History Readings

The boy's death happened at about 6:25 a.m. on the tracks just south of the city's Churchill Avenue, near the elegant century-old high school on an oak-studded Spanish Mission campus, directly across the street from Stanford University, in a ZIP code synonymous with success. Two student suicides earlier this school year at neighboring Gunn High School led to a flurry of community meetings and teen outreach, and the district has been working to overhaul its teen mental-health policies since a much-publicized cluster of student suicides in 2009.

the very life of the school district has been altered in ways large and small. Social studies classes start with meditation. Teachers and staff have been taught to help identify teens struggling with depression or in distress. The district is accelerating construction of a student wellness center at Gunn High School, where students can talk to counselors and mental health professionals and nutritionists to decompress.To reduce stress, the school district -- home to the progeny of top Stanford faculty and many of Silicon Valley's tech titans -- reformed its homework policy in 2012, but the plan was never fully implemented. Now it is back on the school board's agenda. The district also recently contracted with a data-analysis firm called Hanover Research Group to analyze homework, grading practices and curriculum.

Both Gunn and Paly have convened sessions to listen to students. A similar communitywide gathering was held last week, and another is scheduled. Teachers offer academic accommodations -- like not collecting homework, or delaying tests -- and Paly economics teacher Alexander Davis created a "Gratitude Wall" in his classroom for students to write what they are grateful for on sticky notes.Paly, many students say, is a place where teachers care about their well-being. But the causes of suicide are complex.The school offers an array of electives and resources. "There's journalism, glassblowing, theater -- there may be a little more pressure, but a lot more opportunity here," said senior Jack Brook. "People are happy when they find a passion, and there's a lot of opportunity to find a passion here."

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Wednesday that it would provide another $75 million in nonlethal aid to Ukraine’s military. It also imposed sanctions against a handful of pro-Russian separatists and others blamed for fomenting the civil war that has torn apart Ukraine’s eastern regions.

The new aid does not include the weapons that Ukraine has sought and that many administration officials and members of both parties in Congress have urged President Obama to provide. Instead, the United States will send more radios, first-aid kits, surveillance drones, countermortar radar systems and military ambulances.

The White House cited reports that Russia and its proxy fighters in Ukraine were not fully abiding by a cease-fire negotiated last month in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. It said Russian military personnel were still fighting alongside the separatists, additional weapons had been sent across the border, and monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe had been blocked.

FERGUSON, Mo. — The city’s embattled police chief, the focus of bitter complaints after a white officer fatally shot an unarmed black teenager here last August, agreed to resign Wednesday, completing a near complete shake-up of the city’s most senior administrators.

In the week since the Department of Justice released a scathing report detailing how Ferguson used law enforcement to pad its coffers, often violating constitutional rights and disproportionately targeting blacks in the process, the city manager and Municipal Court judge have also stepped down, and the city’s court has been placed under state supervision.

Together with the chief, Thomas Jackson, the three officials were cited as central figures in the abuses found by the Justice Department.

Russia’s relations with many Western nations, including the United States, may be at their worst levels since the Cold War, but its relationship with North Korea is blooming faster than the famously lush flower beds of Moscow’s Alexander Garden.

On Wednesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced an agreement to designate 2015 a “Year of Friendship” with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which is regarded by much of the world as a pariah state.

Tellingly, news of the Year of Friendship came on the same day that Berlin officials said that the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, had declined Mr. Putin’s invitation to attend the ceremony. The German government cited Russia’s policies in Ukraine, where the Kremlin has annexed Crimea and backed violent separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk, as the reason for her refusal to attend.

One of America’s leading political scientists, Robert Putnam, has just come out with a book called “Our Kids” about the growing chasm between those who live in college-educated America and those who live in high-school-educated America

Roughly 10 percent of the children born to college grads grow up in single-parent households. Nearly 70 percent of children born to high school grads do. There are a bunch of charts that look like open scissors. In the 1960s or 1970s, college-educated and noncollege-educated families behaved roughly the same. But since then, behavior patterns have ever more sharply diverged. High-school-educated parents dine with their children less than college-educated parents, read to them less, talk to them less, take them to church less, encourage them less and spend less time engaging in developmental activity.

sympathy is not enough. It’s not only money and better policy that are missing in these circles; it’s norms.

The change, of course, means that the health reform law is now forecast to cost the government substantially less than originally expected. The net savings to the program could be about $142 billion over 10 years.

50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” the gravity of that place seized me, pushing out the breath and rousing the wonder.

to balance celebration and solemnity, to honor the heroes of the past but also to motivate the activists of the moment, to acknowledge how much work had been done but to remind the nation that that work was not complete.

The gang rape of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi sets off an unusual burst of national outrage in India. In South Sudan, women are assaulted by both sides in the civil war. In Iraq, jihadists enslave women for sex. And American colleges face mounting scrutiny about campus rape.

Despite the many gains women have made in education, health and even political power in the course of a generation, violence against women and girls worldwide “persists at alarmingly high levels,” according to a United Nations analysis that the Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is scheduled to present to the General Assembly on Monday.

About 35 percent of women worldwide — more than one in three — said they had experienced physical violence in their lifetime,

In his well-known essay from 1784 — “What Is Enlightenment?” — Kant defines enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity,” a process of growing up that consists in finding the “courage” to think for oneself.

First, in order to think for oneself one must strive to transcend the perspective of one’s private commitments — personal, historical, professional, civic — and attempt to judge from the cosmopolitan “standpoint of everybody else.” Second, and closely related, is the idea that thinking for oneself is possible only by thinking aloud. We would not be able to think very “much” or all too “correctly,” Kant writes, if we would not think together “with others with whom we communicate.” Transcending our private perspective thus depends on submitting our opinions to the judgment of the “entire reading public” — striving to reach, through public debate, an agreement of “universal human reason in which each has his own say.”

Theodor Adorno, captured this notion in a 1959 lecture when he said that enlightenment consisted of resisting the use of the “disastrous word ‘as.’” We encounter that word, he explains, when “people say in the course of a discussion, ‘As a German, I cannot accept that …’ or ‘As a Christian, I must react in such-and-such a way.’”

what is wrong with us?

entire

We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe – and would benefit the vast majority – are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.

President Obama said that he and other world leaders have offered Iran an “extraordinarily reasonable deal” that will test whether the leadership of the Islamic nation is serious about at last resolving the dispute over its nuclear program.

over the next month or so, we’re going to be able to determine whether or not their system is able to accept what would be an extraordinarily reasonable deal

The negotiators have been talking about an agreement that would limit Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium to the point that, in theory, it would take it a year to “break out” and create enough fuel for a bomb if it violated the terms, to be verified by international inspectors.

At least 6,000 people are believed to have been killed

Both Ukraine and the pro-Russian rebels say they are withdrawing heavy weapons from the combat zone, but there have been continuing reports of fighting.

"We are not going to fight the Russians in Ukraine and we have been very clear and open about that".

Carrying flowers and portraits, tens of thousands of people somberly marched Sunday in Moscow to mourn opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, whose slaying on the streets of the capital has shaken Russia's beleaguered opposition. (Mar. 1) AP

L, Ukraine — Several residents in this city in far eastern Ukraine said they want a united country, but they're split on the use of force to solve Ukraine's war with Russian-backed separatists.

The survey authors did not define neutrality other than to point out that European countries have urged Ukraine to move closer to the EU, while Russia wants Ukraine aligned with former Soviet republics.

It comes as more of President Obama's advisers have voiced support for providing military aid to Ukraine's military. A slight 52% majority of Ukrainians support this move, with three-quarters of respondents supportive in the west, and three-fifths supportive in the north. In the east 62% opposed U.S. military support, and the South is evenly divided.

Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked secrets about American spying, said the U.S. government won’t guarantee him a “fair trial,” frustrating his

Poland’s central bank slashed its main interest rate by 50 basis points to 1.50%, the lowest on record, in response to persistent declines in consumer prices.

The Polish rate cut is the latest in a series of easing measures by central banks across Europe, following the European Central Bank’s decision in late January to launch a program of quantitative easing, under which it will buy more than €1 trillion ($1.12 trillion) of mostly government bonds by September 2016.

. The central bank’s target is an inflation rate of 2.5%.

He also describes the dynamics between power and wealth in Russia, claiming that during “the first eight or 10 years of Putin's reign over Russia, it was about stealing as much money as he could.

“I believe that it's $200 billion. After 14 years in power of Russia, and the amount of money that the country has made, and the amount of money that hasn't been spent on schools and roads and hospitals and so on, all that money is in property, bank - Swiss bank accounts, shares, hedge funds, managed for Putin and his cronies.”

The power is very simple in Russia - whoever has the power to arrest people is the person in power.

As cheap oil and Western sanctions continue to batter Russia's economy, President Vladimir Putin slashed Kremlin salaries -- including his own -- by 10% Friday, according to state news service Tass.

Government documents released in 2014 put Putin's annual salary at nearly 3.7 million rubles -- worth about $61,000 today thanks to soaring inflation.

"President Putin also reduced the wages of Kremlin administration, government staff and the Chamber of Accounts by 10% as well," according to Tas