Summary: Pope Benedict XVI 2009 Christmas message … “Urbi et Orbi” … “To the City and to the World” … Immelman family 2008 Christmas greeting. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on December 25, 2008, Aubrey Immelman posted Pope Benedict XVI’s 2008 Christmas message, “Urbi et Orbi” [“To the City and to the World”] and sent out the Immelman family’s 2008 Christmas greeting.
Summary: President-elect Barack Obama says his administration will not compromise its ideals to fight terrorism, adding at a press conference to announce his CIA and national intelligence nominees, Leon Panetta and Adm. Dennis Blair, that he has told them to honor the Geneva Conventions.
Summary: Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials share much of the blame for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to portions of a report released by the Senate Armed Services Committee. … In the deadliest attack in Iraq in nearly six months, a suicide bomber struck a crowded restaurant near the northern city of Kirkuk where Kurdish officials were meeting with Arab tribal leaders, killing at least 55 people and wounding about 120.