The foiled terror plot in Britain leads Friday's paper.
Alan Cowell and Dexter Filkins come up with this dubious explanation: "This is the latest in a series of conspiracies apparently rooted in the disaffection of young, British-born Muslims, many of Pakistani descent, who cast themselves as part of a jihadist struggle against Britain, which they see as an outrider of the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Lebanon."
Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters points out "the reference to Lebanon was extraordinarily specious, as this plan clearly has been in the making for many months, and hatched well before the recent escalation between Hezbollah and Israel."
The original version of an online story Friday morning (the sections below havesince been deleted, but as of Friday morning you can get a peek at them via Google News) strained to fit unfriendly facts into the Times' P.C. worldview.
"In interviews with British news services, friends and neighbors painted a picture of a varied group, with one man described as recent convert to Islam, and another as a Muslim of longstanding piety who was also a lover of British soccer. Most of the men were in their 20's, and all had Muslim names."
And later:"The officials said they had arrested 24 men, all British-born Muslims, who planned to carry the liquids in drink bottles and combine them into explosive cocktails to commit mass murder aboard as many as 10 flights high over the Atlantic."
Yep, sounds like a real "varied group" to TimesWatch.