‘Alien’ prequel directed by Ridley Scott.

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‘Prometheus’ Trailer Released

I don’t believe in the Loch Ness monster. I don’t think government scientists are autopsying aliens in Area 51 or plotting a vast conspiracy from a bunker at the North Pole. But for the past two years, I’ve lived through an experience that has felt, at times, like a real-life episode of “The X-Files.” Read full article > >

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The doctor diagnosed chronic Lyme disease, but many experts say it doesn’t exist

They say that President Obama is a Muslim, but if he isn’t, he’s a secularist who is waging war on religion. On some days he’s a Nazi, but on most others he’s merely a socialist. His especially creative opponents see him as having a “Kenyan anti-colonial worldview,” while the less adventurous say that he’s an elitist who spent too much time in Cambridge, Hyde Park and other excessively academic precincts. Read full article > >

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President Obama as an alien

With encampments largely gone, the challenge is to keep the Occupy cause alive through methods like strikes and protests, which risk alienating people rather than galvanizing them.

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Occupy Movement Regroups, Laying Plans for the Next Phase

Over the years, columnist Carolyn Hax has doled out more than a few helpful hints to would-be brides and grooms. Now, with a bevy of newly engaged couples about to start their wedding planning , a roundup of some of her sage wisdom on how to set boundaries, what you should think about before a destination wedding and how to have the wedding your family will hate. Read full article > >

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Carolyn Hax: How to plan a wedding you want without alienating others

We climbed out of the white Lincoln Navigator ready to be thrilled. The two-hour ride from the Red Rock country of Sedona was behind us, and the alien grandeur of the Grand Canyon was just yards ahead. It was early December and beyond chilly, but we had prepared for any weather eventuality. Or so we thought. Read full article > >

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Winter, a grand time to see the Grand Canyon

As traffic whizzed past them, a group of tiny Asian women in long bright skirts and plastic sandals walked single file along the edge of East-West Highway in Riverdale, headed for the Megamart. Deomaya Dharjmer, 49, led the way, cheerfully determined to conquer her alien new world. Barely a year ago, she and her friends were living in bamboo and thatch huts in Nepal, waiting for someone to decid e their fate. For 18 years, they had languished in crowded U.N. camps, where 100,000 mostly Hindu refugees of Nepalese descent had been driven from next-door Bhutan by a Buddhist regime. Read full article > >

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Refugees from Bhutan face strange new world of Maryland suburbs

Moviegoers who follow David Fincher’s career may be puzzled to see the director adapting a bestseller like “ The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo .” Movie companies tend to be meddlesome when it comes to such “franchise” properties, which have made mountains of money and are expected to make much more, and Fincher doesn’t respond well to meddling. When studio execs manhandled him on his high-stakes first movie (the third installment of the hit “Alien” franchise ) the result was a failure both commercially and with critics. Read full article > >

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‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ director Fincher discusses changes to the story, new D.C. project

TLC’s highly anticipated yet oddly restrained new reality series, “All-American Muslim,” approaches its subjects from a starting point of total naivete. That’s because, like most journalistic acts of enterprise regarding U.S. citizens who follow the Islamic faith, it assumes viewers know absolutely nothing about modern Muslims. Read full article > >

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‘All-American Muslim’: An inalienable right to be as dull as anybody else

Sebastian Rotella is an award-winning investigative reporter who, for more than a quarter-century, has covered politics, crime and corruption throughout Latin America. In 1998 he published a highly praised book of nonfiction called “Twilight on the Line: Underworlds and Politics at the U.S-Mexico Border.” Now, he has turned to fiction to dramatize the violence and venality of the border and the drug trade, even as he honors the honest cops in both countries who resist the power of the cartels. “Triple Crossing” starts in San Diego, where we meet Valentine Pescatore, a young Border Patrol agent who’s both big-hearted and hot-tempered. We see the former quality when he slips money to illegal aliens he’s just arrested. We see the temper when he chases a smuggler he dislikes back across the border into Tijuana, a violation that could get him fired or even jailed. Through Valentine’s skeptical eyes, we watch what he calls the border’s “nightly battle theater of the absurd.” He particularly loathes his boss, who beats up on illegals even as he takes bribes from smugglers. Read full article > >

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Book review: ‘Triple Crossing’ by Sebastian Rotella

Researchers spot the darkest known alien world, TrES-2b – describing it as “blacker than the darkest coal”.

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Darkest alien world spotted by astronomers

I t’s two weeks into Redskins training camp and in the competitive furor over Rex vs. Becks one salient point has fallen through the cracks: Because neither guy is headed to Canton any time soon, what might matter more than who starts at quarterback is who is in front of Rex Grossman and John Beck . What matters is whether or not the offensive line is pushed aside like rag dolls by defensive ogres such as Pittsburgh’s James Harrison , who is coming to town Friday night to lay a lick on someone behind center. Read full article > >

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Washington Redskins offensive line remains a question mark

The following piece,Was Osama bin Laden a relevant, popular leader in the Middle East at the time of his killing? written by Aslan Media Founder Reza Aslan, originally appeared at KCET.com. Reza takes a closer look at what the death of Al-Qaeda’s leader means for the future of the terrorist group. Here are a few things to keep in mind as news continues to circulate about Osama bin Laden’s death. According to poll numbers: not really. In Lebanon, according to a Pew Research Center Global Attitudes Project poll conducted this year, he had a 1 percent support base. In Turkey, his approval rating was at 3 percent, and in countries like Jordan and Egypt, bin Laden only had 13 percent and 22 percent popularity, respectively. Even in Pakistan, where anti-American sentiment is usually high, his popularity is only at 18 percent. It wasn’t always this way. For example, in Jordan, bin Laden’s popularity reached a staggering 56 percent in 2003, but al-Qaida’s attacks on Muslims had by 2006 begun to deeply alienate the “Arab Street.” Indeed, as former Ambassador Marc Ginsberg noted in a Huffington Post column yesterday, “15 percent of the 3,010 victims resulting from al-Qaida’s attacks between 2004 and 2008 were NON-Muslim.” A Sheik from Anbar Province in Iraq described his reaction to bin Laden’s death this way : “All orphans, widows and people who suffered that butcher should be happy now … The killing of Bin Laden is victory for all humanity, not only for Americans.” How relevant is Bin Laden’s death in “ending” the “War on Terror” and to the region as a whole? Perhaps al-Qaida’s most effective branch is in Africa, where the al-Shabab group in Somalia have successfully attacked and killed numerous Africans, including a deadly attack in Uganda last summer. Just last week, al-Qaida organized and planted a bomb in the popular Moroccan café Argana (one of my favorite destinations in the country), killing 16 people. So while it has recently been less of a lethal force, al-Qaida’s attacks will most likely continue with or without bin Laden. Analysts like Shadi Hamid with Brookings Doha Center view bin Laden’s death as a minor event in terms of its regional significance. Hamid tweeted yesterday, “Al Qaeda, in recent yrs, morphed from an organization into an idea. And the idea has proven increasingly unattractive to most Arabs.” Others, like popular Arab blogger The Arabist , agree. “But the sentiment Bin Laden evokes today is probably indifference. Bin Laden simply wasn’t an important figure in recent years, and was particularly irrelevant to the Arab uprisings.” Indeed, the world had not heard from bin Laden in more than six months; he was conspicuously silent about the recent democratic movements in the Arab world. Al-Qaida had tried on numerous occasions to tie itself in with the Arab uprisings but its words fell on deaf ears. Khalil el-Anani, an expert on al-Qaida, told the Associated Press , “Bin Laden became part of the past, just like the Arab regimes that have been toppled” What a coincidence that the same year Arab authoritarian rulers collapse, bin Laden dies.” Regardless of bin Laden’s relevance to the recent Arab uprisings, many believe that his death will fracture an already weak organization. Lawrence Wright, writer of the popular book on al-Qaida, The Looming Tower, says the death of bin Laden is a milestone . “He was important all along. Just the fact that he was able to elude capture or being killed for nearly a decade — or more than a decade, if you go back to the embassy bombings in 1998 when we first went after him — he’s been a symbol of resistance and of the failure of American policy to reach out and stop this kind of terror. It emboldened other imitators all around the globe. So getting bin Laden is immeasurably important.”   Read more of Reza Aslan’s piece here , at KCET.org Photo Credit: Mike Kline

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Bin Laden’s Dead. What Now?

Americans are finally starting to ask: “Is all this higher education really necessary?” Since the appearance in The Atlantic of my essay “In The Basement of the Ivory Tower” (2008), in which I questioned the wisdom of sending seemingly everyone in the United States through the rigors of higher education, it’s become increasingly apparent to me that I’m far from the only one with these misgivings. Indeed, to my surprise, I’ve discovered that rather than a lone crank, I’m a voice in a growing movement. Also see: In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: The idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth. An instructor at a “college of last resort” explains why. The Truth About Harvard: It may be hard to get into Harvard, but it’s easy to get out without learning much of enduring value at all. A recent graduate’s report. By Ross Douthat What Does College Teach? It’s time to put an end to “faith-based” acceptance of higher education’s quality. By Richard H. Hersh I hadn’t expected my essay, inspired by the frustrations of teaching students unprepared for the rigors of college-level work, to attract much notice. But the volume and vehemence of the feedback the piece generated was overwhelming. It drew more visitors than almost any other article on the Atlantic ‘s web site in 2008, and provoked an avalanche of letters to the editor. It even started turning up in the syllabi of college writing classes, and on the agendas of educational conferences.  In the months and years since then – and especially now, as I prepare to add to the critical tumult with a book expanding on that original article – I find myself noticing similar sentiments elsewhere. Is it merely a matter of my becoming so immersed in the subject that I’m seeing it everywhere? I don’t think so. Start paying attention, and it becomes readily apparent that more and more Americans today are skeptical about the benefits of college. “Some Say Bypassing a Higher Education Is Smarter Than Paying for a Degree,” reads a recent headline in The Washington Post. (The article, which addresses everything from higher education’s outsize price tag to its questionable correlation with career success, garnered more than 4,000 Facebook recommendations on the Post’s web site.) And just last month, the Harvard Graduate School of Education published a study suggesting that ( gasp! ) four-year college is perhaps not for everyone. Rather, for a growing proportion of students, the report contends, internships, apprenticeships, and vocational training would be far more beneficial. Even for the academically inclined, the value of college in this economic climate is increasingly subject to question. “Is Going to an Elite College Worth The Cost?,” asked New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg in December. He surveyed economic studies, perused labor reports, and interviewed economists and sociologists to ascertain whether there’s really a significant payoff for choosing a swanky private college over someplace less glamorous. The answer?  Inconclusive. Parents, of course, obsess over the Ivy League admissions game, carefully studying up on how to give their kids an edge. And U.S. News & World Report’s annual college breakdown gets as much publicity these days as the Oscar nominations. But are those students fortunate enough to gain admission really getting an education worthy of the fuss? Reports of rampant grade inflation at many of these schools throws even a straight-A transcript from a prestigious university into question. (Some colleges, including Princeton, have taken to imposing limits on how many A’s instructors can award in any course, while the University of North Carolina has resorted to including median class grades on students’ transcripts so as to make it more readily apparent which A’s were earned in easy courses.) And a new book by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids, makes the case that students at elite colleges are being left to fend for themselves while their impressively credentialed professors take constant sabbaticals and leave the actual teaching to inexperienced assistants. Also see: What’s Wrong With the American University System: An interview with Andrew Hacker, the author of Higher Education?  Yet despite the mounting skepticism about the value of a college degree, and in the face of the economic downturn, colleges continue to demand ever higher fees, saddling graduates with crushing debt along with their diplomas. In June of last year the Federal Reserve released new figures showing that the nation’s total student loan debt now sits at about $830 billion – for the first time surpassing the nation’s credit card debt. Student loan debt, it should be noted, is in many respects less forgiving than credit card debt: “These loans typically can’t be discharged in bankruptcy,” explains the Wall Street Journal. “They have different repayment terms, some of which have heavy consequences for borrowers who miss payments .” Some commentators have even suggested that the crimp the financial downturn is putting on students’ ability to get loans may in fact be doing those students a favor. In a piece titled, “Huge Debt Incurred for College Tuition Just Doesn’t Make the Grade,” syndicated financial columnist Michelle Singletary writes, “I’ll be honest. I think if college students and their parents have a harder time getting loans, that’s a good thing. Perhaps now more people will stop and consider the long-term implications of taking on so much of this so-called good debt.” Adding to the anti-academic backlash is the fact that at a time when most businesses are contracting, colleges are growing inexorably, swallowing up residential neighborhoods in ways that alienate the towns and cities that host them. NYU’s ongoing expansion, for example, has angered many, leading some to dub it the “2031 Plan to Take Over the World.” (A June 2010 Bloomberg article, titled “New York University Assails Greenwich Village,” derides the university’s recent spate of building as an “overbearing onslaught.”) And at the other end of Manhattan, Nick Sprayregen, the owner of several self-storage facilities in West Harlem has been making headlines with his battle to prevent his properties from eminent domain seizure for a planned Columbia University expansion. (Sprayregen was ultimately denied a hearing by the Supreme Court, but a New York appellate court ruled in 2009 that Columbia had inappropriately colluded with the state in its effort to take his land. “The record overwhelmingly establishes,” the judge wrote, “that the true beneficiary of the scheme to redevelop Manhattanville is not the community that is supposedly blighted, but rather Columbia University, a private elite education institution.”) Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, Harvard is regularly lambasted these days for having bought up large swaths of land in working class neighborhoods across the Charles River, then failed to build as promised, leaving vacant lots and gaping, rat-infested holes in the ground. *            *            * Since when have colleges become so controversial? They used to embody humankind at its most elevated; now, they’re just another institution to be wary of. I attended college in the 1970s, when higher education wasn’t newsworthy. When you went away to college, you really went away. I checked into a sylvan campus far away from everything, signed up for a meal plan, submerged myself in the library stacks, and essentially disappeared. Society took little note of academia’s somnolent doings because there was little to take note of. Student activism on any significant scale was moribund. The Vietnam War was over. Colleges were viewed, in the main, as a hiatus from the real world. In my cinderblock dormitory, I watched no television and read no newspapers. We went to see few current movies–it wasn’t all that easy to get oneself off campus and to a theater, even for the likes of Woody Allen and Jill Clayburgh and Burt Reynolds–but we did dig revivals, Duck Soup and Flying Down to Rio and Sunset Boulevard. We seemed to dwell more in the dusty, monochromatic past than the present, even when we weren’t reading Chaucer and Tacitus. I spent four leisurely years imbibing great books and ideas. I could write a good literature paper–it seemed one of the few things I was suited to do–so a degree in English was my destiny. In those days, college was a lot cheaper, so I didn’t rack up much debt. I knew my degree wouldn’t get me a job, but no one had promised that it would. It wasn’t as though the college was hoodwinking me. My pursuit was rather solipsistic and no doubt shortsighted but harmless–a solitary pastime, like collecting penguin figurines or breeding orchids. Twenty years later, I found myself teaching part-time at a small private college, and I was struck by the extent to which the institution had changed. College wasn’t the old place of retreat and meditation that I remembered–a place to quietly condition one’s mind with four years of intellectual crunches and sets and reps. It no longer seemed that intellectual a place at all. Now it was a place where students accumulated credits to advance at their jobs. College was very much part of the workaday world. All kinds of people attended because, if they wanted a bigger paycheck, they had no choice in the matter. The rolls had expanded dramatically, which seemed initially like a good thing. But I was teaching many students who weren’t prepared to do even high school work. I was expected to coax critically reasoned research papers from students who possessed no life of the mind at all: young and not-so-young men and women who didn’t read and thought not a whit about ideas. The task was impossible. I couldn’t shake the sense that the college simply wanted to enroll as many students as possible – and that colleges in general had become more focused on the bottom line than in my day. The system had ended up expanding in ways that industry always expands: by jacking up prices, putting money into public relations, and broadening the customer base by marketing even to customers dubiously served by the product. If my informal observations about the tenor of our national discourse are accurate, however, many of those customers are finally starting to ask some tough questions – chief among them: Is all this higher education really necessary? And while the colleges do claim to instill critical thinking skills, these days, I’m not sure they’re thrilled to be the focus of so much critical thought.

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An Anti-College Backlash?

Evidence suggests that botanic gardens play a part in the spread of invasive alien species, which have escaped from collections, a study concludes.

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Botanic gardens ‘invasives’ role