There is plenty of blame to go around for the U.S. housing bubble, but not much of it belongs to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The two giant housing-finance institutions made many mistakes over the decades, some of them real whoppers, but causing house prices to soar and then crater during the past decade weren’t among them. Read full article > >

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Fannie and Freddie don’t deserve blame for bubble

The Higgs particle is also known as the Higgs boson, or “ the God particle ,” a term that Leon Lederman used some years ago and which delighted journalists but surely offended photons and electrons throughout the universe. The Higgs is named after Peter Higgs, a theorist who four decades ago predicted its existence as part of the Standard Model of particle physics. No one’s ever found one. Discovering the Higgs is a central purpose of two very elaborate experiments being conducted at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. On Tuesday, the CERN scientists will announce their latest batch of results, and, as Scientific American has reported , rumors abound that they’ve homing in on the Higgs. More here from Nature . Read full article > >

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Joel Achenbach:
Higgs particle: Getting closer

TRIPOLI, Libya — French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron were given a heroes’ welcome Thursday as they visited Libya to celebrate the fall of Moammar Gaddafi and pledge continued support for the nation as it rebuilds after four decades of autocratic rule. They also vowed to help the victorious rebels in their hunt for Libya’s fugitive former leader. Read full article > >

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Sarkozy, Cameron vow to support Libya, help find Gaddafi

SAT reading scores for graduating high school seniors this year reached the lowest point in nearly four decades, reflecting a steady decline in performance in that subject on the college admissions test, the College Board reported Wednesday. In the Washington area, one of the nation’s leading producers of college-bound students, educators were scrambling to understand double-digit drops in test scores in Montgomery and Prince William counties and elsewhere. Read full article > >

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SAT reading scores drop to lowest point in decades

In 2004, at age 69, Stella Rimington published “ At Risk ,” the first in a series of espionage novels featuring MI5 operative Liz Carlyle. That book marked the start of a successful second career for this remarkable woman. The first began in 1968, when Rimington joined MI5, Britain’s internal security service. In the decades that followed, she served in every major branch of the organization — counterintelligence, counter-subversion, counterespionage — and in 1992 became its first female director general, a post she held until her retirement in 1996. That is a serious résumé. Read full article > >

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Stella Rimington’s ‘Rip Tide’: A perfunctory spy novel

Some people called Michael S. Hart a Don Quixote, always tilting at windmills. As it happens, Cervantes’s classic tale of the man of La Mancha is one of the more than 36,000 books in Project Gutenberg, a monumental free online library that Mr. Hart conceived of four decades ago, when the Internet was in its infancy and generations before the birth of iTunes and Wikipedia. Mr. Hart, 64, was found dead Sept. 6 at his home in Urbana, Ill. He had a heart attack, said his brother, Bennett Hart. Read full article > >

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Project Gutenberg creator Michael S. Hart dies at 64

A system that began so simply with Public School 1 in Lower Manhattan has over the decades become messy.

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Why New York School Numbers Don’t Quite Add up

Prince George’s County sheriff’s deputies pounded on the motel door at 3:30 a.m. Glenn Wilson Jr., 61, answered in a faded Disney T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. Four decades ago, he didn’t show up for court after being charged with burglary. Since then, Wilson married twice, had three children and worked several jobs. Finally, deputies had their man. “I’m like, ‘Are you guys for real?’ ” Wilson said in an interview. “This was just amazing, after all these years.” Read full article > >

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Long-ago suspect caught up in Prince George’s effort to clear up warrant backlog

JERUSALEM — Militants in the Gaza Strip fired rockets into Israel and Israeli aircraft carried out deadly strikes across the coastal territory Friday in a surge of cross-border violence a day after attackers killed eight people near Israel’s frontier with Egypt . The multiple attacks Thursday north of the Red Sea resort of Eilat were the deadliest such incident in Israel in three years and threatened to ignite a new round of hostilities across the Israel-Gaza border after months of relative calm. The killings of an Egyptian military officer and two policemen in border skirmishes after the attacks have also enraged Egyptians, putting strain on the decades-long relationship between Egypt and Israel. Read full article > >

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8 killed in strikes on Gaza after deadly raid in Israel

Syrian forces swept into the northern village of Jisr al-Shoughour, a town that has offered the stiffest challenge to four decades of Assad family rule.

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Syrian Forces Storm Into Restive Town Near Turkey

The disclosure of the Pentagon Papers four decades ago stands as one of the most significant leaks of classified material in American history. Ever since, in the eyes of the government, the voluminous record of U.S. involvement in Vietnam has remained something else: classified. In the Byzantine realm of government record-keeping, publication of a document in the country’s biggest newspapers, including this one, does not mean declassification. Despite the release of multiple versions of the Pentagon Papers, no complete, fully unredacted text has ever been publicly disclosed. Read full article > >

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Pentagon Papers to be declassified at last

All over India , farmers are coming into conflict with the government as it tries to satisfy the country’s insatiable hunger for land for industry, infrastructure and urban housing. And the decades-old way of doing business — the government seizing the land under a British colonial law, paying a token compensation to farmers and then bullying people into submission — just isn’t working any more. Projects worth tens of billions of dollars have been held up as farmers, backed by local politicians and empowered by India’s vibrant television news channels, have found their voice — and said no. Read full article > >

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In India, fresh clashes over rural land as farmers stand up to government

KROTZ SPRINGS, La. — Renee Ledoux cried when the National Guard and sheriff’s deputies showed up at her front door and warned her she needed to get out to avoid water gushing from the Mississippi River after a floodgate was opened for the first time in four decades. But by the 5 p.m. deadline Sunday, the 44-year-old Ledoux and her boyfriend Billy Hanchett decided to ride it out one more night on air mattresses inside the empty home in Krotz Springs. They have a camper they plan to stay in on a friend’s property outside the flood zone. Read full article > >

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Residents in La.’s Cajun country evacuating after floodgate opens for first time in 4 decades

KROTZ SPRINGS, La. — Deputies warned people Sunday to get out as Mississippi River water gushing from a floodgate for the first time in four decades crept ever closer to communities in Louisiana Cajun country, slowly filling a river basin like a giant bathtub. Most residents heeded the warnings and headed for higher ground, even in places where there hasn’t been so much as a trickle, hopeful that the flooding engineered to protect New Orleans and Baton Rouge would be merciful to their way of life. Read full article > >

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As water from open floodgates creeps closer, La. residents in its path are warned: Get out

SANTA CRUZ, Galapagos Islands It’s hard to tell whether Lonesome George, the last known survivor of his giant tortoise species, is truly lonely. The nearly 100-year-old reptile hasn’t spent a day alone in four decades and recently moved in with two new potential girlfriends of a similar species. Read full article > >

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For the Galapagos’ most prized tortoise, many dates, few sparks