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It seems like an appropriate enough cartoon. The depiction of the president elect Barack Obama with the US flag behind him and the bubble quoting Obama as saying the change has come to Washington. Looking up to the Obama depiction was an excited Egyptian woman congratulating the African American senator, reminding him not to forget that people around the world have been hoping and praying for his success. This was followed by the Arabic phrase: `uqbal inna meaning may the same [change] happen to us.

According to the opposition weekly Sawt al Umma, the cartoon appearing the leadingo Egyptian daily Al Ahram, caused a sense of an emergency among the Egyptian leadership. The independent weekly stated that 150,000 copies of the paper’s first edition were quickly removed from the streets and destroyed and the `troublesome’ phrase disappeared from future prints that day. The before and after cartoon depiction appeared in Sawt al Umma. http://www.shobiklobik.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=172011

This is certainly not the first time that a political cartoon has caused powers in our region to be worried about losing their powers. But the paranoia of the Mubarak regime is a reflection of the concern by many Arab autocrats about the Obama euphoria empowering those calling for change. Obama’s victory on the change mantra was not lost to people around the world yearning for political reform.

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A farm couple got a huge surprise when they opened their fields to anyone who wanted to pick up free vegetables left over after the harvest — 40,000 people showed up.

Joe and Chris Miller’s fields were picked so clean Saturday that a second day of gleaning — the ancient practice of picking up leftover food in farm fields — was canceled Sunday. ” ‘Overwhelmed’ is putting it mildly,” Chris Miller said. “People obviously need food.”

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A bailout ran counter to the Bush Administration’s free-market principles and to his own belief that reckless behavior should not be rewarded, but he had worked on Wall Street for thirty-two years, most recently as the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs, and had never seen a financial crisis of this magnitude. He had come to respect Bernanke’s judgment, and he shared his conviction that, in an emergency, pragmatism trumps ideology.

if a pragmatic course of action conflicts with your ideology, it becomes your responsibility to reexamine your ideology. Not to simply shelve it temporarily, under the assumption that you can just dust it off later and move on about your day. Ideology isn’t an occasional proposition. It works or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, it’s wrong.

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US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent, the group that organized the exam said Thursday.

Ordinary citizens did not fare much better, scoring just 49 percent correct on the 33 exam questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).

This non-citizen scored only 82%.

See if you can do any better

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EU culture ministers yesterday (20 November) rejected French proposals to curb online piracy through compulsory measures against free downloading, instead agreeing to promote legal offers of music or films on the Internet.

The EU Culture Council pushed yesterday (20 November) for “a fair balance between the various fundamental rights” while fighting online piracy, first listing “the right to personal data protection,” then “the freedom of information” and only lastly “the protection of intellectual property”.

The Council conclusions also stressed the importance of “consumers’ expectations in terms of access […] and diversity of the content offered online”. No mention was made of a gradual response to serial downloaders of illegal cultural material, as foreseen by the French authorities.

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Following the recent leak of the BNP membership list, it may have come as a surprise to find that some members were listed as active Christians. Among these, we find a ‘”Born Again” Protestant Christian’, a ‘Devout Christian lay preacher’, a ‘Minister of Religion’, a ‘Member of the Assemblies of God Pentecostal Church’, and a ‘Practising Catholic’. One member lists himself as a member of the ‘British Israel World Federation’ and another as ‘Founder/organiser of Durham British-Israel Fellowship’.

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In order to unravel the bizarre beliefs of Farquhar and the other (listed) BNP member of the British Israel World Federation (BIWF), let’s first have a look at what the BIWF teaches.

Founded in 1919, and currently Registered Charity No. 208079, the BIWF is an organisation that promotes an esoteric interpretation of the Bible, in particular of ‘prophetic’ passages in the Old Testament, which was first popularised in the ‘glory days’ of the British Empire. According to the theory of British Israelism, the British, and other European peoples, are in reality the so-called ‘lost tribes’ of Israel, the Northern Kingdom of Israel, who were expelled during the Assyrian Captivity. It is claimed, meanwhile, that the Kingdom of Judah went on to make up modern day Jewry, although Jews are deemed by many to be ‘ethnically mixed’ and consequently no longer ‘pure’ Israelites.

This pseudo-historical belief system allows white nationalists to claim that the Bible is a book written by Europeans, about Europeans, and for Europeans, for according to this theory, Europeans are the Biblical Israelites. British Israelism, then, is a ‘Christian’ religion that promotes Eurocentricism and opposes ‘race mixing’ as an affront to ‘God’s plan’.

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By the time the 6,000 strong crowd were seated, the mood was decidedly tense.

“We know of course that investing money is a risk, but we didn’t expect this. Now we want to know who was responsible,” said Roby Tschopp, spokesman for one of the shareholder groups.

Well, those responsible were plain to see – a phalanx of UBS chief executives in expensive suits, on a raised dais, bathed in spotlights. It was not the best public relations image.

The Swiss know that UBS bosses earned among the highest salaries in Europe. Added to that were huge bonuses which they continued to award themselves even as the financial crisis unfolded.

It was all too much for one indignant shareholder. Leaping to the podium he turned to UBS chairman Marcel Ospel and told him “give back your fat bonus, now”.

“Here, just in case you go hungry, I’ve brought you something to eat,” he continued.

And reaching into his pocket he produced a string of traditional Swiss sausages and waved them under Mr Ospel’s trembling nose.

It was an unforgettable moment, and shows just why the Swiss are so angry.

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When he removed the nylon case of his Motorola Razr phone from a pocket on the bib of his overalls — over his heart — a .45 caliber bullet fell to the ground.

“I don’t look at any of this as coincidence,” said Richard, who suffered only bruising on his chest. “I look at this as God telling me to put my cell phone in that pocket, and I’m grateful and humbled.”

A rational person looks at this and sees exactly what it is: a coincidence. The man, named Ronald Richard, denies this obvious fact. Instead, he is claiming that an all-powerful God supernaturally reached down onto earth and told him where to put his cell phone. The subtext is obvious: “I am so wonderful that God chose explicitly to save my life.”

The truly sad part is that Christians carry this arrogance with them despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. People die of gunshot wounds every day. Take this 11-year-old boy shot in the chest about the same time:

Boy, 11, dies of gunshot wound to chest

An 11-year-old boy died Tuesday afternoon of a gunshot wound to the chest that occurred while he and a friend were apparently playing with a handgun, Detroit Police said.

God (if he existed) could have jammed the gun, unloaded the gun, moved the aim of the gun over a few degrees, put a cell phone in the boy’s pocket, etc. But, obviously, the boy wasn’t as wonderful as Richard. So the boy died.

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A purchase of Citigroup Inc. would “significantly” add to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. or Morgan Stanley’s earnings as long as the U.S. government absorbed losses on the embattled bank’s assets, according CreditSights Inc.

As for opening sentences of articles, this one is about as surreal as you can get. And yet, they’re serious. They want the profits for themselves and socialize the losses.