The risk of a double-dip recession hasn’t abated, even after news of the huge European bailout in response to the Greek debt crisis.

World markets soared initially on the announcement of the nearly $1 trillion rescue plan, and then declined. But as the economist John Maynard Keynes cautioned long ago, such market reactions are basically a “beauty contest” ”” with investors trying to predict the short-term reaction that other investors think still other investors will have.

In other words, don’t view these beauty contests as a heartfelt response to a fundamental change in the economy.

In fact, there is still a real risk of a double-dip recession, though it can’t be quantified by the statistical models that economists use for forecasts. Instead, the danger stems from the weakness and vulnerability of confidence ”” whose decline could bring markets down, further stress balance sheets and cause cuts in consumption, investment and local government expenditures.

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In what could be a stunning breakthrough in the years-long diplomatic deadlock over Iran’s nuclear program, Tehran has agreed to send the bulk of its nuclear material to Turkey as part of an exchange meant to ease international concerns about the Islamic Republic’s aims and provide fuel for an ailing medical reactor, the spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry told state television Monday morning.

Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told state television that a letter describing the deal would be sent to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency within a week.

“After a final agreement is signed between Iran and the Vienna group, our fuel will be shipped to Turkey under the supervision of Iran and the IAEA,” he told journalists on the sidelines of a conference of developing nations. “Then we will dispatch 1,200 kilograms [2,640 pounds] of 3.5% enriched uranium to Turkey to be exchanged for 120 kilograms [264 pounds] of 20% enriched uranium from the Vienna group.”

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As members of the Church of Ireland we wish to express sorrow that Mary Glasspool, a person who is living in a same-sex relationship, is to be consecrated as one of two new assistant bishops in Los Angeles on May 15.

The elevation to senior church leadership of a person whose lifestyle is contrary to the will of God revealed in Scripture is both wrong and disappointing.

The decision to elect and confirm Mary Glasspool to the position of suffragan bishop is a clear rejection of the many pleas for gracious restraint made from within the Anglican Communion, not least by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Windsor Report and the most recent Primates’ Meeting. The Episcopal Church (TEC) has taken this provocative step despite knowing the division and difficulties created by Gene Robinson’s consecration in 2003. This shows a deliberate disregard for other members of the Anglican family and suggests that TEC does not greatly value unity within Anglicanism and indeed throughout the universal Church.

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Everyone expects the new government to give priority to reducing Britain’s debt and to maintaining its creditworthiness. We also expect it to deal firmly with sleaze at Westminster and beyond, and to restore confidence in the political process. None of these is easy to do, especially in coalition. We should be realistic, therefore, and patient.

We should, however, also be prepared to say “it’s not just the economy, stupid”, nor is it just the expenses claimed by members of parliament. We are experiencing a deep malaise in our national life and we should be prepared to identify the causes and address them together.

What lies behind the financial crisis is massive moral failure. We have a few very wealthy individuals and institutions but a whole nation massively in debt. Instead of a culture where making more and more money is the main criterion of success, we ought to be encouraging a culture which sees working in finance as just as much of a vocation as working in the caring professions. The best of British commercial practice was rooted in the Bible’s vision of our responsibility for one another and for the rest of God’s creation. The experiment in selfishness has not succeeded. It is time to see how a biblical view of stewardship can help us in this fraught situation.

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[Diane] Bruce and [Mary] Glasspool will be assistants to [Jon] Bruno, a position known as suffragan. They are the 1,044th and 1,045th bishops ordained in the history of the Episcopal Church, but few previous clerical elections have attracted as much attention.

Although both ordinations broke new ground, it was the selection of Glasspool, who is gay, that attracted worldwide attention and no small amount of consternation among more conservative members of the worldwide Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is a part. The head of the church, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, said after Glasspool’s election in March that it was “regrettable” and could threaten the unity of the communion.

She becomes the second gay bishop of the Episcopal Church, following Gene Robinson, who was chosen as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003. His selection rocked the church and led to the departure of dozens of its more conservative parishes and four dioceses. In reaction, the church enacted a moratorium on the election of additional gay bishops but overturned that policy at its national convention in Anaheim last summer.

In choosing Glasspool, the Los Angeles Diocese became the first to test the new policy. With some 70,000 members and 147 congregations in six Southern California counties, it is among the largest Episcopal dioceses in the country and is considered among the most liberal.

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“We have not relented on our principles,” Mr. [Jean-Claude] Trichet told Der Spiegel, the German newsmagazine, according to a transcript on the bank’s Web site. “Price stability is our primary mandate and compass.”

And in an interview broadcast on Sunday, the U.S. Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, signaled his confidence that Europe would resolve its debt crisis and that the American economy would withstand its impact. “Europe has the capacity to manage through this,” Mr. Geithner told Bloomberg Television. “And I think they will.”

As investors absorb the details ”” and the potential weaknesses ”” of the $1 trillion European rescue plan, Mr. Geithner seemed to be trying to draw a sharp, if implicit, contrast to remarks last week from another senior economic adviser to President Barack Obama, Paul A. Volcker. Mr. Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman, startled some investors when he spoke of a possible “disintegration” of the euro zone ”” a striking shift from his expressions of confidence of only two months earlier.

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The new healthcare law will pack 32 million newly insured people into emergency rooms already crammed beyond capacity, according to experts on healthcare facilities.

A chief aim of the new healthcare law was to take the pressure off emergency rooms by mandating that people either have insurance coverage. The idea was that if people have insurance, they will go to a doctor rather than putting off care until they faced an emergency.

People who build hospitals, however, say newly insured people will still go to emergency rooms for primary care because they don’t have a doctor.

“Everybody expected that one of the initial impacts of reform would be less pressure on emergency departments; it’s going to be exactly the opposite over the next four to eight years,” said Rich Dallam, a healthcare partner at the architectural firm NBBJ, which designs healthcare facilities.

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The question put to the Rev. Michael Barlowe is on the minds of many Utahns as they quiz four candidates for bishop:

“Where do you see the Episcopal Church in Utah in three years?”

Barlowe’s answer, given recently to a group of Episcopalians in Ogden, is both a joke about the state’s culture and a wish — and it is greeted with applause:

“I’m not the prophet,” he says. “But I would hope we’d be a much larger church.”

Indeed, growing the church is very much on the minds of Utah Episcopalians as they come to the end of an 18-month process of selecting a new bishop to replace the Rev. Carolyn Tanner Irish, Utah’s 10th Episcopal bishop.

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Mary Glasspool, 56, was ordained yesterday in front of 3,000 supporters ”” and two protesters ”” in the Long Beach Arena, south of Los Angeles.

Calling herself a “reconciling person”, she offered to “reach out and engage with people who believe or think differently than I do”, but her appointment has already tested the Episcopal Church’s ties to the Church of England almost to breaking point.

Hoping to retain the allegiance of conservatives still furious over the ordination of Gene Robinson, the first gay Anglican bishop, in 2003, Dr Williams has said that Canon Glasspool’s ordination “raises very serious questions not just for the Episcopalian Church and its place in the Anglican Communion, but for the Communion as a whole”. He declined to comment on the ordination.

A spokesman for the Church of Ireland called the appointment “both wrong and disappointing”.

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The U.S. Episcopal Church has ordained an openly lesbian bishop despite warnings from the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Mary Glasspool, 56, became an assistant bishop at a ceremony attended by 3,000 people in Long Beach, California, on Saturday.

She is only the second openly gay bishop in Anglican church history after Gene Robinson was ordained in November 2003.

Dr Rowan Williams had urged the American Church not to proceed with the ordination, warning that it would further alienate traditionalists who believe active homosexuality to be a sin.

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The Episcopal diocese of Los Angeles ordained an openly lesbian bishop on Saturday, a move likely to stoke further tensions between liberals and conservatives in the deeply divided global Anglican Communion.

Mary Douglas Glasspool is now a suffragan, or assistant, bishop in a liberal diocese on America’s famously tolerant West Coast, and she offered to meet with her critics as a “reconciling person”.

Some 3,000 people attended the ceremony, said diocese spokesman Bob Williams. “The event was joyful and well attended,” he said.

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The theological differences that precipitated the exodus of Sellers’ congregation and others from the Episcopal Church are the root of the latest strife to affect the denomination. This new conflict, though, which has managed to unite groups that abandoned the denomination as far back as 1873, could mean serious trouble for the Episcopal Church, said Bill Leonard, dean and professor of church history at Wake Forest University Divinity School.

“It is very fascinating historically that the Anglican Communion in this country has decided to split over issues of sexuality, when they resisted schism over slavery, temperance, and fundamentalism and liberalism in the 1920s, those controversies that divided so many Protestant groups in North America,” he said.

“It took a long time, but now that it has started, it is moving along with a vengeance.”

In Pinellas, the squabble between the two churches continues over matters such as ownership of an early learning center and a bingo license. The Episcopal congregation wants its website and phone number back.

“It’s like a family breaking up,” said Jim DeLa, spokesman for the Episcopal Diocese.

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An experimental attempt to stop an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico experienced some limited success over the weekend, BP announced Sunday afternoon.

Engineers successfully inserted a tube into the damaged riser pipe from which some of the oil is spewing, capturing “some amounts of oil and gas” before the tube was dislodged, the announcement said. The tube was inspected and reinserted, BP said.

“While not collecting all of the leaking oil, this tool is an important step in reducing the amount of oil being released into Gulf waters,” the announcement said. It did not say why the tube had come dislodged or how much oil and gas were taken aboard the Discover Enterprise, the drill ship waiting to separate the oil, gas and water as it is siphoned off. The gas that reached the ship was burned using a flare system on board.

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Recently, however, the effects of an evolving U.S. Episcopal Church played out very differently at an east Portland Episcopal parish. On May 3, The Oregonian featured the story of St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church, where nearly 100 members left to form St. Matthew’s Anglican Church. Representatives of St. Matthew’s Anglican Church say they no longer feel “respected” by the U.S. Episcopal Church and are not comfortable with its modern interpretations of Scripture.

These arguments are not new: They are the same ones that have been used by breakaway priests and parishioners for 150 years as the Episcopal Church has evolved through slavery, women’s suffrage, civil rights, women’s rights and now the LGBT debate.

The members of the new St. Matthew’s are in a statistical minority; from 2003-08, the Oregon Episcopal diocese lost 2 percent of its baptized members, and the national Episcopal Church lost 9 percent. Researchers say pinning these declines purely on the church’s affirming of LGBT rights is difficult; they say the influence of a growing secular society cannot be ignored.

The St. Matthew’s schism is exactly what [Ted] Berktold worked hard to prevent at St. Mary’s. What follows are excerpts from a May 1 conversation with Berktold and [Bingham] Powell in Eugene.

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Scientists have discovered the “Methuselah” genes whose lucky carriers have a much improved chance of living to 100 even if they indulge in an unhealthy lifestyle.

The genes appear to protect people against the effects of smoking and bad diet and can also delay the onset of age-related illnesses such as cancer and heart disease by up to three decades.

No single gene is a guaranteed fountain of youth. Instead, the secret of longevity probably lies in having the right “suite” of genes, according to new studies of centenarians and their families. Such combinations are extremely rare ”” only one person in 10,000 reaches the age of 100.

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Gisela and Susi, thirtysomething civil service secretaries, were shivering over their sausages in what the tabloids labelled the “most miserable May of the millennium” and planning their summer holidays. “I know where I’m not going,” one of them said. “The hotels, service and food aren’t as good as Turkey but the prices are as high as Italy!”

As Berliners bravely sat on the banks of the River Spree in unseasonably cold weather for the Ascension Day holiday that traditionally marks the start of summer, they had no doubt that the cold wind was blowing from the sunny south: Greece in particular.

The multi-billion-euro payout for Greece, followed by an even more expensive rescue package for the threatened single currency, has created the greatest political climate change in a generation.

Suddenly Germans are asking questions about the European project that has been the bedrock of their politics for 60 years, leaving Angela Merkel, the chancellor, under fire from the electorate, the opposition and her own party….

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In a plastic tent under a glorious desert sky, Richard Lee preached the gospel of the second chance.

The chance to make money on the next housing boom “is like it’s never been,” Mr. Lee, a real estate promoter, assured a crowd of agents, investors and bankers. “We’re going to come back like you’ve never seen us before.”

Home prices in Las Vegas are down by 60 percent from 2006 in one of the steepest descents in modern times. There are 9,517 spanking new houses sitting empty. An additional 5,600 homes were repossessed by lenders in the first three months of this year and could soon be for sale.

Yet builders here are putting up 1,100 homes, and they are frantically buying lots for even more.

Las Vegas is trying to recover by building what it does not need. It is an unlikely pattern being repeated in many of the areas where the housing crash was most severe.

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When her older sister, Emily, died in a rock climbing accident in 2006, Lauren tended to her grieving parents, Kay and Frank. Later, Lauren demanded answers from the Rev. Broderick, asking her about Jesus.

“I need to know the real thing, not the stupid stuff!” Lauren told the minister. “The stuff you study. I need to see you every day. For an hour!”

–From a New Jersey article describing the funeral of Lauren Failla, age 25, who died on April 28 in a crocodile attack while she was snorkeling in India’s Andaman Islands.

In college Elena Kagan wrote an essay lamenting Republican gains in the 1980 election and referring to candidates backed by the Moral Majority as “avengers of ‘innocent life’ and the B-1 bomber.”

Now that Kagan stands as a nominee to join the Supreme Court, some conservatives believe the 30-year-old remark may reveal a personal animosity toward their side of the abortion rights cause.

But liberal activists also wonder about Kagan’s position. They point to memos she wrote as a policy staffer in the Clinton White House urging President Clinton to take a compromise position on some late-term abortions.

President Obama’s advisors say he has no doubt that Kagan is a legal progressive who will maintain the current balance of the court if confirmed to replace the retiring liberal John Paul Stevens. But with the constitutional right to an abortion apparently hanging by just one vote on the court, Kagan’s record is giving pause to both sides.

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In her letter to the Primates, the Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church (TEC) Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, confirmed that the consecration of the openly gay Mary Glasspool is not a random event but comes from the settled mind of her church. Sadly, this shows that TEC has now explicitly decided to walk apart from most of the rest of the Communion.

Since that decision by TEC has to be respected, it should result in three consequences. First, TEC withdrawing, or being excluded from the Anglican Communion’s representative bodies. Second, a way must be found to enable those orthodox Anglicans who remain within TEC to continue in fellowship with the Churches of the worldwide Communion. Third, the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA) should now be recognized an authentic Anglican Church within the Communion.

Dr Philip Giddings, Convenor,

Canon Dr Chris Sugden Executive Secretary, Anglican Mainstream

Integrity celebrates with the Diocese of Los Angeles and the whole church today at the ordinations of Bishop Diane Jardine Bruce and Bishop Mary Douglas Glasspool. This history making day is another important step forward toward the full inclusion of all the baptized in the work and witness of the Episcopal Church, and Integrity is honored to have been part of it.

“As we celebrate these ordinations today, we also celebrate the hard work and persistent activism of Integrity over the last 35 years,” said President David Norgard. “Here in Long Beach today we are not only reaping the fruit of the work of those who have gone before us–we are planting the seeds for fuller inclusion throughout the whole church.”

Also present at the festive ordination service were past-presidents of Integrity, including Bruce Garner (Atlanta), Kim Byham (Newark), and Susan Russell (Los Angeles). “As a daughter of this diocese [I] could not be more proud that Los Angeles has responded to the call to be a headlight instead of taillight on full inclusion,” said Russell. “Today the first woman Presiding Bishop in the history of the Anglican Communion ordained the first two women bishops in the history of the Diocese of Los Angeles…and the fact that one of them is a lesbian is not an ‘issue’ but an opportunity for us to better incarnate the wholeness of God’s abundant and inclusive love.”

Today is a day for celebration. And tomorrow Integrity will get back to work toward the day when the gender, orientation, identity or race of a bishop for the Church of God is no longer an “issue.” For anybody. And for the time when all the sacraments will be fully available to all the baptized. For everybody

Earlier this week, the Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King, irked US authorities by pointing out that even the world’s economic superpower has a major fiscal problem -“even the United States, the world’s largest economy, has a very large fiscal deficit” were his words. They were rather vague, but by happy coincidence the International Monetary Fund has chosen to flesh out the issue today. Unfortunately this is a rather long post with a few chunky tables, but it is worth spending a bit of time with ”“ the IMF analysis is fascinating.

Its cross-country Fiscal Monitor is not easy reading and is a VERY big pdf (17mb), so I’ve collected a few of the key points. The idea behind the document is to set out how much different countries around the world need to cut their deficits by in the next few years, and the bottom line is it’s going to be big and hard (ie 8.7pc of GDP in deficit cuts around the world, which works out at, gulp, about $4 trillion).

But the really interesting stuff is the detail, and what leaps out again and again is how much of a hill the US has to climb. Exhibit a is the fact that under the Obama administration’s current fiscal plans, the national debt in the US (on a gross basis) will climb to above 100pc of GDP by 2015 ”“ a far steeper increase than almost any other country.

Read it all and look carefully at the graphs.

Amid concern in financial markets that the debt crisis could break apart the euro zone, European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet warned of contagion dangers and called for more action by euro-zone governments to pool fiscal governance.

“We are now experiencing extreme tensions,” Mr. Trichet said in an interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine. The ECB provided a transcript Saturday.

“In the market, there is always a danger of contagion””like the contagion we saw among the private institutions in 2008.” Mr. Trichet said. Contagion can flare up quickly, he said, even in “half a day.”

What’s needed now, Mr. Trichet said, is “a quantum leap” in how Europe manages its fiscal economy, which he says in the most difficult situation since World War II.

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[BOB] ABERNETHY: Kagan’s confirmation would also mean that for the first time in American history the Supreme Court would have no Protestants. Does this matter? If so, what does it say about the place of Protestantism in America today? Joining me is Kim Lawton, our managing editor. Kim, I want to have a little discussion about this. People are saying, Protestants are saying, well, yes, this is a big symbol and they’re sad about it, of declining Protestant influence in this country. But at the same time I hear other people saying it’s really good news, because it is a symbol of how far the country has come in overcoming the anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish prejudice that existed for so long””still exists, but there’s been a lot of progress made on that. And they also say it matters a lot more what somebody thinks, a Supreme Court justice thinks, on a particular issue than what kind of religious label that person wears. You hear that?

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: Well, it is interesting. I mean, nobody is saying that she shouldn’t be confirmed because it throws the religious balance of the court out, or anything like that, but it has been a very interesting moment to take stock of this change in our society. But, yeah, what I’m hearing from people, what I heard from one Protestant pastor this week was he said to me I’m less concerned about her religious affiliation than I am about how she’s going to vote on, for example, some of the religion cases, and certainly that those ideas of the separation of church and state and what kind of relationship the government and religion should have””that’s been very controversial. There have been some very close decisions on the court, and so what she thinks about that, for example, is going to have a big impact no matter what kind of religious label she carries.

Read or watch the the whole thing.

All Saints Episcopal Church is a congregation of about 200 members; it’s a welcoming, diverse congregation. When the Rev. Tanya R. Wallace arrived to serve as rector in September, she decided it was “the perfect place” for her.

“They are such devoted, faithful people. It’s a joy to be working with them,” she said.

Wallace wanted “to be very intentional” about moving forward with the congregation in ways members wanted to function as a parish.

So she began the process of developing a five-year plan, convening a long-range planning committee and hosting a series of listening sessions to which all members of the 50-year-old church were invited to express their thoughts on “who we are as a congregation and where we’re going.”

There’s a mix of people in the parish, from the young families who are joining to the founding members who remain part of the church.

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Investors, who had started the week reassured by the huge rescue of Europe’s indebted nations, expressed second thoughts on Friday, sending markets lower and further devaluing the euro on concerns that the austerity measures required by the bailout would stunt the Continent’s already anemic economic growth.

The euro fell to its lowest level in 18 months, and bank stocks on both sides of the Atlantic took a beating.

Investors seemed fearful that the $957 billion bailout package for Greece and other nations, while providing short-term protection against default, might drag out the economic pain and hurt the financial system in the process.

A continued hammering of the euro would make European exports cheaper, but the side effect would be weaker American exports, potentially dragging the United States ”” and the rest of the world ”” back toward recession.

“What you get is markets worrying about a whole cascading of weakness stemming from Europe being transmitted through the euro to the United States,” said Martin Murenbeeld, chief economist at DundeeWealth Economics in Toronto.

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Retailers have begged Congress for years, in vain, to limit the fees they must pay to banks when customers swipe credit or debit cards. Bills never reached a vote. Amendments were left on the table. The Senate did not even grant the courtesy of a committee hearing.

That long record of futility ended in a landslide Thursday night. Sixty-four senators, including 17 Republicans, agreed to impose price controls on debit transactions over the furious objections of the beleaguered banking industry.

The amendment to the Senate’s sweeping financial legislation could save billions of dollars for family restaurants and dry cleaners, Wal-Mart and Amazon.com, and every other business whose customers increasingly pay with debit cards. It does not address credit card fees directly.

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The Rev Mary Glasspool will become Assistant Bishop of Los Angeles in a “grand event” taking place at a 13,500-seat arena on the Californian coast.

Her appointment is being made despite warnings from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, about the “serious questions” it will raise for the 80 million-strong Anglican Communion.

It is being viewed by traditionalists as another “provocative” move by the ultra-liberal Episcopal Church of the USA in “defiance” of pleas not to go against tradition and Scripture by ordaining homosexual bishops.

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The election of Mary Glasspool – who has been with her partner Becki for 22 years – represented a snub by the liberal Episcopal Church to other Anglican Churches around the world.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams had urged the American Church not to proceed with the ordination, warning that it would further alienate traditionalists who believe active homosexuality to be a sin.

It is likely to accelerate the gradual marginalisation of the Episcopal Church within a two-tier Communion and increase tensions between Anglicans elsewhere.

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