1. Confirmation of Samuel Alito as an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court
I weep for my native country. Majority control of SCOTUS was a main goal of ShrubCo and his supporters, especially the neo-conservatives and the Religious Right; it means decades of legal tampering and bad decisions by authoritarian, (neo-)conservative judges. Where is ( Read more... )

1. My paternal grandmother, Beatrice Arnold nee Morse, died Monday 21 November at the age of eighty-six after a long illness.

( Boston Globe Obituary )

Simon Wiesenthal Dies at 96Simon Wiesenthal was a Holocaust survivor who dedicated most of his life to tirelessly tracking down Nazi war criminals and making sure they were prosecuted. He was the loudest voice there was to "never forget", to stop neo-Nazism and its offshoots from gaining any ground, to stop anti-Semitism and other forms of ( Read more... )

Peter Jennings dies of lung cancer at age 67

I don't know what to say; hours after I heard of his passing, I'm still upset, depressed and dismayed. Peter Jennings was on my television anchoring World News Tonight every evening from the time I can first remember watching television until I became an expatriate. After I moved to the UK, his ( Read more... )

Robin Cook, the Scottish MP and former Cabinet minister, died shortly after collapsing suddenly last night whilst hillwalking with his wife in the Highlands ( Read more... )