Daily News Channel
On the outside, Betsy Lueth’s school looks like any other in this arty neighborhood of Minneapolis: a sprawling, boxy red brick building with plain steel doors. Yet inside, the blond, gregarious Minnesotan presides over an institution unique in the heartland: Yinghua Academy, a charter public school where elementary students of every ethnicity study subjects ranging from math to American history in Mandarin
The normal high school curriculum is a daily kaleidoscope of unrelated courses: a class in English, perhaps followed by history, civics and then the arts, each session unrelated to the other. Emulating liberal arts colleges and the better prep schools, some public high schools are now offering broad-scale courses in humanities that seek to relate these disciplines, and to show their relevance to the kind of decisions students must make in their own lives.A pacesetter in the field is the state of New York, where 100 high schools have developed experimental humanities courses, using a rough guideline prepared by state education officials
For the longest time, Sarah Palin was leery of Facebook. Some of the comments left on her page during the 2008 vice-presidential campaign were so withering and unpleasant that it took months of coaxing by her staff and her daughters Bristol and Willow to convince Palin that she should give it another try.
For padding payrolls in the Street Cleaning Department, to the extent of perhaps $5,000,000 per annum, three public servants of New York City were last week sentenced to Sing Sing prison.
The hand-to-hand combat over new rules limiting the power of public unions in Wisconsin didn’t end when Governor Scott Walker signed them into law on March 11; it merely changed venues. The new law is headed for a challenge at the state’s supreme court later this year
Singapore’s newest museum doesn’t dwell on the alleged dichotomy between art and science. Instead, it celebrates the connections between both, with lively galleries of interactive displays in areas such as design, media and technology.
Two months after the writer David Foster Wallace killed himself, his agent, accompanied by his widow, went into his garage office to look through his papers. It was Thanksgiving weekend, 2008, and the weather was cold and gray in Claremont, Calif.
Like his predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, California Governor Jerry Brown is struggling to keep the state afloat in an ocean of red ink. Facing a $26 billion deficit, he warns of “draconian” cuts to education and public safety if the state cannot raise revenue and has to adopt an all-cuts budget.
In his 11 years in power, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, has cultivated an everyman image of himself, in stark contrast to the formal, distant mien of his late father and predecessor Hafez. The late president was feared more than he was loved.
The murder by knife of three children, including an infant of 3 months, and both parents in a West Bank settlement late Friday night rocked Israel terribly.