THE FUNERAL WILL take place later day of Christina-Taylor-Green, the nine-year-old girl killed in Saturday’s shooting in Tuscon, Arizona.

The nine-year-old had been brought by a neighbour to the ‘Congress on your Corner’ event organised by congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, having been recently developed an interest in politics and having been elected to her school council.

The Arizona Republic newspaper reports that the national 9/11 flag – the largest flag from New York to have survived the September 11 terrorist attacks – is to be flown at her funeral, marking the fact that Green was born on the day of the attacks in 2001.

Green had been one of fifty children to feature in a photography book called ‘Faces of Hope’, which pictured babies born on the exact date that four planes were hi-jacked and crashed at various locations on the US’s east coast, killing approximately 3,000 people.

The flag had been sent to the funeral after the head of the charity which keeps the flag heard Green’s mother say how Christina had “looked at 9/11 as a national holiday… and looked for all the hopeful things that came out of it.”

US president Barack Obama yesterday addressed the nation from Arizona, insisting that it was important, “at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarised… that we are talking to each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.”

Giffords and her staff had gathered to fulfil “a central tenet of the democracy envisioned by our founders”, he said.

Obama’s speech has been well received, with Republican governor of New Jersey Chris Christie welcoming it as “excellent”, and adding that he could not explain why his party colleague, former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin, had accused the media of “blood libel”.

Palin – considered a likely contender to be Obama’s Republican opponent in 2012 – had offered that journalists and political pundits  ”should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.”

The Alaskan has come under fire for using the particular phrase “blood libel”, a phrase typically associated with false allegations that religious minorities – cost commonly Jews – killed their own children and use their blood in religious rituals.

Palin added that the chief suspect in the shootings, Jared Lee Loughner, was “apolitical”.