NewsTrust - Lifelong Learning - Most Recent Stories: News (Mainstream)

Discharged for Being Gay, Veterans Seek to Re-enlist

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By James Dao - Sep. 04 (Investigative Report) - .By some estimates, hundreds of gay men and lesbians among the more than 13,000 who were discharged under the policy have contacted recruiters or advocacy groups saying they want to re-enlist after the policy is repealed on Sept. 20.

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New Facebook iPhone App ’Pretty Much Done’

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By MG Siegler - Aug. 08 (News Report) - As one of the most popular applications on Apple’s popular iPhone platform, a lot of users are eagerly awaiting the next version of the app. And that wait is almost over.

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The Jobless Go Back to School and, They Hope, Work

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By Amy Merrick, Roger Thurow - Feb. 05 (News Report) - Chad Smith considered going to college, but as he landed a series of well-paying construction and auto-industry jobs over the past decade, school seemed like a waste of time and money. "When you're making $55,000 at 18 years old, it's hard to tell yourself to go to school," he says. "You've got the world by the tail." Then, last May, he was laid off from his night-shift job at a Chrysler assembly plant. Even if he wanted to go back to construction, home building already had slowed to a crawl, offering few jobs. Now 29 years old, Mr. Smith is back in school through a federal retraining program, studying software development and computer networking at Rock Valley College, a community college in Rockford, Ill.

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New Scholarships for Laid-Off Workers - US News and World Report

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

U.S. News & World Report - By Kim Clark - Feb. 02 (News Report) - A small but growing number of government agencies and colleges are rushing to help laid-off workers afford retraining and college courses by offering them free or greatly discounted tuition.

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Library use jumps in Seattle area; economy likely reason

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Times - By Mary Ann Gwinn - Jan. 15 (Special Report) - A library card has become a hot property in the Seattle region — area public libraries are experiencing a surge in circulation. While busy libraries in one of the nation's most literate cities are nothing new, some librarians credit (or blame) the recession for a dramatic upswing in business. The Seattle area's two library systems, the King County Library System (KCLS) and Seattle Public Library (SPL), each loaned more than a million more items in 2008 than in 2007.

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Asia and the Mideast Gain Ground in Higher Ed

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Zvika Krieger - Aug. 10 (Special Report) - Drive down Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai's main thoroughfare, and you'll pass the world's only seven-star hotel, its tallest building and its largest man-made resort island. But head off into the desert and you'll hit a modest-looking set of office buildings and construction cranes that promise to be just as superlative. This is the site of Dubai International Academic City: the future home of a Michigan State University campus and the center of the local effort to make the emirate into a new global hot spot for higher education. "There is a war out there for talent," says Abdulla al-Karam, director-general of Dubai's Knowledge and Human Development Authority, "and we're not going to let everyone else take the best."

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn, gulag chronicler, dies

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - Aug. 04 (News Report) - With "The Gulag Archipelago," he gave a name to the brutal network of labor camps that spread across the Soviet Union during dictator Josef Stalin's frenzied industrialization drive. Tens of millions of men, women and children died in the effort.

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How Smart Are Americans?

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - Jun. 29 (Poll) - The Newsweek Poll gauges what U.S. citizens know on a broad range of topics, from the price of oil to the works of Shakespeare.

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Americans are not stupid

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

CNN - By Julian Morrow - Jun. 21 (Special Report) - A lot of people give Americans a bum rap for being stupid and knowing nothing about the world, but the reality couldn't be further from the truth, as I discovered on the streets here, asking locals about the very world their country runs.

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The freedom to say 'no'

Sun, 18 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - By Elaine McArdle - May. 18 (Special Report) - Now two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves. When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women - highly qualified for the work - stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else.

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Jefferson Award: Reaching out to ex-cons

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By Regina Hackett - Mar. 24 (Special Report) - Although some of the people the Chamberlains took in ultimately reoffended and returned to prison, none was ever a personal threat to the couple. "I know people who are scared spitless by convicts, but we've never felt that way," he said. A successful life after prison takes work, he continued. "If people go directly from prison back to the world, it's no wonder they fail. In this country, we think of punishment first. That's not the way Europeans handle it. In Europe there are many steps prior to lockup. It's a last resort in Europe, and here it's a first resort. There are too many people in jail in this country. "I think it's partly because the country was founded by religious extremists. They wanted freedom to practice their religion but weren't interested in granting it to others. That's a very judgmental base.

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How Many Billionaires Does It Take to Fix a School System?

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - Mar. 09 (Special Report) - For as long as wealthy Americans have given their money away, education has been a leading recipient of their largess. Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller: the biggest philanthropists of the 20th century all gave significant portions of their fortunes to schools, teachers and libraries. Today, according to the Foundation Center, about a quarter of all foundation giving goes to education; overall, only religious organizations receive more charitable donations.

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Hand-wringing About American Culture - Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Patricia Cohen - Feb. 14 (Special Report) - A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from "American Idol," appearing on the Fox game show "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: "Budapest is the capital of what European country?" Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. "I thought Europe was a country," she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. "Hungry?" she said, eyes widening in disbelief. "That's a country? I've heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I've never heard of it."

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Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Patricia Cohen - Feb. 14 (News Report) - Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn't zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge. ... But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that "too much learning can be a dangerous thing") and anti-rationalism ("the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion") have fused in a particularly insidious way. Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don't think it matters.

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Number of young adults using libraries surprises researchers

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0800

Associated Press - By (no author named) - Dec. 30 (Special Report) - Young adults are the heaviest users of public libraries despite the ease with which they can get access to a wealth of information over the Internet from the comforts of their homes, according to a new study.

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Twilight of the Books

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0800

New Yorker - By Caleb Crain - Dec. 19 (Special Report) - More alarming are indications that Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability. According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average adult's skill in reading prose slipped one point on a five-hundred-point scale, and the proportion who were proficient--capable of such tasks as "comparing viewpoints in two editorials"--declined from fifteen per cent to thirteen.

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Iran invites Bush to speak at university

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 23:25:40 -0700

Tehran Times - By (no name provided) - Oct. 01 (News Report) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad invited President Bush to speak at an Iranian university if the American leader ever traveled to the Islamic Republic, state-run television reported Friday.

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Despite the Web, Americans Remain Woefully Ill-Informed

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 09:29:12 -0700

Wired - By Patrick di Justo - Jul. 18 (Poll) - More than a decade after the Internet went mainstream, the world's richest information source hasn't necessarily made its users any more informed. A new study from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press shows that Americans, on average, are less able to correctly answer questions about current events than they were in 1989. Citizens who call the Internet their primary news source know slightly less than fans of TV and radio news. Hmmm... maybe a little less Perez Hilton and a little more Jim Lehrer.

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Oh, THAT John Locke

Sat, 16 Jun 2007 12:51:55 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Jamin Brophy-Warren - Jun. 16 (Special Report) - There's a new sport on the Internet: competing to come up with the best examples of how Wikipedia, the Web's home-grown reference source, is skewed towards pop-culture topics. For instance, the West Wing of the White House merits a 1,100-word entry on Wikipedia, while "The West Wing," the Aaron Sorkin TV drama, has an 6,800-word write-up. This game already has a name: "Wiki-groaning."

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Public Knowledge of Current Affairs Little Changed by News and Information Revolutions

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 05:10:03 -0700

Pew Research - Apr. 16 (News Report) - Since the late 1980s, the emergence of 24-hour cable news as a dominant news source and the explosive growth of the internet have led to major changes in the American public's news habits. But a new nationwide survey finds that the coaxial and digital revolutions and attendant changes in news audience behaviors have had little impact on how much Americans know about national and international affairs.

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Hello, Grisham -- So Long, Hemingway?

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 07:09:27 -0800

Washington Post - By Lisa Rein - Jan. 02 (News Report) - You can't find "Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings" at the Pohick Regional Library anymore. Or "The Education of Henry Adams" at Sherwood Regional. Want Emily Dickinson's "Final Harvest"? Don't look to the Kingstowne branch. It's not that the books are checked out. They're just gone. No one was reading them, so librarians took them off the shelves and dumped them.

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To fix US schools, panel says, start over

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 12:20:27 -0800

Christian Science Monitor - By Amanda Paulson - Dec. 15 (News Report) - Many of the ideas are likely to encounter opposition. Even the group's proponents insist the report isn't an exact blueprint, but a framework - one they hope will be used to jumpstart a national conversation and entice a few states to experiment with overhauls inspired by these ideas, much the way states led the way with welfare reform in the early 1990s.

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