With his declaration that he would waive the most contentious provisions of the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law, President Obama rerouted a decade of federal influence.

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With No Child Left Behind Waivers, Obama Turns Some Education Powers Back to States

The Egyptian foreign minister urges the US to support the declaration of an independent Palestinian state, in a significant change of policy.

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Egypt in Palestine appeal to US

APThis is an undated charcoal drawing of Thomas Jefferson, co-author of the Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States, 1801 to 1809. (AP Photo)Thomas Jefferson’s birthday was today.

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Why we should honor Thomas Jefferson

From South Carolina’s daily The State : The language of the S.C. Declaration is so straightforward, so unambiguous that it is difficult to comprehend that there ever could have been any disagreement over what drove South Carolina to secede. So before any more breath is wasted in arguing about just what our state will be commemorating on Monday, we are reprinting the Declaration on this page. We would urge anyone who doubts that our state seceded in order to preserve slavery — or, for that matter, anyone who has come to accept the fiction that slavery was merely one of several cumulative causes — to read this document.  What we found most striking in rereading the Declaration was the complete absence of any other causes. After laying out the argument that the states retained a right to secede if the Union did not fulfill its constitutional and contractual obligations, the document cited the one failing of the United States: its refusal to enforce the constitutional provision requiring states to return escaped slaves to their owners. “This stipulation was so material to the compact,” the document declares, “that without it that compact would not have been made.”  Good to see this. We should confuse the Neo-Confederates with “The South.”

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Progress