MINNEAPOLIS -- Leaders of the nation's largest Lutheran church have voted to allow sexually active gays and lesbians in committed relationships to serve as clergy.

Gays and lesbians are currently allowed to serve as ministers in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America only if they remain celibate. The proposal passed last night with 68 percent approval.

At 4.7 million members and about 10,000 congregations in the United States, the ELCA is one of the largest U.S. Christian denominations yet to take a more gay-friendly stance on clergy.

The final decision on whether to hire gay clergy in committed relationships will lie with individual congregations.

Critics predict that its passage will prompt individual congregations to split off from the denomination.

WASHINGTON -- The pilot of an airliner stranded overnight on an airport tarmac in Minnesota pleaded unsuccessfully for her 47 passengers to be allowed to get off and go inside a terminal.

The Transportation Department yesterday released recordings of the repeated appeals by the pilot and her airline's dispatchers earlier this month while passengers were kept waiting for about six hours in the cramped plane amid crying babies and a smelly toilet before they were allowed to deplane.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said a preliminary investigation by his department found that ExpressJet, the regional carrier which operated Continental Express Flight 2816 for Continental Airlines, wasn't at fault in the tarmac stranding.

Instead, blame for the incident, which has revived calls for greater consumer protections for airline passengers, belongs with Mesaba Airlines, whose representative incorrectly told ExpressJet that the passengers couldn't be allowed inside the terminal because Transportation Security Administration personnel had left for the day, Mr. LaHood said.

Mesaba is a unit of Delta Air Lines of Atlanta.

COLUMBUS, Ga. -- Speaking in a soft, sometimes labored voice, the only U.S. Army officer convicted in the 1968 slayings of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai made an extraordinary public apology while speaking to a small group near the military base where he was court-martialed.

"There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai," William L. Calley told members of a local Kiwanis Club, the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer reported yesterday. "I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry."

Mr. Calley, 66, was a young Army lieutenant when a court-martial at nearby Fort Benning convicted him of murder in 1971 for killing 22 civilians during the infamous massacre of 500 men, women and children in Vietnam.

Though sentenced to life in prison, Mr. Calley ended up serving three years under house arrest after President Richard Nixon later reduced his sentence.

WASHINGTON -- A Yemeni man's family ties to Osama bin Laden and admission that he met with the terrorist mastermind in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks are not enough to continue holding him at Guantanamo Bay, a judge wrote in an order released yesterday.

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ruled that Muhammed al-Adahi, 47, must be released after seven years at the U.S. detention facility in Cuba.

Mr. Adahi testified that in July 2001 he took his sister to Afghanistan for a celebration of her arranged marriage to a man the United States alleges was a bin Laden bodyguard. The wedding was at bin Laden's house, and Mr. Adahi said he was introduced to bin Laden there for the first time and then met briefly with him again a few days later. He said bin Laden summoned him and for about five to 10 minutes asked about the religious community in Yemen.

Meanwhile, Saber Lahmar, a Guantanamo prisoner who has been cleared for release by a U.S. judge, was fighting yesterday against what his lawyers said was an apparent plan to send him to Bosnia, where he would likely be deported to his native Algeria and imprisoned.

Mr. Lahmar, 40, is one of six Algerians who were detained in Bosnia in 2001 on suspicion of plotting to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo. They were taken to Guantanamo in January 2002.