of abortion on fathers.

In addition, with the John Paul II Institute in Rome, we sponsored a conference last year on the effect of abortion on parents, and the effect of divorce on children.

Whether locally or nationally, Knights have been defenders of those with no one else to defend them. And it has been this way since our founding.

People often speak of the Church’s preferential option for the poor. And we often hear reference to Christ’s words that tell us that what we do for the least we do for Him. This is a great part of the reason that the Knights of Columbus have had as a consistent mission an outreach to those on the margins, to those forgotten by society, to those society considers the least!

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The Episcopal Church is in a Level Five conflict. It’s not getting better, it’s getting worse. We continue on this trajectory and the entire communion is affected. The best thing would be for The Episcopal Church to withdraw for a time certain, work through their theological issues, and then come back. Perhaps in that time, the rest of the communion will have worked through and discovered that yes, God is Doing A New Thing and glory hallelujah. Or not. Then The Episcopal Church can decide whether it belongs in the Anglican Communion.

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Tim Black, our seminarian, was the kind person who instinctively knew that I was unaware of what I was missing in Sunday School. So he asked me and invited and reminded me, here a Sunday, there a Sunday, and finally one morning wooed me back to the founders room to the sofa in the back. Before I knew it, I was completely engaged in the topic at hand. The class was interesting and funny and thought provoking, laughter and intensity. Everyone in the class had their hand up, and comments and questions bounced around the room like atoms under an atomic microscope.

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Japan is a decent, consensual and egalitarian country. Much of it is still prosperous, despite a dismal period for the economy. The beliefs of its two main political parties are often hard to tell apart. Both their leaders are grandsons of (rival) prime ministers. There were no loud celebrations when the results of the general election were announced on August 30th. It is tempting therefore to write it off as no earth-shattering event.

That would be a mistake. The vote, in which the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) broke the half-century lock of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) on power, marked the overdue destruction of Japan’s post-war political system. The question is what will now take its place.

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What does all this say about us and about our choice of freedoms? In the end, how important is public freedom? In Britain pockets of civil society remain strong. But how much change has it really brought about? How many fall into the category of troublemakers? What percentage of the population consists of NGOs, defence lawyers, dissenters or investigative journalists? How many people take part in marches? Participatory democracy has all but disappeared. And even where it has occasionally broken through into the mass consciousness, such as the huge anti-war march in London in 2003 on the eve of the Iraq conflict, it made no difference.

Will a new generation of world leaders produce something different and more inspiring, a post-crash version of freedom that inspires and addresses the many iniquities around the world? I fear the answer is a resounding “no”, although I hope I am proven wrong. People’s priorities reflect the socio-economic conditions of their time. So although it may have been the bankers and hedge fund managers who caused the immediate mess, the bigger culprits were we, the people, particularly in the West, for allowing democracy to mutate into something it should never have become ”” a vehicle to deliver consumption.

In Britain, as elsewhere around the world, a critical mass of people vested in their leaders almost unlimited powers to determine questions of liberty. In return they were bought off by a temporary blanket of security and what turned out to be an illusory prosperity.

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Genetic mutations that could account for more than one in five cases of Alzheimer’s disease have been found, in a significant leap forward for dementia research, scientists say.

British scientists have discovered two genes associated with the degenerative illness of the brain and their French colleagues uncovered a third. Having certain variations of the three genes could increase the risk of having “common” late-onset Alzheimer’s by ten to 15 per cent, the researchers say.

It is thought that cancelling out their effects could prevent almost 100,000 cases of Alzheimer’s disease in the UK each year.

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Twelve people stood in a circle in a tower high above Wall Street. Eyes flitted from side to side, watching, concentrating, as arms rose and fell to a cascading cacophony of bells, bells, bells. One shook her head in disgust over missing a beat.

“This is all,” said Dale Winter, the conductor, using the technical phrase to close out a sequence of rings. The clanging inside Trinity Church’s 280-foot bell tower fell silent.

Trinity this week is the focus of the American bell-ringing world. The North American Guild of Change Ringers is holding its annual meeting at the church, which in New York fashion is promoting a mini-festival of classes, ringing performances and private sessions, including a 24-hour marathon beginning at 12:30 p.m. on Sunday (which will take place behind sound-baffling shutters and only if the church can find enough ringers). Public sessions are scheduled for noon and 4 p.m. on Saturday, along with the normal ringing before and after services on Sunday morning.

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Amid political battles over the role of government in health care and other functions, White House officials Sunday offered carefully drawn statements describing how far the president would go in pushing for a so-called “public option’ alternative to private insurance in his health care overhaul initiative.

The president “believes the public option is a good tool,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” But Axelrod added: “It shouldn’t define the whole health care debate, however.”

The president addresses a joint session of Congress Wednesday in the hope of reigniting interest in retooling the nation’s health insurance system. In advance of the nationally televised speech, he has been buffeted by pressure from the left and the right over the public option, a government-backed policy that that would be offered alongside private plans to promote competition and assure coverage for the uninsured.

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