Yesterday’s hostage crisis in Manila, where a ex police chief kidnapped a bus of Chinese tourists, made the headlines. Several were killed, and we expect lots of fingers being pointed at the rescuers for a botched hostage rescue. But no one is going to say that the motives were due to religion, or try to [...]

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A well used phrase is that the eyes are the gateway to a persons soul. There are many variations of the saying, and in one form or another they exist in many languages and cultures. I cannot disagree with the concept behind the idea, but I do have my own variation on it. I believe [...]

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Late last night Jan and I received a phone call. It was a call that while not unexpected, was to say the least not one that I thought would come so soon. As the phone call wound down the inevitable question of when was I going to publish reared its ugly head. My decision was [...]

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Over-protective, inept or unskilled mothers sabotage their daughters. Almost all the women who’ve interviewed me on radio and TV or who’ve called in with comments have said that their mothers told them to rise above mean girls, to be nicer and kinder to bullies, to be nice because the mean girls were being bullied at [...]

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This just in from TJ Hart – Jan Barrett  Much has happened since Haleigh Cummings vanished from her Satsuma home in February 2009 while in the care of her babysitter, Misty Croslin. Here are just a few things that have happened since that day: Haleigh’s father Ronald Cummings married and later divorced Misty Croslin A jail [...]

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Now that I am in my eighth decade I avoid reading obits like the plague and worry each time I look for an old friend on Google — the last had died several years ago. What a delight it was to receive a phone call from a very old friend — when we were in [...]

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  The Catholic Worker’s Movement of the 20th century is a monumental event that deserves recognition and admiration. Without the movement scores of Catholic workers, engaged in many facets of American labor might have endured insufferable and continued disregard for their human rights and values. Recounting the courageous individuals that forged the Catholic Labor Movement [...]

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Social media has evolved into the fifth major form of media: print, radio, television, Internet, social. While social media functions on the Internet, there’s no denying that it is its own platform. It encompasses most forms of media in one tight and neat package . Some social networking sites have more users than number of [...]

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Part I of the article, dealing with the ‘Unusually Uncertain’ economic environment, is here. It was always difficult to read financial markets or economies, but a few people anyway thought that they could read it like Paul the Octopus did the recently concluded World Cup. So amidst present round of ‘unusually uncertain’ economic environment; economists [...]

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              Part I deals with the ‘Unusually Uncertain’ economic environment  In economics, it’s all about opinions and hypothesis. ‘A hypothesis can never be proven true, it can sometimes be verified beyond reasonable doubt in the context of a particular theoretical approach’, explains free online dictionary while differentiating among hypothesis, law and theory. They all arise [...]

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