Roger Ebert remembered

Roger Ebert, one of the United States’ most influential film critics who used newspapers, television and social media to take readers into theatres and even into his own life, was laid to rest Monday (local time) with praise from political leaders, family and people he’d never met but who chose movies based on the direction of his thumb. “He didn’t just dominate his profession, he defined it,” said Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel in a brief eulogy to hundreds of mourners who gathered at Holy Name Cathedral just blocks from where Ebert spent more than 40 years as the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times

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Bands want to know if their music was used on Gitmo detainees

Rock bands, including REM and Pearl Jam, want to know whether their music was played at the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In a hard-hitting, wide-ranging speech Wednesday for a conservative gathering, Cheney targeted the administration’s decision-making process on how to proceed in Afghanistan, saying Obama has failed to give troops on the ground a clear mission or defined goals and appeared “afraid to make a decision.” “The White House must stop dithering while America’s armed forces are in danger,” Cheney said at the Center for Security Policy

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Ezekiel Emanuel, Obama’s ‘Deadly Doctor,’ Strikes Back

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the medical ethicist and oncologist who advises President Obama, does not own a television, and if you catch him in a typically energized moment, when his mind speeds even faster than his mouth, he is likely to blurt out something like, “I hate the Internet.” So it took him several days in late July to discover he had been singled out by opponents of health-care reform as a “deadly doctor,” who, according to an opinion column in the New York Post, wanted to limit medical care for “a grandmother with Parkinson’s or a child with cerebral palsy.” “I couldn’t believe this was happening to me,” says Emanuel, who in addition to spending his career opposing euthanasia and working to increase the quality of care for dying patients, is the brother of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

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