La Nacion — the largest newspaper in Costa Rica — says the Nicaraguan commander, Eden Pastora, used Google Maps to “justify” the incursion even though the official maps used by both countries indicate the territory belongs to Costa Rica. Pastora blames Google Maps in the paper:

See the satellite photo on Google and there you see the border. In the last 3,000 meters the two sides are from Nicaragua.

The paper points out that Bing Maps shows the correct and officially recognized border.

To build a mosque adjacent to Ground Zero, named in memory of the Islamic conquest of parts of Europe and echoing the Islamist desire to regain all former Muslim territories, would be an act of reconciliation.

Israeli scientists have found that even subliminal exposure to national flags can shift a person’s political views and even who they vote for. They managed to affect the attitudes of volunteers to the Israeli-Palestine conflict by showing them the Israeli flag for just 16 thousandths of a second, barely long enough for the image to consciously register.

It’s the direction in which attitudes shifted that’s fascinating:

When they were shown the control flag, the High group, as expected answered the on-screen questions with a nationalistic bent, averaging a score of 6. The Low group’s average score was closer to 2.5. However, when both groups saw the subliminal Israeli flag, they both converged to a middle-ground score of 4.

Sixteen milliseconds of exposure to the flag was enough to close the ideological gap between the two groups. In a second experiment, Hassin showed that the flashed flag had the same moderating effect on opinions about Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. At this point, it’s worth noting that the flags didn’t wield an irresistible mind-altering power. There was still variation in the volunteer’s choices, but the average trend changed in a statistically significant way.