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BLACKSBURG -- Several thousands people gathered on Virginia Tech’s Drillfield this morning to form a giant message of thanks to the world for its support after the April 16 massacre. Photos of the event are posted on hokiesthanktheworld.org. Dressed in the school colors of maroon and orange, and surrounded by fall foliage of the same hues along the Blue Ridge Mountains, the crowd was arranged to form Tech’s "VT" logo, and under it, "THANKS YOU." At 11:10 a.m., a satellite aimed to capture the image as the thousands waved up at the sky.

Burlington, Vt., Jul 16, 2007 / 10:46 am (CNA).- The Latin Mass will be made available to those Vermont Catholics who seek it, Bishop Salvatore Matano announced in a July 6th letter to the faithful in his diocese. The bishop made the announcement, following Pope Benedict XVI’s recent universal approval of the 1962 Latin Mass."I will consult with our council of priests ... to determine the most suitable manner for making the 'extraordinary form' of the Sacred Liturgy available to those who request it," wrote Bishop Matano.Latin Masses will be offered occasionally around the state based on worshippers' requests. However,...

State Police searching Virginia Tech duck pond By Dawn Jefferies / 10 On Your Side Jun 25, 2007 It was here, at the Virginia Tech duck pond witnesses reported seeing Seung Hui Cho the morning of April 16th. Today, the duck pond is being drained. Virginia state police say they're leaving no stone unturned. Back in April, 10 on your side was there when teams searched the area, only saying it was a routine part of the investigation. Teams will come out and search this area again but they have to wait until the water drains. Last week, the Washington...

MONTPELIER, Vt. --At Riverwalk Records, the all-vinyl record store just down the street from the state Capitol, the black "US Out of Vt.!" T-shirts are among the hottest sellers. But to some people in Vermont, the idea is bigger than a $20 novelty. They want Vermont to secede from the United States -- peacefully, of course. Disillusioned by what they call an empire about to fall, a small cadre of writers and academics is plotting political strategy and planting the seeds of separatism. They've published a "Green Mountain Manifesto" subtitled "Why and How Tiny Vermont Might Help Save America From...

WEST RUTLAND, Vt. (The Vermont Catholic Tribune) – When Father Adam Krempa sits down for a light meal, he enjoys a bowl of cottage cheese drizzled with honey, seeded rye bread lightly toasted with butter – not margarine – and a cup of coffee with a heaping teaspoon of honey."It's like dying and having lunch with the Lord," said the pastor of St. Raphael Church in Poultney, Vt. It's not the toast or even the butter that makes the meal special. It's the honey. For 40 years Father Krempa has been keeping bees at his family homestead here on Valley...

A MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE SILVER STAR FAMILIES OF AMERICA My Friends My name is Steve Newton and I am the President of the Silver Star Families of America. The Silver Star Families of American was born to recognize, remember and assist the wounded of our armed forces from all wars. We honor and remember our wounded primarily by the presentation of Silver Star Banners, certificates and letters to our Wounded or their families. The tradition of the Silver Star for the Wounded dates back to 1917 when people used to sew over a Blue Star with Silver...

US Muslims Told Not to Pray for Non-Muslim VT Victims... Liberal Arab Website Reports: Debate on Virginia Tech Muslims Students' Mailing List Concerning Permissibility of Praying for Mercy for Non-Muslim Victims The liberal Arabic-language website Aafaq reports that a Muslim student set off a debate when she sent an email to the mailing list of a Muslim students' association (rabitat al-tullab al-muslimin) at Virginia Tech asking the students to pray that Allah have mercy on those killed and wounded in the shooting attack at the university. According to Aafaq, the dean of student affairs at American International University, Abu Hamza...

by Phyllis Schlafly, May 9, 2007 What was the motive behind 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui's killing of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech? Why was he consumed with hate, resentment and bitterness? Cho was an English Department major and senior. As a frequent lecturer on college campuses, I have discovered that the English Departments are often the weirdest and/or the most leftwing. A look at the websites of Virginia Tech's English Department and of its professors reveals their mindset. We don't yet know which courses Cho took, but it could have been any of these. Did he take Professor Bernice...

ALBANY -- A renowned poet who taught the Virginia Tech killer found his presence so intimidating it felt like he was "controlling my classroom," the professor said in an interview. . . . The evening wasn't all solemn, though. Giovanni's often profane jokes about men, Jesus, and especially the Bush administration kept the crowd in stitches, though most of them can't be printed in a family newspaper. And from this article:But it wasn't what the celebrated poet said about the massacre that provoked one of the loudest reactions from her audience of University at Albany students Thursday. What really got...

We Mourn Students, But Not Soldiers April 26, 2007 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It never occurred to me there was any disconnect in President Bush's order that flags be flown at half-staff to honor the memory of 32 students and faculty gunned down at Virginia Tech. It was, I believed at the time, the fitting tribute of a nation, united in grief, over the slaughter of so many young and talented people. I still believe President Bush did the right thing. But now I'm also troubled by the disconnect: Why are flags flown half-staff to mourn slain students, yet never flown half-staff to...

My oldest goes to college in Virginia. Fortunately, he is at the University of Virginia — not Virginia Tech — so when the news of the shooting broke, and I started getting concerned calls from friends, I had general anxiety, not the frightening and personal one I’m sure the parents of students at Blacksburg felt. Afterward, I spoke with my sons about it — two are in college and one in fifth grade. I spent time reassuring the 10-year-old that he was more likely to be badly injured by bee stings than by something like this. And as I watched...

GamePolitics.com is reporting that United States District Judge Paul C. Huck has dismissed anti-video game crusader Jack Thompson's lawsuit against Gawker Media, the publisher of gaming blog Kotaku. Thompson had claimed that Kotaku and Gawker Media had failed to honor his requests to remove "threatening" comments from several of their blog posts that were critical of his eagerness to blame video games for the tragic Virginia Tech shootings earlier this month. On Wednesday, Thompson had added the blog publishing company, which also operates other popular blogs like Gizmodo, Wonkette, and Valleywag, to a list of defendants in a suit he...

In the wake of an event such as Virginia Tech, our system moves heaven and earth to figure out what went wrong and how to make sure it doesn't happen again. This of course is what we did after September 11 and after the botched response to Hurricane Katrina. Here's what's really unnerving about this inevitable "process": In June 2000, the Bremer Report of the National Commission on Terrorism described virtually everything we needed to know about preparing for the kind of attack that occurred in September 2001. Similarly--and you can guess what you're about to read--in 2002 the Final...

AMERICANS BELIEVE that for every problem there is a solution. If we think and work hard enough, we believe we can solve every problem. Of course, we also live with the obdurate presence of contingency and uncertainty. We know that too, for we believe in Murphy's Law. But the media assume that this tragedy was avoidable and start blaming: the administrators were negligent despite the fact that their hands were tied. The gun store should never have sold firearms to Seung-Hui Cho. All relevant information concerning mentally ill persons should be known to the police and to gun store operators,...

Are the Virginia Tech murders the latest evolution of a strain of violence embodied in radical Islamist terrorism? Post-9/11, terrorism inspired by al Qaeda has been devolving in a progression that can best be described as from the caliphate to Columbine. That is to say, from a pseudo-religious political movement to nihilist acts of destruction. Welcome to the McJihad. Osama bin Laden and the other founders of al Qaeda are now more destructive as a global brand than they could ever hope to be as tactical terrorists. After al Qaeda’s success on 9/11, the media and the Internet presented them...

How to prevent next massacre -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: April 17, 2007 1:00 a.m. Eastern Like most Americans yesterday, I had the TV on from the moment the Virginia Tech slaughter broke. After the death toll was established at 33, the focus of reporting and analysis shifted to the how and the why of this national tragedy. I heard the following questions and statements raised: How can we prevent this from taking place on another campus? Why is it that these massacres seem to be happening more frequently at schools and colleges? There is little more we can do in an open...

BAGHDAD - Students in Baghdad, where universities have been hard hit by violence, said Monday they were saddened by last week's massacre at Virginia Tech and hung up a banner to express their solidarity with "our brothers in humanity and in pursuing knowledge." "We want to let the whole world know that we do not support terrorism anywhere," said Yassir Nazar, head of the student union at Baghdad Technology University, who organized the hanging of the banner near the campus gate. It reads, "We, the students of Technology University, denounce the attack at Virginia Tech. We extend our condolences to...

The terrible slaughter that recently occurred at a university in Virginia caused a predictable reaction in France. On all TV channels, there are inquiries into the “violence” created by American society, into the ease with which one can obtain weapons in the United States, and into the “all-powerful gun lobby.” It’s the same thing in the print media. With a delicate, often self-characterizing hypocrisy, Le Monde, in an unsigned editorial, stresses that it would be “unjust and false” to dwell on an image of America given by “outbursts of murderous insanity to which isolated individuals yield,” but immediately adds that...

What can we do about psychopathic warning signs? There are dangerous, vicious people among us, a recognition that ought to be the starting point of any policy aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings. In the case of Mark Barton, the disgruntled investor who shot up an Atlanta day-trading shop in 1999, he had left a trail of police officers, insurance investigators, in-laws, neighbors and former employers, who knew he was a psychopath and suspected he was a killer, though police had never been able to make a case against him. In the case of Salvador Tapia, who shot up a...

Within hours of the Virginia Tech massacre, the New York Times had identified the problem: ''What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss.'' --snip--The "gun-free zone" fraud isn't just about banning firearms or even a symptom of academia's distaste for an entire sensibility of which the Second Amendment is part and parcel but part of a deeper reluctance of critical segments of our culture to engage with reality. Michelle Malkin wrote a column a few days ago connecting the prohibition against physical self-defense with "the erosion of intellectual...