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WW11 Japanese mass grave on Iwo Jima

Japanese officials bow at a mass grave site on Iwo Jima island on Dec. 14, 2010 where the remains of Japanese soldiers, who died in the battle for Iwo Jima, have been discovered.

In a rare visit to Iwo Jima, now known in Japan as Ioto , Japan's Prime Minister offered prayers at two recently discovered mass grave sites and vowed to find the more than 12,000 fallen soldiers whose bodies have yet to be recovered from the remote island where some of World War II's fiercest fighting took place.

Second blizzard in the heartland

As if they hadn't had enough another strong blizzard howled through the nation's midsection Wednesday, piling up to 2 feet of new snow on parts of Oklahoma and Arkansas still struggling to clean up from last week's epic storm.

The blowing snow brought traffic to a halt, and the National Guard was summoned to rescue stranded motorists. Subzero wind chills forced ranchers to work desperately to protect their herds.

Link

Winter can't be all bad…

A child enjoys snow tubing in Oregon.

Snowman in NY China Town

People walk past a giant snowman in the Chinatown neighborhood of New York.

Long Beach: Pull up saggy pants in respect for black history month

Long Beach, California has two requests for teens: pull 'em up and keep 'em up.

Bishop William Ervin along with Carson City Councilman Mike Gipson are calling on black children and teens to “pull up their pants on their waist” as a sign of respect during Black History Month.

KNX Radio's Ron Kilgore reports their message to young men who wear their pants down around their knees is simple: “You can have the swag without the sag”.

Community leaders say the plan is not just to honor black history month, but may have legal benefits as well: sagging pants are often used for profiling purposes by law enforcement agencies.

Link
losangeles.cbslocal.com/2011/02/03/long-beach-tells-teens-to-pick-up-saggy-pants/

Reminds us of the General Platt appearance on American Idol below:

A scene from across America this week

New York City smoking ban in parks and beaches

Many believe the Big Apple has become a nanny state.

Smokers have just one message for Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council members: butt out of our business.

"We’re outside. We should have freedom to smoke."

The smoking ban will cover 1,700 parks and 14 miles of public beaches plus boardwalks, marinas and pedestrian plazas.

Link

Photo: trudging across a frozen river in China

A man walks across a frozen river in China's northeastern Liaoning province.

Report Unions see sharp membership declines again

From an Associated Press report last Friday:

The nation's labor unions saw another steep decline in membership last year, even as the economy showed signs of recovery and job losses slowed.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that unions lost 612,000 members in 2010, dropping the unionized share of the work force to 11.9 percent from 12.3 percent in 2009.

That follows a loss of 771,000 workers in 2008, continuing a steady decline from the 1950s when more than a third of workers belonged to unions.

Union membership in the private sector fell from 7.2 percent to 6.9 percent, a low point not seen since the infancy of the labor movement in the 1930s.

Link

Which cities have the worst traffic?

A CNN article at the link below report:

Drivers in the Chicago and Washington, D.C., metro areas spend the most time stuck in traffic, according to an annual analysis of the nation’s traffic trends.

Commuters in those two cities spent an average of 70 hours stuck in traffic in 2009, according to the 2010 Urban Mobility Report, published by the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University.

The top 10 cities for traffic delays in 2009:

1st - (tie) Chicago, Washington, D.C. – 70 hours
3rd - Southern California – 63 hours
4th - Houston – 58 hours
5th - San Francisco-Oakland – 49 hours
6th - (tie) Dallas-Fort Worth, Boston – 48 hours
8th - Atlanta, Seattle – 44 hours
10th - New York- Newark – 42 hours

Link

Trafalgar Square graffiti removal

A workman uses a high pressure hose to clean graffiti from Trafalgar Square in London, England.

Earth rotation changes zodiac signs

Change in earth's rotation adds new Zodiac sign - Ophiuchus.


Those who read a horoscope every day, may want to recheck what your Zodiac sign is.

The new list showing dates:

Capricorn: Jan. 20-Feb. 16.
Aquarius: Feb. 16-March 11.
Pisces: March 11-April 18.
Aries: April 18-May 13.
Taurus: May 13-June 21.
Gemini: June 21-July 20.
Cancer: July 20-Aug. 10.
Leo: Aug. 10-Sept. 16.
Virgo: Sept. 16-Oct. 30.
Libra: Oct. 30-Nov. 23.
Scorpio: Nov. 23-29.
Ophiuchus: Nov. 29-Dec. 17.
Sagittarius: Dec. 17 - Jan. 20.

Where do I fit in to all this? For now I'm just trying to learn to spell and pronounce the name of the new sign.

Link

(click on cartoon to enlarge)

Temporary shelter

A family from Bolivia sit inside a makeshift shelter in the Indoamericano Park at the Villa Soldati neighborhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Clashes between squatters and residents who want them out the park, exploded last week killing at least 3 people and injuring dozens, according to local media and police.

AP photo

Time Magazine: defending the indefensible

Time Magazine has a report at the link below in their Swampland blog titled In Defense Of The Mainstream Media.

This is not an easy task for anyone -- especially for Time Magazine. Time is not as left leaning as Newsweek but that's not saying much when you consider that Newsweek is a little to the left of Attila the Hun.

How can a left leaning news source defend a media made up of mostly left leaning news sources? It can't.

For most columnists of the New York Times and other decidedly leftist newspapers there is no mystery about their political agendas.

On the network evening news programs it becomes a little blurry. For instance when Tom Borkaw was reading the news on NBC Nightly News he kept his liberalism mostly in check.

It came out in dramatic fashion on election night 2000 when the Florida results were in flux. When the lead in Florida appeared to go from Gore to Bush, Tom Brokaw (above left) told Tim Russert (above right), of Meet the Press who was with him in the booth that night, "I thought we had won Florida."

It was the personal pronoun we that first gave away his liberalism that he had tried hard to keep in the closet.

Now that Brokaw, the "news reader" from my home state of South Dakota, has retired he makes no pretense about his political preferences.

Other television "news readers" such as Brian Williams don't try to hide their political leanings.

Now that "news readers" on the evening news television programs are no longer hiding their liberalism, it makes Time Magazines attempt to defend the indefensible even more difficult.

The Time report is here.

Miss Nebraska is the 2011 Miss America

Teresa Scanlan, a 17-yar-old aspiring politician from Gering, Nebraska is the new 2011 Miss America.

Teresa Scanlan won a $50,000 scholarship and a yearlong run with the crown at the competition at the Planet Hollywood casino-resort in Las Vegas, giving the Cornhusker State its first-ever win at the pageant.

Pageant officials said she was the youngest Miss America since the pageant's first competition in 1921.

Miss Arkansas Alyse Eady won $25,000 as first runner-up, while Miss Hawaii Jalee Fuselier won $20,000 for third place.

Link

Moment of silence at the capitol rotunda

Guides and visitors pause for a moment of silence in the U.S. Capitol rotunda to honor the memory of the victims of the January 8 shooting in Tucson, Arizona.

Time magazine photo

About those targets and bullets on maps

The difference between targets and surveyor symbols.

Shown above are the "targets" Sarah Palin is accused of showing on maps. They are not targets.

They are surveyor symbols showing places to concentrate on in future political campaigns, yet radicals at MSNBC, etc. are claiming Palin used them as "cross-hairs" to target opponents with physical harm.

They had no more meaning that the "real" targets used by Democrat politicians shown below.

There's no app for that …

Transformed in Loveland Colorado

The second year of Art in Public Places in Loveland, Colorado is now complete.



The upper photo shows an artist working on a transformer box.


Artists from Loveland, Longmont an up through Northern Colorado have painted electrical transformer boxes throughout the city.

Link