The United States has entered a new phase in the war against al Qaeda and its allies, drawing down from its large-scale combat operations in Afghanistan and moving to more targeted counterterrorism operations where military attack drones will play a major role.

However, the U.S. bishops are now warning increased U.S. dependence on military attack drones for “targeted killings” pose serious moral questions that President Barack Obama, Congress and the U.S. public must consider.

Bishop Richard Pates, head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on International Justice and Peace, wrote a May 17 letter to the White House stating that the military use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or “drones” in certain cases appeared to “violate the law of war, international human-rights law and moral norms.”

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Every American president has faced the same central questions: What is the appropriate relationship between security and liberty? When should the scales tip one way or the other? We have never found a universal answer, which says as much about the enormous challenge our elected leaders accept as it does about who we are and what we value.

Presidents often do what they insist needs to be done to protect their people — and gamble that they'll be forgiven for the inevitable erosion of rights. Congress and the public typically fall in line, particularly in the post-9/11 world. And the nation moves on until the next situation flares.

In general, both presidents and their people inherently believe in America's ability to remain true to its identity and not let others define it, as long as it abides by the country's founding principles. The trouble, or perhaps the gift, is that the framers of our Constitution made sure to include leeway in the ability for leaders to tip the security-vs.-liberty scales when the situation demands.

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Nigeria's military has imposed a 24-hour curfew in parts of the north-eastern city of Maiduguri as its offensive against militants continues.

A statement named 11 areas of the city where people must remain inside their homes until further notice.

Maiduguri, capital of Borno state, has been an important base for Boko Haram Islamist militants.

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A United Methodist woman in Richmond, Va., said she was acting out of Christian compassion in helping to arrange the burial of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings.

“Jesus tells us to love our enemies, not hate them after they’re dead,” said Martha Mullen, in a phone interview. “That’s why I kind of got this ball rolling.”

Ms. Mullen, a 48-year-old counselor in private practice who studied at a United Methodist seminary, was distressed at news accounts about the difficulty of finding a burial place for Tsarnaev, who died in an April 19 shootout with police.

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Radical and intolerant Islamist leaders preached to crowds of students at almost 200 official events in the past year, according to a study of external speakers at universities including Cambridge, Birmingham and University College London.

Segregated seating for male and female students is understood to have been implemented for at least a quarter of those public meetings held by the Islamic societies at 21 universities.

Two institutions have announced investigations into segregated meetings. But research by Student Rights, which was set up to tackle extremism on campus, indicates that the practice is prevalent across Britain, despite university equality rules forbidding it.

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The mystery surrounding the burial of the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev has come to an end. The Boston Marathon bombing suspect was buried this week at a small Muslim cemetery in Doswell, Va.

According to his completed death certificate, which was released on Friday, Mr. Tsarnaev was buried on Thursday at Al-Barzakh Cemetery, about half an hour north of Richmond. Officials in Massachusetts had said the body was moved to a burial site out of state. But they had refused to disclose where.

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Responding to Carson’s testimony at a House Subcommittee on Africa hearing in July 2012, Subcommittee Chairman, U.S. Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ), remonstrated that poverty alone does not drive people to violence. And in any case, Boko Haram is well funded by outside Islamists. “Heavy machine guns” and “buses and pickup trucks mounted with machine guns” are just the latest examples to show that Boko Haram is not just a motley crew of impoverished, marginalized local Muslims. In February 2013 it was revealed that hundreds of Boko Haram members had trained for months in terrorist camps in northern Mali with the local “Ansar Dine” al Qaeda of Mali. Their former chef, explained that he cooked for over 200 Nigerians who had “arrived in Timbuktu in April 2012 in about 300 cars, after al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) swept into the city.”

In its 2013 Nigeria briefing, human rights group Justice for Jos +, a project of Jubilee Campaign USA, remarked, “Ironically, in northern Nigeria, it is Christians who are totally disenfranchised politically, economically, and socially in their own states and by their own ethnic groups due to their religious identity.” This is worse than just “political marginalization,” Mr. Carson! Justice for Jos + continues, “Christians are regarded as inferior to Muslims and suffer ongoing, systematic and comprehensive discrimination even by local and (Sharia) state governments.”

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Cemeteries and even some mosques have refused to take his body. His city, Cambridge, has urged family members to bury him elsewhere. Republican U.S. Senate candidate Gabriel Gomez and local talk radio host Dan Rae want him dumped in the ocean, like Osama bin Laden. Clergy have largely kept mum.

“The only signs of people who are showing some sort of moral conscience are those few who stand with a card near the funeral home saying (burial) is a corporal work of mercy,” said James Keenan, a moral theologian at Boston College. “To say, ‘we won’t bury him’ makes us barbaric. It takes away mercy, the trademark of Christians. … I’m talking about this because somebody should.”

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BOB ABERNETHY, host:....The president referred to self-radicalizing. What—how does that work, and what can the Muslim community do to prevent it?

HARIS TARIN (Muslim Public Affairs Council): Well, the phenomenon of self-radicalization is where individuals who do not find a place in mainstream Muslim institutions, places like mosques and organizations, they don’t find a place for their fiery rhetoric, for their violent, extremist rhetoric, so they go online, and they listen to sermons, and they listen to individuals like Anwar al-Awlaki or Adam Gadahn or other folks who misinterpret the religion to give it a violent, violent ideology, and they fall prey to these individuals who are basically online predators, and they get influenced by these individuals to address their grievances through violence....

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he surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings told F.B.I. interrogators that he and his brother considered suicide attacks and striking on the Fourth of July as they plotted their deadly assault, according to two law enforcement officials.

But the suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, told investigators that he and his brother, Tamerlan, 26, who was killed in a shootout with the police, ultimately decided to use pressure-cooker bombs and other homemade explosive devices, the officials said.

The brothers finished building the bombs in Tamerlan’s apartment in Cambridge, Mass., faster than they had anticipated, and so decided to accelerate their attack to the Boston Marathon on April 15, Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts, according to the account that Dzhokhar provided to authorities.

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Italian police arrested four men on Tuesday, who are suspected of planning terrorist attacks in Italy, the US and Israel, reports Reuters News. One of the arrested men is believed to be a Tunisian former imam at a mosque in the city of Andria, in the southern Italian region of Puglia, where police said the terror cell was based. According to paramilitary police, the men aimed to train terrorists and send them to fight abroad, and are suspected of conspiracy to commit international terrorism and incite racial hatred.

According to investigators, the four men focused their recruitment activities among illegal immigrants, who were subsequently sent to training camps in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Chechnya. Police described the group as being characterized by "fierce anti-Semitism and anti-Western sentiment" and an aversion to states viewed as enemies in the context of religious war.

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[Neil] Diamond flew his private jet to Boston. He showed up unannounced to Fenway about 30 minutes before start time, called the control room and asked if he could sing.

When the eighth inning came, Neil walked out in a Red Sox cap and the 35,000-strong crowd cheered. ''What an honour it is for me to be here today!'' Diamond told them. ''I bring love from the whole country.''

Then they sang along, out of sync to the backing track but that hardly mattered. Neither did the fact the Red Sox beat the Royals something to something else.

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Set amid the rolling plains outside Aleppo, the town of al-Safira looks just like another vicious battleground in Syria's civil war. On one side are lightly-armed rebels, on the other are government troops, and in between is a hotly-contested no-man's land of bombed-out homes and burned-out military vehicles.

The fight for al-Safira is no ordinary turf war, however, and the prize can be found behind the perimeter walls of the heavily-guarded military base on the edge of town. Inside what looks like a drab industrial estate is one of Syria's main facilities for producing chemical weapons - and among its products is sarin, the lethal nerve gas that the regime is now feared to be deploying in its bid to cling to power.

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The Boston Marathon bombings last week shocked America and served as a reminder that the threat of terrorism in the western world is still alive. While offering condolences to the victims, one group is pointing out that Nigerian Christians face such horrors every week in the face of Islamic extremist group Boko Haram.

In an open letter to the American people this week, the Christian Association of Nigerian-Americans (CANAN) wrote, "The evil of terrorism in today's world are now well-known and so too must be the demand of vigilance in the overall protection of the common good."

Laolu Akande, executive director of CANAN, is urging Americans to help protect Christians who are regularly attacked in Nigeria.

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In ways both big and small, both fleeting and transformational, this time simply felt different.

On the lawn of the First Baptist Church in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, Eve Nagler stood at a prayer vigil two days after terrorists attempted to shred the joy of Boston's biggest day with nails and BB's and bits of hurtling metal.

This, she knew, was not 9/11 – the scale, the shock, the fear were nothing like people had felt 12 years ago. Yet something else had shifted, too – something perhaps less easily definable but no less palpable to many of those at the vigil and across the suburbs that bound themselves together as "Boston Strong."

There was a calm, not only in the streets but in raw and wounded hearts.

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Pastor Greg Laurie knows a thing or two about prayer in tough times.

The honorary chairman of this year’s National Day of Prayer (May 2) says prayer was the only thing that got him through his son’s death five years ago. When fellow megachurch pastor Rick Warren lost his son Matthew to suicide, Laurie was the man he most wanted to hear from.

Laurie, 60, who leads the evangelical Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside, Calif., talked about prayer, grief and what not to say when a friend’s loved one dies. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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The Rev. John Wykes, director of the St. Francis Chapel at Boston's soaring Prudential Center, and the Rev. Tom Carzon, rector of Our Lady of Grace Seminary, were among the priests who were turned away right after the bombings. It was jarring for Father Wykes, who, as a hospital chaplain in Illinois a decade ago, was never denied access to crime or accident scenes.

"I was allowed to go anywhere. In Boston, I don't have that access," he says.

But Father Wykes says he has noticed a shift in the societal role of clergy over the past few decades: "In the Bing Crosby era—in the '40s, '50s, '60s—a priest with a collar could get in anywhere. That's changed. Priests are no longer considered to be emergency responders."

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The CIA pushed to have one of the suspected Boston Marathon bombers placed on a U.S. counterterrorism watch list more than a year before the attacks, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

Russian authorities contacted the CIA in the fall of 2011 and raised concerns that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed last week in a confrontation with police, was seen as an increasingly radical Islamist who could be planning to travel overseas.

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In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings that left three dead and more than 260 injured, perhaps none face more significant adjustments or a longer road ahead than the 14 amputees who lost a limb.

For these victims, the path forward involves relearning almost everything, from getting out of bed to getting in a car. Whether they go on to lead satisfying lives depends largely on how they handle the spiritual challenges at hand, according to amputees and researchers.

Losing a limb is like losing a family member: It involves grief and mourning, according to Jack Richmond, a Chattanooga, Tenn., amputee who leads education efforts for the Manassas, Va.-based Amputee Coalition. When one’s body and abilities are radically changed, questions of meaning are suddenly urgent: Why did this happen? Why am I here?

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The security planning for last week's Boston Marathon, where two bombs went off killing three people and wounding 264, included preparation for such an emergency, a top Massachusetts public safety official said on Wednesday.

"We spend months planning for the marathon. We did a tabletop exercise the week before that included a bombing scenario in it," Kurt Schwartz, the state's undersecretary for homeland security, told a panel at Harvard University.

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U.S. Pastor Saeed Abedini, who is currently suffering from internal bleeding in Iranian prison, said that he is praying for America in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings that killed three people and left over 200 injured last week.

"Pastor Saeed told family members he had heard about the terrorist bombings in Boston on the prison radio, expressed his concern, and told them he is praying for the victims and their families during this very challenging time for our nation," the American Center for Law and Justice revealed on Monday.

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After two troubling outbursts at a local mosque, leaders there told Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev he would no longer be welcome if he continued disrupting services.

Leaders at the Islamic Society of Boston's mosque in Cambridge say Tsarnaev, 26, who died early Friday (April 19) after a shootout with police, "disagreed with the moderate American-Islamic theology" of the mosque, but they never had "any hint" the brothers might be violent.

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The 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack, according to U.S. officials familiar with the interviews.

From his hospital bed, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has acknowledged his role in planting the explosives near the marathon finish line on April 15, the officials said. The first successful large-scale bombing in the post-Sept. 11, 2001, era, the Boston attack killed three people and wounded more than 250 others.

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If you ask me, I think it’s time we stop walking on eggshells with Islam.

It’s not healthy. This notion that any critique of Islam equates to Islamophobia is absurd and patronizing. It says to Muslims: “We criticize Judaism and Christianity because we think they can handle it, but we don’t think you can.” That’s insulting to Islam and to Muslims.

Every religion needs a good dose of criticism. That’s how they improve and become more human. That’s how they shed their outdated and immoral layers, like slavery and oppression of women. Where would Judaism be today without the centuries of relentless self-reflection and self-criticism that goes on to this day?

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Listen here if you wish.

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Canadian police and intelligence agencies will announce later today they have thwarted a plot to carry out a major terrorist attack, arresting suspects in Ontario and Quebec, CBC News has learned.

Highly placed sources tell CBC News the alleged plotters have been under surveillance for more than a year in Quebec and southern Ontario.

The investigation was part of a cross-border operation involving Canadian law enforcement agencies, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

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Friday morning, four Pakistani-American doctors dressed in business suits and medical scrubs sat in one of this city’s most popular breakfast spots and fretted. At an adjacent table, a middle-aged woman grew visibly nervous when their native land was mentioned. One of the doctors, a 47-year-old cardiologist, was despondent.

“We were all praying this wouldn’t happen,” he told me. “No matter what you do in your community, that’s the label that is attached.”

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For five years we have heard, principally from those who wield executive power, of a claimed need to make fundamental changes in this country, to change the world's—particularly the Muslim world's—perception of us, to press "reset" buttons. We have heard not a word from those sources suggesting any need to understand and confront a totalitarian ideology that has existed since at least the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s.

The ideology has regarded the United States as its principal adversary since the late 1940s, when a Brotherhood principal, Sayid Qutb, visited this country and was aghast at what he saw as its decadence. The first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993, al Qaeda attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, on the USS Cole in 2000, the 9/11 attacks, and those in the dozen years since—all were fueled by Islamist hatred for the U.S. and its values.

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"The city that started the American Revolution is proving its strength by simply moving forward; NBC’s Katie Tur reports."

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[...An] important strand of the British effort is what the UK government calls the “Prevent” strategy. This involves the police and local authorities working with Muslim organisations and communities to ensure that British nationals who become radicalised are identified and encouraged to channel their anger before they resort to violence.

Professor Michael Clarke, an expert on counter-terrorism at the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank, says the strategy has had some success. “It is about getting the Muslim community to accept responsibility for people in their midst, helping to identify those who are radicalised and working with the police and local authorities to stop them before they plan attacks,” he says....like a number of UK experts, he argues that the US has been slow to tackle “homegrown” jihadism pre-emptively. “The Americans find it hard to accept that jihadism can arise from within their own society. They still feel the phenomenon is pushed into the US by outside forces or foreign actors.”

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A close examination of the Tsarnaev family shows that, over the past five years or so, the personal lives of the family members slipped into turmoil, according to interviews with the parents, relatives and friends. The upheaval in the household was driven, at least in part, by a growing interest in religion by both Tamerlan and his mother.

Once known as a quiet teenager who aspired to be a boxer, Tamerlan Tsarnaev delved deeply into religion in recent years at the urging of his mother, who feared he was slipping into a life of marijuana, girls and alcohol. Tamerlan quit drinking and smoking, gave up boxing because he thought it was in opposition to his religion, and began pushing the rest of his family to pursue stricter ways, his mother recalled.

"You know how Islam has changed me," his mother, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in Makhachkala, Dagestan, says he told her.

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Four glowing white pillar candles illuminated photographs of the people killed in bombing-connected violence in the Boston area last week as the city sought comfort in religious services on the first Sunday after the blasts plunged the community into days of chaos.

The photographs showing the faces of 8-year-old Martin Richard, 23-year-old Lu Lingzi, 29-year-old Krystle Campbell and 26-year-old Sean Collier, a police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were propped up on the altar at Boston's Cathedral of the Holy Cross, where Roman Catholic Cardinal Sean Patrick O'Malley spoke about the city's pain and looked ahead to its spiritual recovery.

"Everyone has been profoundly affected by this wanton violence and destruction inflicted upon our community by two young men unknown to all of us," said O'Malley, speaking to a crowd of mourners that included Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis, who sat in the front row of the cavernous cathedral with other elected officials. "It's very difficult to understand what was going on in their heads. What demons were operating, what ideologies or politics, or the perversions of their religion."

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CHAPLAIN MARY LOU VON EUEW (Tufts Medical Center): She said “the hardest thing about this is that some human beings can treat other human beings like this. I just don’t understand it.”

[KIM] LAWTON: Indeed, Von Euew says, after a tragedy like the bombing, clergy often hear age old questions about the nature of good and evil, suffering and the existence of a loving God.

VON EUEW: You know most of the time people deep down inside aren’t asking for an answer. They’re asking for you to fight and wrestle with the questions with them. We truly believe that God is with us when it happens, so we’re not suffering alone, that we have someone with us who loves us beyond all measure.

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While police in and around Boston hunt for celebrate the capture of 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the suspected Boston Marathon bombers, information gathered from various social media outlets indicate that he and his brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, harbored radical Islamic beliefs.

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This week, on Patriot’s Day, a day that celebrates the beginning of our country’s journey toward freedom, a horrific tragedy occurred.

The Boston Marathon bombing has left us all with a heavy heart and we pray for the victims and their families.

However, while the perpetrators of this act of terror hoped that they could shake the confidence of a city, they have instead only strengthened the resolve of our nation....

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On Monday, an act of terror wounded dozens and killed three innocent people at the Boston Marathon.

But in the days since, the world has witnessed one sure and steadfast truth: Americans refuse to be terrorized.

Ultimately, that’s what we’ll remember from this week. That’s what will remain. Stories of heroism and kindness; resolve and resilience; generosity and love....

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Numerous Muslim organizations across the United States have condemned the heinous bombing attacks that took place on Monday at the Boston Marathon, and they expressed their sympathy for the victims and their families. The attacks left three people dead and at least 140 injured.

Many Muslim organizations have called upon Muslims to pray for the victims and donate blood for those who were wounded.

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Profiled in the Lowell Sun in 2004, Tamerlan [Tsarnaev] said he liked the USA.

“America has a lot of jobs. That’s something Russia doesn’t have,” he told the newspaper. “You have a chance to make money here if you are willing to work.”

He later said, in a photo essay about his boxing exploits, that he hoped to be selected for the US Olympic team, and that he dreamed of becoming a naturalized citizen. But he also lamented his alienation, saying, “I don’t have a single American friend. I don’t understand them.’’

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Although terrorists from the Caucasus have struck in Moscow and other parts of Russia, the conflict in the region has never led to attacks in other countries. One possible explanation for the Boston bombings, said Aslan Doukaev, an expert on the Caucasus who works for Radio Liberty in Prague, is that the brothers were motivated by radical jihadism, not Chechen separatism.

As the war in Chechnya wound down after Russian forces withdrew — they left formally in 2009 — violence has spilled into neighboring republics such as Dagestan, where the Tsarnaev family once found shelter and where the brothers’ parents now live. That conflict is increasingly marked by radical Islamic terrorism in an often vicious cycle of attack and reprisal between insurgents and Russian security forces. Tamerlan visited Dagestan last year, according to an official with knowledge of his travels.

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation interviewed suspected marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011 at the request of the Russian government, but didn't find evidence of suspicious activity and closed the case, an FBI official said Friday.

The fact that the FBI spoke with Mr. Tsarnaev, who was killed Friday morning in a firefight with authorities, is likely to become a focal point of the post mortem into how the attack was able to be carried out at the Boston Marathon. It also speaks to the challenge faced by authorities as terrorism morphs to some extent from the complex international plots of a decade ago to small-scale attacks carried out by individuals located within U.S.

U.S. counterterrorism policy has since 2001 focused largely on killing terrorists overseas or preventing them from getting into the U.S. But the Boston bombings show how the diffusion of terrorist tactics easily transcends borders. Countering small groups of individuals inside the U.S. can be a bedeviling assignment.

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Quite a photo.

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[Yossef] Bodansky traces the secret history of the two Chechen wars, illuminating how the process of "Chechenization" transformed the fight from a secular nationalist struggle into a jihadist holy war against Russia and the secular West.

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Life is difficult. It can knock you down. Sometimes, an entire nation gets knocked down.

First it was Boston. Some mad man (or men) lays waste to one of America's most hallowed sporting events — the Boston Marathon. Sidewalks that should have been covered with confetti were covered in blood.

Then it was the quintessential small Texas town of West[, Texas]...

Taken together, it was a bruising week for a nation wearied by war and nagged by chronic unemployment.

Yet Americans are people of faith....

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The FBI today released photos and video of two suspects in the deadly Boston Marathon terror bombings case, appealing to the public to help law enforcement officials find them.

“Somebody out there knows these individuals,” said Richard DesLauriers, special agent in charge of the Boston FBI office. He said the two men are considered “armed and dangerous.”

DesLauriers described the two men as Suspect No. 1 and Suspect No. 2. Suspect No. 1 was wearing a dark hat. Suspect No. 2 was wearing a white hat.

DesLauriers said Suspect No. 2 was observed planting a bomb, leaving it in place shortly before it went off.

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...one of the most striking and certainly the most moving images coming out of Boston was of people rushing forward toward the sites of the explosions to help the injured.

The Archbishop of Boston, Sean O’Malley, spoke for many of us when he said that “the citizens of the City of Boston and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are blessed by the bravery and heroism of many, particularly the men and women of the police and fire departments and emergency services who responded within moments of these tragic events.”

But it wasn’t only those in uniform. Carlos Arredondo, a peace activist whose son was killed in Iraq, became a national hero when he jumped over the security fence and started helping the injured. And he wasn’t the only civilian who ran towards the chaos when common sense dictated running away from it.

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Deeply moving--take the time to watch and listen to it all.

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Here is the picture circulating hither and yon.

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No sooner had the reality of the Boston Marathon bombing sunk in on Monday (April 15) afternoon than Muslim activists in the U.S. began sending out a slew of news releases, tweets and Facebook messages urging prayers and aid for the victims – and condemning whoever was behind the horrific attack.

“American Muslims, like Americans of all backgrounds, condemn in the strongest possible terms today’s cowardly bomb attack on participants and spectators of the Boston Marathon,” Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said in a statement on Monday.

It’s a familiar race against time for Muslim groups. Almost as soon as the smoke cleared around Copley Square, they knew from long experience that some would immediately point the finger of blame in their direction.

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...I do love this city. I love its atrocious accent, its inferiority complex in terms of New York, its nut-job drivers, the insane logic of its street system. I get a perverse pleasure every time I take the T in the winter and the air-conditioning is on in the subway car, or when I take it in the summer and the heat is blasting. Bostonians don’t love easy things, they love hard things — blizzards, the bleachers in Fenway Park, a good brawl over a contested parking space. Two different friends texted me the identical message yesterday: They messed with the wrong city. This wasn’t a macho sentiment. It wasn’t “Bring it on” or a similarly insipid bit of posturing. The point wasn’t how we were going to mass in the coffee shops of the South End to figure out how to retaliate. Law enforcement will take care of that, thank you. No, what a Bostonian means when he or she says “They messed with the wrong city” is “You don’t think this changes anything, do you?”

Trust me, we won’t be giving up any civil liberties to keep ourselves safe because of this. We won’t cancel next year’s marathon. We won’t drive to New Hampshire and stockpile weapons. When the authorities find the weak and terminally maladjusted culprit or culprits, we’ll roll our eyes at whatever backward ideology they embrace and move on with our lives.

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The bombing of the Boston Marathon on Monday was the end of more than a decade in which the United States experienced strikingly few terrorist attacks, in part because of far more aggressive law enforcement tactics in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In fact, Sept. 11 was an anomaly in an overall gradual decline in the number of terrorist attacks since the 1970s, according to one of the most authoritative sources of terrorism statistics, the Global Terrorism Database, maintained by a consortium of researchers and based at the University of Maryland.

Only in 2009, after 13 people were killed in a shooting spree at Fort Hood in Texas, did the number of fatalities in post-9/11 terrorism on American soil rise into double digits in a single year. That was a sharp contrast with the 1970s, by far the most violent decade since the tracking began in 1970, the database shows.

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Shaken Bostonians and visitors in town for the marathon sought solace side-by-side Tuesday at the downtown Episcopal Cathedral Church of St. Paul, where priests and a bishop led them in a vigil for victims, for healing and for peace.

More than 100 worshipers attended the hastily planned midday service. Following a burial rite, they prayed for the three killed in Monday's bombings, sang hymns and received Communion.

Bishop Suffragan Gayle Harris, who presided at the service, said they wanted to respond with "some sense of hope and light." She told those gathered, "We need to run another race to address the violence in our society, the hatred and the anger."

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A prayer service with Holy Eucharist is being planned for Tuesday, April 16 at 12:15 p.m. at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul (138 Tremont Street) in Boston, with Bishop Gayle E. Harris presiding (assuming downtown conditions and transit have regularized). All are welcome.

Downtown church personnel reached so far report chaos in the Back Bay area and limited mobility.

Trinity Church in Copley Square was closed today for the Marathon; Marathon runners on Trinity Church's charity team are reported safe....

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Pope Francis has sent his “sympathy and closeness in prayer” to the people of Boston in a telegram sent on his behalf.
The telegram reads “In the aftermath of this senseless tragedy, His Holiness invokes God’s peace upon the dead, his consolation upon the suffering and his strength upon all those engaged in the continuing work of relief and response. At this time of mourning the Holy Father prays that all Bostonians will be united in a resolve not to be overcome by evil, but to combat evil with good (cf. Rom 12:21), working together to build an ever more just, free and secure society for generations yet to come.”

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From the FBI to local police departments, law enforcement agencies have dramatically shifted their emphasis to counterterrorism over the past decade, gathering intelligence on both domestic and foreign extremist groups. The George W. Bush and Obama administrations have created an enormous global apparatus designed to track and target terrorists.

But officials have always warned that the United States cannot prevent every attempted strike on U.S. soil. In some recent plots, authorities have benefited as much from luck as investigative skill.

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The powerful blasts at the Boston Marathon finish line Monday underscore why the Federal Bureau of Investigation has spent years refining its "tripwire'' system for catching would-be bomb makers before they can build a deadly device.

For years, federal agents have asked businesses that sell materials useful in making bombs to alert authorities to any suspicious orders. The types of tripwires in place have shifted over the years. In the 1990s, law enforcement worried mostly about fertilizer-based bombs after such devices were used in the Oklahoma City attacks of April 1995. In the past decade, chemical-based bombs have come into focus as authorities adapt to the changing threat.

"The tripwires have certainly been successful in the past,'' said Don Borelli, a former counterterrorism official at the FBI who now works for Soufan Group.

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“I’d never imagined in my wildest dreams this would ­ever happen,” Norden said, sitting on a bench outside the Beth Israel Deaconess emergency room Monday night.

As she looked at her feet, with socks mismatched ­because she had dressed so quickly to leave the house, tears fell to the sidewalk.

“I feel sick,” she said. “I think I could pass out.”

She had yet to see either son, because doctors had not authorized visitors. Both are graduates of Stoneham High School and had been laid off recently from their jobs as roofers. The oldest, age 33, still lives in Stoneham, the younger in Wakefield. Both are avid fishermen.

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If you can stomach it, there are photos that are (warning--contains some graphic images including one which requires you to click on it to see {I didn't do so]) collected there.

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An Anglican Communion clergy[man], Godwin Daramola, has condemned the Nigerian government for its inability to prevent many woes befalling the nation.

Mr. Daramola, who delivered the sermon at the 10th year remembrance service held in honour of Atinuke Ige, late daughter of the slain Governor of the old Oyo State and former Attorney-General of the Federation, Bola Ige, at the St. Anne's Church, Molete, Ibadan on Wednesday, identified some of the social ills defying government's efforts as corruption, insecurity, materialism and selfishness.

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The President of AYF, Wuse Archdeaconry Council, Barrister Isaac Harrison stated this during a workshop organised for youth, with the theme; “Empowered To Impact The World”, in Abuja.

According to him, “We cannot grant amnesty to people we do not know, we cannot also grant amnesty to people who had already made up their minds that whether there is dialogue or not, they will go on with whatever they are doing, If Boko Haram actually need peace, they will not be killing those that are moving towards that peace.

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Primate of the Church of Nigeria, (Anglican Communion), Most Rev. Nicholas Okoh, yesterday stated that there was an evil force behind the Boko Haram sect.

Okoh said this in his sermon, titled “Alleluia! Christ is Risen”, at the Easter Sunday service of the Cathedral Church of the Advent, Life Camp, Gwarimpa, Abuja.

He said the dreaded group is challenged to the good fortunes of Nigeria., assuring that it shall soon become history.

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Church burnings, attacks on worshippers and suicide bombings in Nigeria are a recent phenomenon that threatens the longstanding harmony between Muslims and Christians, warned Nigeria’s new cardinal.

“(This) is all new to us,” Cardinal John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan, archbishop of Abuja, told MPs and Senators of the Canada Holy See Friendship Group Feb. 4.

“We didn’t think it would ever happen.”

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The U.S. military was closely tracking a one-eyed bandit across the Sahara in 2003 when it confronted a hard choice that is still reverberating a decade later. Should it try to kill or capture the target, an Algerian jihadist named Mokhtar Belmokhtar, or let him go?

Belmokhtar had trained at camps in Afghanistan, returned home to join a bloody revolt and was about to be blacklisted by the United Nations for supporting the Taliban and al-Qaeda. But he hadn’t attacked Americans, not yet, and did not appear to pose a threat outside his nomadic range in the badlands of northern Mali and southern Algeria.

Military commanders planned to launch airstrikes against Belmokhtar and a band of Arabs they had under surveillance in the Malian desert, according to three current and former U.S. officials familiar with the episode. But the ambassador to Mali at the time said she vetoed the plan, arguing that a strike was too risky and could stir a backlash against Americans.

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Prime Minister David Cameron has said the international community should use "everything at its disposal" to fight terrorism, on a visit to Algeria.

The recent hostage crisis, in which some 37 foreigners died, was "a reminder that what happens in other countries affects us at home", he said.

He also defended Western intervention in the conflict in neighbouring Mali.

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NARRATOR: Depending on the situation, the decision to kill comes from an intelligence officer who could be anywhere, a battle commander on the ground, or sometimes the pilot.

JEFFREY BROWN: Since the Obama administration came to power four years ago, the United States has vastly increased the number of drone strikes against suspected terrorists.

Just today, Reuters reported that six suspected al-Qaida militants were killed in Yemen. But their use has been highly controversial, on a number of levels.

And we move to that debate now, with Seth Jones, who worked for the commander of U.S. special forces in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2011 and is now a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, and Chris Anders, senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union....

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Police dogs checking for explosives at St George's Anglican Church, Tunis, on Sunday, were "a healthy reminder that we live in volatile times", the Area Bishop for North Africa, Dr Bill Musk, said on Tuesday. He spoke in the wake of an attack by Islamist terrorists in Algeria in which 37 hostages were killed, and a warning by the Prime Minister that North African states had become "a magnet for jihadists".

Addressing Parliament on Monday, Mr Cameron said that the "murderous violence" perpetrated by the terrorists at the remote Tigantourine gas complex in the Saharan desert last week required a "strong security response". Britain was engaged in a "generational struggle against an ideology which is an extreme distortion of the Islamic faith".

Clergy had mixed views on the implications of Mr Cameron's speech for Christians.

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A week of violence in Algeria and Mali has transformed al-Qaeda’s North Africa branch into a cause celebre for militant Islamists around the globe, boosting recruitment and fundraising for the jihadists and spurring fears of further terrorist attacks in the region and beyond.

Even after suffering tactical defeats in both countries in recent days, the movement known as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is being lionized in Internet chat rooms and in official statements by extremist groups, some of which are urging reprisal campaigns against Western interests....

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The Nigerian military says it has arrested a leader of the Islamist militant group, Boko Haram.

Mohammed Zangina was detained in the Government Reserved Area (GRA) of the north-eastern city of Maiduguri on Sunday afternoon, a statement said.

Mr Zangina, also known as Mallam Abdullahi and Alhaji Musa, was planning "deadly attacks" against civilians and security personnel there, it added.

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A device made of materials like those used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing could have been a former student’s “dry run” to see how authorities would respond to a bomb threat at Trident Technical College, Sheriff Al Cannon said Friday.

Local investigators and federal terrorism experts wouldn’t say whether the device could have exploded and caused damage near the North Charleston campus’ Student Center, which was mostly abandoned Monday for the holiday break.

The device contained ammonium nitrate, the same, readily available fertilizer that Timothy McVeigh used in his attack on the Oklahoma City federal building that killed 168 people.

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Military counterterrorism officials are seeking more capability to pursue extremist groups in Africa and elsewhere that they believe threaten the U.S., and the Obama administration is considering asking Congress to approve expanded authority to do it.

The move, according to administration and congressional officials, would be aimed at allowing U.S. military operations in Mali, Nigeria, Libya and possibly other countries where militants have loose or nonexistent ties to al Qaeda's Pakistan headquarters. Depending on the request, congressional authorization could cover the use of armed drones and special operations teams across a region larger than Iraq and Afghanistan combined, the officials said.

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Amid what is being termed as "genocide" of Christians by Boko Haram suicide bombers in Nigeria, Christians from this West African nation living in the U.S. have intensified their calls for the designation of the Islamist group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the State Department.

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Nigeria’s military is offering about $1.8 million in rewards for information leading to the arrest of top members of a radical Islamist sect that has killed hundreds of people in the country this year alone.

Lt. Col. Sagir Musa said in a statement Friday the bounty for Boko Haram sect leader Abubakar Shekau is $312,500.

The statement says information on four other named top sect officials would earn the informant $156,000 each. It then listed 14 “commanders” and each had a $62,500 bounty.

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

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According to reports, one of the issues raised by the government team was that one of the mediators had taken contrary position against the government-funded Joint Task Force (JTF), while another was said to have a son fighting alongside the Al-Qaeda in Islamic Magreb (AQIM) in Mali. Another member was said to have only recently been forgiven by the sect after an accusation of financial impropriety.

While such reports were still taken with a pinch of salt by many with the belief that the government and the sect would find a way through, the announcement by General Buhari last week appeared a huge stake. Buhari, while speaking at the Board of Trustees meeting of his party, the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) said he could not mediate for the sect.

The General said: “How can I represent people I do not know, that I do not believe in whatever their cause is? How can I work for a government that has failed to do the most important thing of protecting lives and property with all the military, with all the resources available? How do I work for them?”

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At least seven people have been killed and dozens injured in a suicide bombing during Mass at a Catholic church in northern Nigeria, officials say.

An explosive-laden vehicle drove into the church and detonated its load, ripping a hole in the wall and roof.

The attack happened in Kaduna, which has been targeted by Islamist militant group Boko Haram in the recent past.

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“What we’re trying to do right now is to have a set of standards, a set of criteria, and have a decision-making process that will govern our counterterrorism actions — we’re talking about direct action, lethal action — so that irrespective of the venue where they’re taking place, we have a high confidence that they’re being done for the right reasons in the right way,” [John] Brennan said in a lengthy interview at the end of August.

A burly 25-year CIA veteran with a stern public demeanor, Brennan is the principal architect of a policy that has transformed counterterrorism from a conventional fight centered in Afghanistan to a high-tech global effort to track down and eliminate perceived enemies one by one.

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Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the “disposition matrix.”

The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. U.S. officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the “disposition” of suspects beyond the reach of American drones.

Although the matrix is a work in progress, the effort to create it reflects a reality setting in among the nation’s counterterrorism ranks: The United States’ conventional wars are winding down, but the government expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years.

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The CIA is urging the White House to approve a significant expansion of the agency’s fleet of armed drones, a move that would extend the spy service’s decade-long transformation into a paramilitary force, U.S. officials said.

The proposal by CIA Director David H. Petraeus would bolster the agency’s ability to sustain its campaigns of lethal strikes in Pakistan and Yemen and enable it, if directed, to shift aircraft to emerging al-Qaeda threats in North Africa or other trouble spots, officials said.

If approved, the CIA could add as many as 10 drones, the officials said, to an inventory that has ranged between 30 and 35 over the past few years.

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The Nigerian army says it has arrested a senior commander of Boko Haram, as attacks by suspected members of the Islamist group continue.

Shuaibu Muhammed Bama was detained at the home of a serving senator in the city of Maiduguri, the army said.

The senator - who has not been named - denies the army's claim, which has fuelled suspicions that some politicians are helping the militants.

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The FBI on Wednesday arrested a Bangladeshi man in a sting operation on charges he attempted to blow up the New York Federal Reserve Bank with what he believed was a 1,000-pound (450-kg) bomb, federal authorities said.

Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, 21, faces charges of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and attempting to provide material support to al Qaeda, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement. If convicted, he faces life in prison.

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Widespread and systematic murder and persecution by Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group in northern Nigeria, likely amount to crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Government security forces have also engaged in numerous abuses, including extrajudicial killings, Human Rights Watch said.

The 98-page report, “Spiraling Violence: Boko Haram Attacks and Security Force Abuses in Nigeria,” catalogues atrocities for which Boko Haram has claimed responsibility. It also explores the role of Nigeria’s security forces, whose own alleged abuses contravene international human rights law and might also constitute crimes against humanity. The violence, which first erupted in 2009, has claimed more than 2,800 lives.

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Unidentified gunmen massacred at least two dozen university students in northern Nigeria Monday night in the city of Mubi near the border with Cameroon. The attacks lasted more than an hour, with gunmen targeting specific students by name rather than indiscriminately firing.

Suspicion fell immediately on Boko Haram, a violent Islamist organization in northern Nigeria that has typically attacked Christian churches and security forces. Student leaders, meanwhile, suggested that the killings may have been tied to internal student political campaigns. No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack.

Aside from Boko Haram's history of bloody attacks on civilians, the very name of the group – which means "Western education is a sin" – stokes suspicion of their involvement. But even if the group is found to be involved, the purpose of such an attack would not be part of some global jihad.

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Nigeria's "robust" approach to neutralizing a threat posed by Islamist sect Boko Haram using military force, holding indirect talks with the group and improving education in the north is paying off, the Nigerian president said on Wednesday.

Boko Haram, which wants to carve out an Islamic state in northern Nigeria, has been blamed for more than 1,000 deaths since its insurgency intensified in 2010. The United States has designated three of Boko Haram's senior members as terrorists.

In an interview with Reuters on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly's annual gathering of world leaders, President Goodluck Jonathan also played down the significance of the government forces' killing of the sect's spokesman, Abu Qaqa, in a gun battle in Kano on September 16.

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A suicide car bomber blew himself up outside a Roman Catholic church in northern Nigeria on Sunday, killing himself and at least two other people and wounding 46, police said.

Police cordoned off the area around St. John's church after the blast, which caused minimal damage to the building but killed at least two people in a market area of Bauchi city.

A Reuters journalist saw emergency services bring out three bodies in the area, called Wunti, and police identified one as the occupant of the car that blew up.

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Christians in Nigeria are coming under siege as terrorist group Boko Haram attacks churches to try to drive out Christians and destabilise the country. The Archbishop of Jos, the Most Rev Dr Benjamin Kwashi, describes the situation in Jos, Plateau State, to Release's Andrew Boyd.

Listen to it all (from earlier this month, but still relevant and useful for our awareness and prayers--KSH)..

Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Church of Nigeria • * Culture-Watch • Law & Legal Issues • Police/Fire • Religion & Culture • Urban/City Life and Issues • Violence • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General • Terrorism • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Islam • Muslim-Christian relations

The Archbishop Metropolitan and Primate of All Nigeria, Anglican Communion, Most Reverend Nicholas Okoh, on Thursday. said that the survival of the Nigerian nation and respect for human life were the two main factors restraining Christians from fighting Boko Haram which had thrown the country into an insecure state.

Primate Okoh also described the proposed bill for Fulani Commission in which government seeks to create permanent routes and reserves in all states for Fulani pastoralists as a recipe for endless crisis.

The cleric, who stated this in his primatial address during the official opening of the standing committee meeting of the Church of Nigeria, Anglican Communion at the Cathedral Church of Emmanuel, Ado-Ekiti with the theme “...Resist the devil and he will flee from you,” called on President Goodluck Jonathan to act fast in tackling the prevailing insecurity in the nation before it gets out of hand.

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It was a beautiful day, that’s what everyone remembers. So clear, so crisp, so bright. It sparkled as I walked my 14-year-old son out to go to the subway that would take him to his new high school, in Brooklyn. He was now a commuter: a walk to the 86th Street subway station and then the 4 or 5 train downtown near the towers and over the river. That was about 7:30 in the morning. It was beautiful at noon when I went to mass at St. Thomas More church on 89th Street. And between those two events, his departure and the mass, the world had changed, changed utterly. After mass, at the rise of 86th Street, the day was so clear you could see all the way downtown to the towering debris cloud.

But it was beautiful. That was one of the heartbreaking elements....

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Children • History • Marriage & Family • Teens / Youth • Urban/City Life and Issues • * Economics, Politics • Terrorism

I finally got to watch this production during the past week after knowing peripherally about the story. Wow--incredibly powerful. And, as usual, there was so much I did not know--KSH. Here is the blurb about it to whet your appetite:

See how one man's conviction and determination helped save 3,000 lives on 9/11.

In 2001, Rick Rescorla was the 62-year-old head of security at the Morgan Stanley Bank. The bank's offices were situated high up in the South Tower at the World Trade Center. Rescorla was convinced that Osama Bin Laden would use jet planes to try and destroy the World Trade Center.

Long before September 11th, he developed an evacuation plan for the bank. The plan and its preparation were hugely unpopular with the Morgan Stanley staff, many of whom thought Rescorla was mad. Ultimately, however, the plan saved 3,000 lives. It was put into effect after the first jet hit the North Tower--even though WTC managers were instructing everyone to stay in the buildings. When the second jet hit the South Tower, Rescorla averted panic and organized a rapid evacuation. Rescorla went back inside to help the injured and trapped get out. He was still inside when the building collapsed and his body was never found.

Filed under: * By Kendall • * Culture-Watch • History • Movies & Television • * Economics, Politics • Terrorism

For John Mahony, a retired U.S. Army colonel who was managing projects for Blue Cross/Blue Shield, instinct came before analysis as he fought to stay on his feet the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

“The building jerked hard, throwing everyone off balance,” remembers Mahony in the account he has written of surviving the 9/11 attacks.

Mahony was working on the 19th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center that morning.

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Spirituality/Prayer • * Culture-Watch • History • Religion & Culture • * Economics, Politics • Terrorism

Look at them all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Globalization • History • * Economics, Politics • Terrorism

There are 40 in all--take a look.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • History • * Economics, Politics • Terrorism

One of the great themes of the Hebrew Scriptures is that God identifies with the suffering. There are all these great texts that say things like this: If you oppress the poor, you oppress to me. I am a husband to the widow. I am father to the fatherless. I think the texts are saying God binds up his heart so closely with suffering people that he interprets any move against them as a move against him. This is powerful stuff! But Christianity says he goes even beyond that. Christians believe that in Jesus, God’s son, divinity became vulnerable to and involved in - suffering and death! He didn’t come as a general or emperor. He came as a carpenter. He was born in a manger, no room in the inn.

But it is on the Cross that we see the ultimate wonder. On the cross we sufferers finally see, to our shock that God now knows too what it is to lose a loved one in an unjust attack. And so you see what this means? John Stott puts it this way. John Stott wrote: “I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the Cross. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?” Do you see what this means? Yes, we don’t know the reason God allows evil and suffering to continue, but we know what the reason isn’t, what it can’t be. It can’t be that he doesn’t love us! It can’t be that he doesn’t care. God so loved us and hates suffering that he was willing to come down and get involved in it. And therefore the Cross is an incredibly empowering hint. Ok, it’s only a hint, but if you grasp it, it can transform you. It can give you strength.

And lastly, we have to grasp an empowering hope for the future. In both the Hebrew Scriptures and even more explicitly in the Christian Scriptures we have the promise of resurrection....

Read it carefully (noting especially the original setting as described) and read it all.

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Americans marked the 11th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks Tuesday in familiar but subdued ceremonies that put grieving families ahead of politicians and suggested it’s time to move on after a decade of remembrance.

As in past years, thousands gathered at the World Trade Center site in New York, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pa., to read the names of nearly 3,000 victims killed in the worst terror attack in U.S. history.

But many felt that last year’s 10th anniversary was an emotional turning point for public mourning of the attacks. For the first time, elected officials weren’t speaking at the ceremony, which often allowed them a solemn turn in the spotlight, but raised questions about the public and private Sept. 11. Fewer families attended the ceremonies this year, and some cities canceled their remembrances altogether.

“I feel much more relaxed” this year, said Jane Pollicino, who came to ground zero Tuesday morning to mourn her husband, who was killed at the trade center....

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...the once ubiquitous phrase "war on terror" is not much heard these days and is not much missed. Meanwhile, the fight against terrorists has not stopped. Drones patrol the skies above countries such as Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

At Ground Zero in New York City, at the Pentagon and at the scarred field at Stonycreek, Somerset County, Americans will gather today to mourn those who should never be forgotten and ponder the significance of that day which became another day in infamy. America has changed, but America has regained its equilibrium -- itself a proof the terrorists did not win. They never will win.

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President and Mrs. Bush, I want to say a personal word on behalf of many people. Thank you, Mr. President, for calling this day of prayer and remembrance. We needed it at this time.

We come together today to affirm our conviction that God cares for us, whatever our ethnic, religious, or political background may be. The Bible says that He’s the God of all comfort, who comforts us in our troubles. No matter how hard we try, words simply cannot express the horror, the shock, and the revulsion we all feel over what took place in this nation on Tuesday morning. September eleven will go down in our history as a day to remember.

Today we say to those who masterminded this cruel plot, and to those who carried it out, that the spirit of this nation will not be defeated by their twisted and diabolical schemes. Someday, those responsible will be brought to justice, as President Bush and our Congress have so forcefully stated. But today we especially come together in this service to confess our need of God.

Today we say to those who masterminded this cruel plot, and to those who carried it out, that the spirit of this nation will not be defeated by their twisted and diabolical schemes. Someday, those responsible will be brought to justice, as President Bush and our Congress have so forcefully stated. But today we especially come together in this service to confess our need of God.

We’ve always needed God from the very beginning of this nation, but today we need Him especially. We’re facing a new kind of enemy. We’re involved in a new kind of warfare. And we need the help of the Spirit of God. The Bible words are our hope: God is our refuge and strength; an ever present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way, and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea.

But how do we understand something like this? Why does God allow evil like this to take place? Perhaps that is what you are asking now. You may even be angry at God. I want to assure you that God understands these feelings that you may have. We’ve seen so much on our television, on our — heard on our radio, stories that bring tears to our eyes and make us all feel a sense of anger. But God can be trusted, even when life seems at its darkest.

But what are some of the lessons we can learn? First, we are reminded of the mystery and reality of evil. I’ve been asked hundreds of times in my life why God allows tragedy and suffering. I have to confess that I really do not know the answer totally, even to my own satisfaction. I have to accept by faith that God is sovereign, and He’s a God of love and mercy and compassion in the midst of suffering. The Bible says that God is not the author of evil. It speaks of evil as a mystery. In 1st Thessalonians 2:7 it talks about the mystery of iniquity. The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah said “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.” Who can understand it?” He asked that question, ‘Who can understand it?’ And that’s one reason we each need God in our lives.

The lesson of this event is not only about the mystery of iniquity and evil, but secondly it’s a lesson about our need for each other. What an example New York and Washington have been to the world these past few days. None of us will ever forget the pictures of our courageous firefighters and police, many of whom have lost friends and colleagues; or the hundreds of people attending or standing patiently in line to donate blood. A tragedy like this could have torn our country apart. But instead it has united us, and we’ve become a family. So those perpetrators who took this on to tear us apart, it has worked the other way — it’s back lashed. It’s backfired. We are more united than ever before. I think this was exemplified in a very moving way when the members of our Congress stood shoulder to shoulder the other day and sang “God Bless America.”

Finally, difficult as it may be for us to see right now, this event can give a message of hope — hope for the present, and hope for the future. Yes, there is hope. There’s hope for the present, because I believe the stage has already been set for a new spirit in our nation. One of the things we desperately need is a spiritual renewal in this country. We need a spiritual revival in America. And God has told us in His word, time after time, that we are to repent of our sins and return to Him, and He will bless us in a new way. But there’s also hope for the future because of God’s promises. As a Christian, I hope not for just this life, but for heaven and the life to come. And many of those people who died this past week are in heaven right now. And they wouldn’t want to come back. It’s so glorious and so wonderful. And that’s the hope for all of us who put our faith in God. I pray that you will have this hope in your heart.

This event reminds us of the brevity and the uncertainty of life. We never know when we too will be called into eternity. I doubt if even one those people who got on those planes, or walked into the World Trade Center or the Pentagon last Tuesday morning thought it would be the last day of their lives. It didn’t occur to them. And that’s why each of us needs to face our own spiritual need and commit ourselves to God and His will now.

Here in this majestic National Cathedral we see all around us symbols of the cross. For the Christian — I’m speaking for the Christian now — the cross tells us that God understands our sin and our suffering. For He took upon himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, our sins and our suffering. And from the cross, God declares “I love you. I know the heart aches, and the sorrows, and the pains that you feel, but I love you.” The story does not end with the cross, for Easter points us beyond the tragedy of the cross to the empty tomb. It tells us that there is hope for eternal life, for Christ has conquered evil, and death, and hell. Yes, there’s hope.

I’ve become an old man now. And I’ve preached all over the world. And the older I get, the more I cling to that hope that I started with many years ago, and proclaimed it in many languages to many parts of the world. Several years ago at the National Prayer Breakfast here in Washington, Ambassador Andrew Young, who had just gone through the tragic death of his wife, closed his talk with a quote from the old hymn, “How Firm A Foundation.” We all watched in horror as planes crashed into the steel and glass of the World Trade Center. Those majestic towers, built on solid foundations, were examples of the prosperity and creativity of America. When damaged, those buildings eventually plummeted to the ground, imploding in upon themselves. Yet underneath the debris is a foundation that was not destroyed. Therein lies the truth of that old hymn that Andrew Young quoted: “How firm a foundation.”

Yes, our nation has been attacked. Buildings destroyed. Lives lost. But now we have a choice: Whether to implode and disintegrate emotionally and spiritually as a people, and a nation, or, whether we choose to become stronger through all of the struggle to rebuild on a solid foundation. And I believe that we’re in the process of starting to rebuild on that foundation. That foundation is our trust in God. That’s what this service is all about. And in that faith we have the strength to endure something as difficult and horrendous as what we’ve experienced this week.

This has been a terrible week with many tears. But also it’s been a week of great faith. Churches all across the country have called prayer meetings. And today is a day that they’re celebrating not only in this country, but in many parts of the world. And the words of that familiar hymn that Andrew Young quoted, it says, “Fear not, I am with thee. Oh be not dismayed for I am thy God and will give thee aid. I’ll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand upon” my righteous — on “thy righteous, omnipotent hand.”

My prayer today is that we will feel the loving arms of God wrapped around us and will know in our hearts that He will never forsake us as we trust in Him. We also know that God is going to give wisdom, and courage, and strength to the President, and those around him. And this is going to be a day that we will remember as a day of victory. May God bless you all.

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Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta appeared somber and reflective as he stood upon "hallowed ground" at the Flight 93 National Memorial on the eve of the 11th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

"I came here to Shanksville to extend our nation's gratitude to the heroes of Flight 93 and their families," Mr. Panetta said. "At the cost of their own lives they made a fateful decision to fight back and in so doing they prevented an attack on the U.S. Capitol. I am especially grateful to them because on that day I was at the U.S. Capitol."

The 40 passengers and crew members of Flight 93 are credited with thwarting the deadly intentions of four al-Qaeda terrorists who hijacked their plane less than an hour after it left Newark International Airport.

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Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • History • * Economics, Politics • Terrorism

Last Sept. 11, the images of that day were inescapable. Every time they flashed across the screen — flames and black smoke rising and an impossibly blue sky — the anguish came crashing back.

For the families of those killed, the 10th anniversary retrospectives and memorials were so cruelly pervasive it almost felt as if they were reliving the attacks, they said, rather than simply remembering them from a decade’s distance.

“It seemed like every time you turned on the TV, the towers were falling,” said Cindy McGinty, whose husband, Michael, was killed at the World Trade Center in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “All the days of build-up, you just couldn’t get away from it.”

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Is it time for a different kind of Sept. 11?

Victims' families and others were poised to gather and grieve Tuesday at ground zero, the Pentagon and near Shanksville, Pa., for the first time after the emotional turning point of last year's 10th anniversary.

And in New York, there was a sense that it was a season of change and moving forward for the ground zero ceremony. It followed a last-minute breakthrough on a financial dispute that had halted progress on the Sept. 11 museum, and the commemoration itself was to be different: For the first time, elected officials won't speak at an occasion that has allowed them a solemn turn in the spotlight, but also has been lined with questions about separating the Sept. 11 that is about personal loss from the 9/11 that reverberates through public life.

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The US federal government has added about 50 types of cancer to the list of illnesses to be covered by a 9/11 health treatment programme.

The decision entitles 70,000 surviving emergency service workers and other survivors to free care.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety announced the change on the eve of the attacks' 11th anniversary.

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(History Channel) For 102 minutes on September 11, 2001, the world looked on in horror as terrorists flew hijacked passenger planes into New York City's mighty twin towers, destroying the iconic buildings and killing more than 2,700 people. Watch unfiltered videos from nine New Yorkers who witnessed the day that changed America.

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