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The Associated Press, December 22, 2007

LONDON, England (AP) — Tony Blair, who often kept his religious views private while serving as Britain’s prime minister, has converted to Catholicism, officials said Saturday.

Blair, who had long been a member of the Church of England, converted to the Catholic faith during a Mass held Friday night at a chapel in London, the Catholic Church said.

“It can be confirmed that Tony Blair has been received into full communion with the Catholic Church by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor,” the head of the church in England and Wales, the church said in a statement.

“I’m very glad to welcome Tony Blair into the Catholic Church,” the statement quoted Murphy-O’Connor as saying.

“For a long time he’s been a regular worshipper at Mass with his family and in recent months he’s been following a program of formation for his reception into full communion. Our prayers are with him, his family and his wife at this joyful moment in their journey of faith together,” Murphy-O’Connor said.

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David Evans, Bloomberg.com, December 18, 2007

It was the first day of November and Coleman Stipanovich’s world was coming undone. Florida school districts and towns had begun pulling their cash out of the $26 billion money market fund he supervised, after they learned it held subprime-tainted debt.

Stipanovich, who earned $180,214 in 2006 as executive director of the State Board of Administration, was in New York in confidential meetings with Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the largest U.S. underwriter of mortgage-backed bonds. Lehman was proposing ways to help the state manage the risk of its debt investments, according to a letter the bank sent to Stipanovich after the meeting.

What Stipanovich, 58, hadn’t told his boss, Florida Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, was that Lehman Brothers was the same firm that had sold the state fund $842 million of mortgage-backed debt in July and August. Those securities defaulted within four months, and totaled more failing debt than any other bank sold the state, Florida records show. “At the time, I never knew it was Lehman Brothers that actually sold us these investments,” Sink says.

Sink also was unaware that former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who incorporated Jeb Bush & Associates in February 2007, a month after completing his second term, had been hired as a consultant to Lehman Brothers in June. Bush is the brother of President George W. Bush.

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Daniel Gross, Slate Magazine, December 20, 2007

This fall should have been an excellent time for companies that cater to well-heeled hunters and fishers. The farm-based economies of the Great Plains and Midwest are roaring. And the onset of the presidential campaign season, during which you often find city slickers posing as big-game hunters, usually provides a boost—for retailers and comedians alike. President Bush, in what now looks like foreshadowing, went out to shoot for doves during his 1994 gubernatorial campaign, and instead brought down a killdeer, which was protected by state law. John Kerry’s duck hunting in the fall of 2004 failed to sway rural voters. More recently, tough guy Vice President Dick Cheney bagged a septuagenarian, and ex-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney bragged about his long history of hunting varmints.

But this fall has been a terrible one for those in the business of making and selling rifles and shotguns. And for the dwindling core of optimists who believe the American consumer is doing just fine, the stock charts of companies like Cabela’s, Gander Mountain, and Smith & Wesson should cause them to check their scopes.

Cabela’s, which started as a catalog retailer in Nebraska in the 1960s, has enjoyed explosive growth: It now boasts 26 stores, with seven more to open soon. (As Cabela’s grew into a huge phenomenon—Cabela’s is to the rural well-off what REI is to blue-staters, or L.L. Bean to preppies—clueless New York-based editors occasionally dispatched writers like Manny Howard to decode the alien, rural culture of the company for their urban audiences.) But Cabela’s has done poorly in recent months. Its third-quarter earnings, reported on Nov. 1, were decent, although the company reported disappointing margins. But as the geese began to migrate south, investors soured on the company’s prospects. As this three-month chart shows, Cabela’s has lost 40 percent of its value since September.

Like Cabela’s, Gander Mountain is a Midwest-based (St. Paul, Minn.) purveyor of hunting and fishing gear that evolved from a catalog retailer into a large (115-store) chain. After a solid first half of the year, Gander Mountain has tumbled. In its third quarter, which ended Nov. 3, same-store sales plummeted 8.4 percent from 2006, and the company reported a loss. The culprits, according to CEO Mark Baker: “warm weather across northern states, which affects our critical fall hunting seasons, and soft consumer demand across our store base.” Baker also said the fourth quarter wasn’t looking much better “in light of continued softness in consumer discretionary purchases.” But what’s good for geese has been bad for Gander Mountain. As this three-month chart shows, the company’s stock has lost about 60 percent of its value this fall.

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Alex Koppelman, Salon, December 19, 2007

Maverick Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul has been dogged by questions about his supporters throughout the campaign. Commentators have pointed to the collection of New World Order conspiracy theorists and white supremacists who make up a small proportion of his constituency and to previous questionable statements on race at least partially attributable to the Texas congressman. Paul’s campaign doesn’t seem to be afraid of the charges, though. According to a spokesman for Paul, the campaign will be keeping one donation that has raised a few eyebrows.

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Jenn Abelson, The Boston Globe, December 12, 2007

The titles are grim: ‘‘His Days Are Numbered,’’ ‘‘The End is Near,’’ and ‘‘The Official Countdown.’’

But these are not your ordinary apocalyptic tales lining the shelves at area bookstores. Instead, they are calendars, many, many calendars, counting down the days until the end of the Bush administration.

As President George W. Bush enters his final year with some of the lowest approval ratings in his two terms in office, publishers are seizing on a disgruntled America and hoping to cash in this holiday season with a bounty of Bush-bashing calendars and handbooks. The countdown products feature celebratory exclamations like ‘‘Yes, the End is Near!’’ or ‘‘Hang in there! It’s almost over!’’ along with unflattering pictures of Bush and quotes from the president.

In Downtown Crossing, the items are so popular that Borders bookstore has dedicated coveted aisle space to them, with a ‘‘Countdown to Victory’’ sign hanging over products including ‘‘Bye Bye Bush’’ and ‘‘The Bad President,’’ along with four exclusive ‘‘Countdown to Victory’’calendars for presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Barack Obama.

Sales of the Bush calendars are up 30 percent over last year, according to Ann Binkley, a Borders Group spokeswoman.

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Karen Matthews, The Associated Press, Dec 5, 2007

NEW YORK – The Archdiocese of New York is handing out coloring and comic books that warn children about sex predators, the first such effort by a Roman Catholic diocese in the United States.

In the coloring book, a perky guardian angel tells children not to keep secrets from their parents, not to meet anyone from an Internet chat room and to allow only “certain people” like a doctor or parent to see “where your bathing suit would be.”

In a comic book version for children over 10, a teenager turns to St. Michael the Archangel for strength to report that two schoolmates are being sexually abused.

Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the archdiocese, said the have been distributed to about 300 schools and 400 religious education programs to use as a resource. They are also free online.

“It’s to help young people to know situations they should not get into,” he said. “How to be safe — but to try to do it in an age-appropriate and sensitive way.”

Some critics, while applauding the intent, say the books should say explicitly that trusted adults — including priests — may be the abusers.

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Steve Rubenstein, The San Francisco Gate, December 4, 2007

Conservative talk show host Michael Savage sued an Islamic rights group Monday for rebroadcasting on its Web site several excerpts from his radio show in which he called the Quran a “book of hate” and said Muslims “need deportation.”

Savage, in a suit filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, said the Council on American-Islamic Relations had violated copyright law by using the excepts in a campaign to persuade advertisers to stop sponsoring his show.

In the excerpts, Savage calls the Quran a “hateful little book,” says Muslims “breed bombers” and asserts that the religion of Islam seeks to “convert or kill” nonbelievers.

The council, in rebroadcasting the excerpts, urges visitors to its Web site to complain to Savage’s advertisers.

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The Associated Press, November 29, 2007

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Rep. Henry Hyde, the Illinois Republican who steered the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton and was a hero of the anti-abortion movement, died Thursday. He was 83.

Mary Ann Schultz, a spokeswoman for Rush University Medical Center, said Hyde died Thursday at 2:30 a.m. CST at that hospital. She said Hyde, who underwent open-heart surgery in July, was admitted for persistent renal failure related to his cardiac condition and suffered from a fatal arrhythmia.

Hyde retired from Congress at the end of the last session. Earlier this month, President Bush presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

”During more than 30 years as a congressman, he represented the people of Illinois with character and dignity — and always stood for a strong and purposeful America,” Bush said in a statement Thursday. ”This fine man believed in the power of freedom, and he was a tireless champion of the weak and forgotten. He used his talents to build a more hopeful America and promote a culture of life.”

House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio said in a statement: ”In his respect for the institutional integrity of the House of Representatives, Henry took second place to no one.”

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