U.S. generals planning the promised offensive against Kandahar may now argue that the scheduled July 2011 beginning of the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan encourages the Taliban to push the United States against the wall it constitutes.

At the same time, the advantages of more vigorous combat directed against the Taliban must be factored into the effort by the Hamid Karzai government to draw at least some Taliban into greater cooperation with the Afghan authorities through means such as the just-completed loya jirga, or grand council meeting of tribes and factions in Afghanistan.

All in all, the complexities of Afghan politics, plus the rising toll in U.S. lives and expenditure on this war, argue strongly for drawing it to an end.

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Authorities are banding together ever more closely with the financial sector and Internet providers in hopes of disrupting the multibillion-dollar global child-pornography trade.

These concerted efforts come as the child-porn industry has shifted in the last five years to a more anonymous, web-based system for moving funds, according to law-enforcement officials, technology specialists and money-laundering experts.

To root out the companies that supply an estimated $20 billion annual global child-porn market, the Financial Coalition Against Child Pornography — comprised of Internet service providers, financial heavyweights and technology companies — is working closely with law-enforcement agencies in the United States and around the world.

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What comes to mind when I say moral blind spots? Abortion if you’re a conservative? Gay rights if you’re a liberal? But how can anything be “blind” if half the country is talking about it?

Mahatma Gandhi”” viewed by many (including Martin Luther King Jr.) as one of the greatest moral leaders of the 20th century ”” opined that the moral fiber of a society is best gauged by how we treat our animals. So as a Baptist preacher who is interested in the morality of my country, I decided to check us out. What I found has alarmed me. Worse still is the fact that so few of us are talking about it. Eureka. A moral blind spot.

Let’s start with the animals we profess to love: our pets. Many of us cherish our dogs, cats or other critters and consider them part of the family. We spare no expense when caring for them. Others of us just skirt by, particularly once the novelty of owning a pet wears off. Owner complacency becomes indifference; indifference becomes neglect. One of the saddest outcomes is a dog that is chained and left in the backyard. A tethered dog lives in utter misery without physical or mental stimulation. Owner neglect on a much larger scale results in 3 million to 4 million dogs and cats being euthanized each year. That’s about 10,000 per day. Much of this results from pet owners simply failing to spay or neuter their animals. With free and discounted spay/neuter opportunities galore, that’s inexcusable.

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The cost of fixing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage companies that last year bought or guaranteed three-quarters of all U.S. home loans, will be at least $160 billion and could grow to as much as $1 trillion after the biggest bailout in American history.

Fannie and Freddie, now 80 percent owned by U.S. taxpayers, already have drawn $145 billion from an unlimited line of government credit granted to ensure that home buyers can get loans while the private housing-finance industry is moribund. That surpasses the amount spent on rescues of American International Group Inc., General Motors Co. or Citigroup Inc., which have begun repaying their debts.

“It is the mother of all bailouts,” said Edward Pinto, a former chief credit officer at Fannie Mae, who is now a consultant to the mortgage-finance industry.

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Public school teacher pensions are a ticking time bomb. They’re short by $933 billion in assets needed to cover promises to retirees, or more than $18,600 per public school pupil.

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The awareness of sin used to be our shadow. Christians hated sin, feared it, fled from it, grieved over it. Some of our grandparents agonized over their sins. A man who lost his temper might wonder whether he could still go to Holy Communion. A woman who for years envied her more attractive and intelligent sister might worry that this sin threatened her very salvation.

[Today] preachers mumble about sin. the other custodians of moral awareness often ignore, trivialize, or evade it.

–Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), pp. ix-x

For a generation growing up with digital media, the written word printed on paper has little appeal ”” even if it’s the word of God. It’s for them that an Orlando, Fla., company has come up with the multimedia digital Glo Bible.

“You have entire generations of people that don’t engage with paper very well,” says Nelson Saba, founder of Immersion Digital. “If you look at Bible literacy among younger generations, it’s dismal.” The Glo Bible “is designed to be a digital alternative to the paper Bible.”

A Gallup poll in 2000 found that about one-quarter of people ages 18 through 29 read the Bible weekly ”” about half the rate of those 65 or older. Part of that, Saba contends, is the younger generation’s aversion to the printed word.

“There is nothing wrong with paper. I have lots of paper Bibles, but it’s just not the media they engage,” he says.

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French and German banks have lent nearly $1 trillion to the most troubled European countries and are more exposed to the debt crisis than the banks of any other countries, according to a new report that is likely to add pressure on institutions to detail their holdings.

French banks had lent $493 billion to Spain, Greece, Portugal and Ireland by the end of 2009 while German banks had lent $465 billion, according to the report by the Bank for International Settlements, an institution based in Basel, Switzerland, that acts as a clearing house for the world’s central banks.

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Terry Vargas is living with the oil. Nearly three weeks ago, the third-generation shrimper pulled into port in Grand Isle, in southeast Louisiana, with a catch worth $1,400. But that was before authorities closed the rich Delta waters to fishing, thanks to the massive oil spill that has swamped the shoreline. Like many furloughed Louisiana fishermen, Vargas took a check from BP ”” part of the energy giant’s promise to Gulf Coast residents to “make things right” in the wake of the biggest environmental disaster in U.S. history. It was for $5,000, an amount Vargas says he can make in two nights during a good shrimping season. Still, $5,000 is better than nothing, but Vargas knows it won’t cover his expenses now or in the uncertain weeks ahead. So he has taken on carpentry jobs ”” the only paying work he can find ”” and today is building a small shed among the houses on Grand Isle, many of which stand on stilts, stork-like, to endure the inevitable floods.

Vargas thinks about the hurricane season that began on June 1 ”” forecasters predict a major one ”” and remembers when Katrina hit and left a pile of sand in his living room. Hurricanes pass; people evacuate, and then they rebuild. But the spill is a disaster of a different kind. He worries about a storm hitting the oily waters, raining crude on his hometown. “If that oil comes ashore,” Vargas says, “it’s all over.”

Read the whole thing.

It goes without saying ”” but must never be forgotten ”” that priority must always be given to the victims and survivors of abuse. They have suffered more than anyone. But at the same time, as the stories swirled around in newspapers and on television, it was impossible for many other ordinary Catholics and priests not to feel mired, sucked into the swamp.

One focus of attention became Rome, not simply because of the misconceived efforts to snare the Pope in the scandals, but also out of curiosity: there were people who wanted to know how those of us who live in Rome were coping. In particular they were wondering about the effects of the scandal in a college such as the Beda, where older men from the English-speaking world are preparing for priestly ordination. How was morale? Did we feel tarnished?

But quite soon I began to notice a shift in the line of interest. It became less a matter of how we were coping, and more a question of why people still wanted to be priests at all. The questions were not hostile. They were respectful. Nevertheless, people wanted to know, if our instinct is to shun failure, who would want to be associated with Catholic priesthood?

One part of the answer to such a question comes from remembering that the behaviour of a few priests, even one, however much it shames all those who have been ordained, is not the behaviour of the many. We find it as repellent as anyone.

And another part of the answer lies in the nature of vocation itself. Vocation, a sense of calling, is something compelling, like falling in love.

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There is the big picture for every politician who seeks to be more than a mere manager of the state’s business, a part of the mechanism of collecting Caesar’s taxes. Good government from a Christian point of view is about the acknowledgement and reinforcement of human dignity. And to see it in this way may help us out of the useless standoff that sometimes arises when we try and talk about what ‘strong’ government is and whether it is desirable.

We react against certain kinds of strong government or ‘big’ government on the grounds that we don’t want to be patronised or bullied or stripped of the fruits of our own work. And the mistake is then to hand over all responsibility to non-state agents ”“ which in practice often means non-accountable interests. Or, on the other hand, we try to make sure that government controls all outcomes and averts all risks by law and regulation. And this produces a culture of obsessional legislation, paralysis of initiative and pervasive anxiety.

Well, the last three decades have seen plenty of both these odd growths ”“ the delinquent children of Milton Friedman and Sidney Webb. Is it a fantasy to think that we just might be on the verge of discovering another register for talking politics and doing politics? One thing that the remarkable recent election has surely told us is that some of the historic party identities of British politics are not making much sense to a lot of the electorate; party loyalties are not what they were, because people have been unclear about what the arguments really are (despite the high-profile debating). The leaders of a new government, a new leadership in opposition, have the chance to put the question of human dignity at the centre of public debate by affirming that strong government is government that makes strong citizens ”“ not by resigning responsibility but by deliberately building capacity for co-operation, encouraging mutual dependence and skill-sharing, helping to create what some have called a ‘social-quality market’ in which people collaborate to define the goods they are seeking together instead of being reduced to the level of the simple relations between producer and consumer.

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In a unanimous decision, the California Supreme Court agreed…to hear St. James Anglican Church’s appeal that it has a constitutional right to continue its property rights battle against The Episcopal Church. By granting the St. James petition, the Court has acknowledged that this property rights dispute is far from over as the Episcopal Church has claimed, and that the Court must decide whether a defendant can be deprived of its property before it has had the opportunity to defend itself with evidence in a court of law.

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Almighty God, who hast revealed to thy Church thine eternal Being of glorious majesty and perfect love as one God in Trinity of Persons: Give us grace that, like thy bishop Basil of Caesarea, we may continue steadfast in the confession of this faith, and constant in our worship of thee, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; who livest and reignest for ever and ever.

Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh 4 and designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord…

–Romans 1:1-4

O Lord, heavenly Father, in whom is the fullness of light and wisdom: Enlighten our minds by thy Holy Spirit, and give us grace to receive thy Word with reverence and humility, without which no man can understand thy truth; for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord.

–John Calvin

I think [Mark ] Mykleby’s letter gets at something very important: We cannot fix what ails America unless we look honestly at our own roles in creating our own problems. We ”” both parties ”” created an awful set of incentives that encouraged our best students to go to Wall Street to create crazy financial instruments instead of to Silicon Valley to create new products that improve people’s lives. We ”” both parties ”” created massive tax incentives and cheap money to make home mortgages available to people who really didn’t have the means to sustain them. And we ”” both parties ”” sent BP out in the gulf to get us as much oil as possible at the cheapest price. (Of course, we expected them to take care, but when you’re drilling for oil beneath 5,000 feet of water, stuff happens.)

As Pogo would say, we have met the enemy and he is us.

But that means we’re also the solution ”” if we’re serious. Look, we managed to survive 9/11 without letting it destroy our open society or rule of law. We managed to survive the Wall Street crash without letting it destroy our economy. Hopefully, we will survive the BP oil spill without it destroying our coastal ecosystems. But we dare not press our luck.

We have to use this window of opportunity to insulate ourselves as much as possible against all the bad things we cannot control and get serious about fixing the problems that we can control. We need to make our whole country more sustainable. So let’s pass an energy-climate bill that really reduces our dependence on Middle East oil. Let’s pass a financial regulatory reform bill that really reduces the odds of another banking crisis. Let’s get our fiscal house in order, as the economy recovers. And let’s pass an immigration bill that will enable us to attract the world’s top talent and remain the world’s leader in innovation.

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Ghanaians thronged the streets of the capital and launched what promises to be an all-night celebration to mark the first win by an African team at the World Cup in South Africa.

Large crowds gathered around major streets in Accra to celebrate the 1-0 victory against Serbia. Cars draped in the national flag swarmed the streets, and some drivers honked their horns as others sang.

Radio stations also said celebrations were taking place nationally.

Congratulations to them–read it all.

North Korea warned of an “all-out military strike” to destroy South Korean loudspeakers and other propaganda tools along their fortified border, according to the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency.

South Korea’s preparation for psychological warfare, is a “direct declaration of a war” against the North, the general staff of the communist state’s military said today in a statement on KCNA. The North’s military retaliation may turn Seoul into “a sea of flame,” the statement said.

The South has already installed loudspeakers in 11 places along the border and is attempting to set up electronic displays, according to the statement.

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Caught this on the morning run–really inspiring. Watch it all-KSH.

It started as a traffic ticket, issued to a woman at the wheel whose vision police said was dangerously obstructed by a full-face Islamic veil.

Before long, the case expanded into charges of polygamy and welfare fraud lodged against her common-law husband, a French national of Algerian origin. And now, according to Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux, it has become a reason to amend the constitution to harden the way French society deals with lawbreakers among a Muslim minority estimated at more than 5 million.

The noisy rise to national concern of a $25 traffic ticket issued to Sandrine Mouleres last April in the port city of Nantes, 220 miles west of Paris, has illuminated the extent of unease in France and other Western European countries over Muslim populations whose customs and visibility often clash with the continent’s secular and Christian values.

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…what will be its effect on the litigants in this case? Simply stated, to require them to spend more time and money in trying the issues of ownership. Significantly, the Virginia Supreme Court’s opinion did not address the arguments which had been made about the validity, under Virginia law, of the trusts which the Dennis Canon’s passage in 1979 attempted to create. At that time, Virginia law did not recognize unincorporated associations (above the level of a local congregation) as having legal standing to hold any beneficial interests in religious property. That law was not changed until 1992. Thus on remand, the Fairfax County Circuit Court will be asked to adhere to its earlier ruling that the enactment of the Dennis Canon was ineffective to create any trust in the parishes’ property in favor of either the Diocese or ECUSA.

At issue in the proceedings on remand will be the language in the church deeds, their articles of association, and the provisions in the diocesan and national canons — some of which evidence the court has already examined in connection with certain issues in the case. ECUSA and the Diocese will be trying once again to prove that the properties were held in trusts whose existence could be implied from the circumstances under which they were acquired and subsequently held. The CANA congregations, on the other hand, will offer evidence to prove that no such implied trusts ever arose.

Thus the Court’s decision today holds little precedential value for the wider issues at stake in litigation in other states between ECUSA, its dioceses, and their parishes. The proceedings in Virginia will drag on for another two years or so, after which there will inevitably be a further request to the Supreme Court to review any decision by the trial court. (In Virginia, review of a trial court’s civil decision is discretionary with the Supreme Court, and not a matter of right.)

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(ENS) The full text of her sermon may be found here–read it all.

AUSTERITY is a word much found on the lips of politicians and economists at the moment; but it is seldom heard from technologists. And although the idea that “less is more” has many adherents in architecture, design and fashion, the technology industry has historically espoused the opposite view. Products should have as many features as possible; and next year’s version should have even more. As prices fall, what starts off as a fancy new feature quickly becomes commonplace””try buying a phone without a camera, or a car without electric windows””prompting companies to add new features in an effort to outdo their rivals. Never mind if nobody uses most of these new features (this article is being typed into word-processing software from 1997, for instance, but it seems to work perfectly well). In an arms race, more is always more.

But now there are signs that technologists are waking up to the benefits of minimalism, thanks to two things: feature fatigue among consumers who simply want things to work, and strong demand from less affluent consumers in the developing world. It is telling that the market value of Apple, the company most closely associated with simple, elegant high-tech products, recently overtook that of Microsoft, the company with the most notorious case of new-featuritis. True, Apple’s products contain lots of features under the hood, but the company has a knack for concealing such complexity using elegant design. Other companies have also prospered by providing easy-to-use products: think of the Nintendo Wii video-games console or the Flip video camera. Gadgets are no longer just for geeks, and if technology is to appeal to a broad audience, simplicity trumps fancy specifications.

Another strand of techno-austerity can be found in software that keeps things simple in order to reduce distractions and ensure that computer-users remain focused and productive….

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A specially outfitted ship ventures into deep ocean waters in search of oil, increasingly difficult to find. Lines of authority aboard the ship become tangled. Ambition outstrips ability. The unpredictable forces of nature rear up, and death and destruction follow in their wake. “Some fell flat on their faces,” an eyewitness reported of the stricken crew. “Through the breach, they heard the waters pour.”

The words could well have been spoken by a survivor of the doomed oil rig Deepwater Horizon, which exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in April, killing 11 men and leading to the largest oil spill in United States history. But they come instead, of course, from that wordy, wayward Manhattanite we know as Ishmael, whose own doomed vessel, the whaler Pequod, sailed only through the pages of “Moby-Dick.”

In the weeks since the rig explosion, parallels between that disaster and the proto-Modernist one imagined by Melville more than a century and a half ago have sometimes been striking ”” and painfully illuminating as the spill becomes a daily reminder of the limitations, even now, of man’s ability to harness nature for his needs. The novel has served over the years as a remarkably resilient metaphor for everything from atomic power to the invasion of Iraq to the decline of the white race (this from D. H. Lawrence, who helped revive Melville’s reputation). Now, 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, its themes of hubris, destructiveness and relentless pursuit are as telling as ever.

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For too long, we evangelical Christians have maintained an uneasy ecological conscience. I include myself in this indictment.

We’ve had an inadequate view of human sin….

We’ve had an inadequate view of human life and culture.

What is being threatened in the Gulf states isn’t just seafood or tourism or beach views. What’s being threatened is a culture. As social conservatives, we understand”¦or we ought to understand”¦that human communities are formed by traditions and by mores, by the bond between the generations. Culture is, as Russell Kirk said, a compact reaching back to the dead and forward to the unborn. Liberalism wants to dissolve those traditions, and make every generation create itself anew; not conservatism.

Every human culture is formed in a tie with the natural environment. In my hometown, that’s the father passing down his shrimping boat to his son or the community gathering for the Blessing of the Fleet at the harbor every year. In a Midwestern town, it might be the apple festival. In a New England town, it might be the traditions of whalers or oystermen. The West is defined by the frontier and the mountains. And so on.

When the natural environment is used up, unsustainable for future generations, cultures die. When Gulfs are dead, when mountaintops are removed, when forests are razed with nothing left in their place, when deer populations disappear, cultures die too.

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President Obama urged reluctant lawmakers Saturday to quickly approve nearly $50 billion in emergency aid to state and local governments, saying the money is needed to avoid “massive layoffs of teachers, police and firefighters” and to support the still-fragile economic recovery.

In a letter to congressional leaders, Obama defended last year’s huge economic stimulus package, saying it helped break the economy’s free fall, but argued that more spending is urgent and unavoidable. “We must take these emergency measures,” he wrote in an appeal aimed primarily at members of his own party.

The letter comes as rising concern about the national debt is undermining congressional support for additional spending to bolster the economy. Many economists say more spending could help bring down persistently high unemployment, but with Republicans making an issue of the record deficits run up during the recession, many Democratic lawmakers are eager to turn off the stimulus tap.

“I think there is spending fatigue,” House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said recently. “It’s tough in both houses to get votes.”

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