President Barack Obama on Friday declared that the United States would end its bloody and costly combat mission in Iraq by late summer of 2010 — but a dramatic force reduction was not expected until after Iraq's elections at the end of this year.
"Let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end," he said in a speech at the Marine Corps base at Camp Lejeune, N.C.
"The cartoon in today's New York Post is troubling at best given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys. One has to question whether the cartoonist is making a less than casual reference to this when in the cartoon they have police saying after shooting a chimpanzee that "Now they will have to find someone else to write the stimulus bill."But showing an African American as an ape is the least of this cartoon's problems. The drawing more than hints at the white power structure assassinating the first African American president, thereby forcing the economy in a new direction. Remember the rabid anti-Socialist death threats shouted at McCain rallies? Or the questioning of Obama's trustworthiness and ability to make decisions due to his supposed associations with the Weather Underground terrorists? This cartoon starkly illustrates the privileged and powerful putting an end to what they consider a threatening economic policy, as fearful white male police officers brandish a smoking pistol after killing the crazed ape who wrote the stimulus bill.
New research shows that the color red makes us more cautious and attentive to details, while blue makes us more creative and receptive to new ideas...From this, I was inspired to create two desktop backgrounds, one red for things like making those lengthy GTD action lists, and one blue for brainstorming my next writing project. I tried the red today, and I can say that it at least didn't hinder my ability to break down my wieldy to do list into manageable steps. Steal away from the color blocks at the top of this post! (Just be sure to size your windows down so you can actually see and benefit from these. I'm pretty sure you have to look at the colors, not just have it behind your programs.) And let me know how it works out.
Scientists at the University of British Columbia studied more than 600 people as they performed various tasks, usually on a computer. Sometimes the screen's background color was red, sometimes it was blue.
The experiments showed that with the red background, people did as much as 31 percent better at tasks like proofreading or solving anagrams, which require attention to detail. But for creative tasks, like designing a child's toy, a blue background improved performance.
The viewpoints of Bishop Williamson on the Shoah [Holocaust] are absolutely unacceptable and firmly rejected by the Holy Father, as he himself ... reaffirmed his full and indisputable solidarity with our brother recipients of the First Covenant, and affirmed that the memory of that terrible genocide should induce "humanity to reflect on the unpredictable power of evil when it conquers the human heart," adding that the Shoah remains "for everyone a warning against forgetting, against negating or reductionism, because violence committed against even one human being is violence against all." Bishop Williamson, in order to be admitted to the Episcopal functions of the Church, must in an absolutely unequivocal and public way distance himself from his positions regarding the Shoah.
- Statement by the Vatican Secretariat of State, issued in the wake of international outrage following the lifting of the excommunication of British Bishop Richard Williamson, a holocaust denier. The statement also said that the Pope had not been aware of Williamson's views when he lifted excommunications on him and three other bishops last month.
(Source: Zenit)
