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Perhaps I shouldn't talk about this.  After all, someone is deeply upset.  But a colleague just shared with me the contents of a letter informing her that a certain UU conference had been canceled due to a fire.  

No one was injured.  The building was insured and they were in the process of rebuilding the damage.  But they would not be able to rebuild in time for the conference.

That is indeed unfortunate and neither my colleague nor I would ever wish the stress on anyone.  However, we were both taken aback by the language in the letter, calling the fire and subsequent cancelation a "tragedy" and relating how "devastated" they were. The lamentation went on for several paragraphs.

While his views on homosexuality and gender left much to be desired, Pope John Paul II was the first Pope to visit Auschwitz, where he kneeled at the memorial. He prayed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. He visited the Israeli Holocaust Memorial, Yad Vashem. He visited the Mosque in Rome. He reached out to Eastern Orthodox and Protestants.

In contrast, Pope Benedict XVI, the cardinal formerly known as Ratzinger, just reinstated the Latin Mass.

Why should non-Catholics care? Because behind this is a decades long struggle within the Church over whether it will embrace the liberalizing changes of Vatican II or revert back to its earlier intolerance. By reinstating the Latin Mass, Pope Benedict has signaled that the conservatives have won (for now.)

The recent head of China's State Food and Drug Administration was executed today.  Zheng Xiaoyu, 63, was convicted of accepting bribes constituting $800,000 U.S. to approve tainted and dangerous products, and sentenced to death in May.

As an American, who is used to people sitting on death row for years if not decades, the news came as a shock. Even by Chinese standards the execution was swift,  designed to tell the world that China was taking the recent export scandals seriously.  Designed to save Chinese face preceding the Olympics and the Chinese economy in general.