History Readings

Medical students at the University of California, San Francisco, will be able to get course credit for editing Wikipedia articles about diseases, part of an effort to improve the quality of medical articles in the online encyclopedia and help distribute the articles globally via cellphones.

Wikipedia editing will force students to think clearly and avoid jargon, he said. “We do a great job in helping them talk to doctors, but we don’t do as good a job in helping them speak to the public,” h

The students’ editing will be part of Wikiproject Medicine, which focuses contributors on the 100 or so most significant medical articles, including those on tuberculosis and syphilis, but especially on those important articles that need the most editing.

In essence, the hard-line faction of the House GOP is demanding the following, as recent NYT, WSJ, and WaPo articles, apart from today's, have made clear:  EITHER the Administration must undo the main legislative accomplishment of the president's time in office, which he passed despite filibuster resistance four years ago and which the Supreme Court has since held constitutional;  OR ELSE all other business of the government will be halted, and the full faith and credit of the United States will be called into question, with unknown but likely bad world-financial consequences.

the closest parallels in our history were to the John C. Calhoun era before the Civil War. If you think that's unfair, please tell me another case in which a dissatisfied minority threatened to shut down the entire government, and if necessary renege on the national debt, unless a sitting President agrees to reverse his hardest-won policy accomplishment.

are there any other ways in which a democracy might assess the people's will? I can think of three

the motives for defending one’s language differ from country to country. In France, it is part of a quest to bolster the country’s self-perception as a still-functioning colonial power.

In Germany, the driving force comes from the opposite direction. Refusing to accept the internationalization of the German language is a way of rejecting internationalization as a phenomenon. It is a nativist attempt to stand up to globalization.

The frequent use of English words has become a status symbol, not unlike a pair of pearl earrings or shopping at Whole Foods, a way of showing off your education

E. D. Hirsch Jr. is being dragged back into the ring at the age of 85

Invitations to speak have come from Spain, Britain and China. He has won a prestigious education award. Curriculums developed by the Core Knowledge Foundation, which Mr. Hirsch created to disseminate his ideas, have recently been adopted by hundreds of schools in 25 states and recommended by the New York City Department of Education for teachers to use in their classrooms.

“This is a redemptive moment for E. D. Hirsch, after a quarter-century of neglect by people both conservative and liberal,”

In 2001, 11,700 New Yorkers reported earning more than $1 million annually, according to summaries of resident tax returns provided by the mayor’s office. A decade later, 20,416 did.

“We’ve been able to do something that none of these other cities can do, and that is attract a lot of the very wealthy from around the country and around the world,” Mr. Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show on Sept. 20. “And they are the ones that pay a lot of the taxes, they’re the ones that spend a lot of money in the stores and restaurants and create a big chunk of our economy.

In 2011, New Yorkers who made more than $10 million annually accounted for nearly one-fifth of the city’s personal income tax revenue, which is second only to property taxes as a revenue source. The city also taxes capital gains like ordinary income instead of at lower rates as the federal government does.

“Earlier it was because some students weren’t plugged in enough into any virtual communication.” Seven years later, she said she cannot remove the instruction because now students avoid e-mail because it is “too slow compared to texting.”

Just how little are students using e-mail these days? Six minutes a day, according to an experiment done earlier this year by Reynol Junco, an associate professor of library science at Purdue. With the promise of a $10 Amazon gift card, Dr. Junco persuaded students to download a program letting him track their computer habits. During the semester, they spent an average of 123 minutes a day on a computer, by far the biggest portion of it, 31 minutes, on social networking. The only thing they spent less time on than e-mail: hunting for content via search engines (four minutes).

“I never know what to say in the subject line and how to address the person,” Ms. Carver said. “Is it mister or professor and comma and return, and do I have to capitalize and use full sentences? By the time I do all that I could have an answer by text if I could text them.”

The emerging popular consensus about our biological predisposition to warfare is troubling. It is not just scientifically weak; it is also morally unfortunate, as it fosters an unjustifiably limited vision of human potential.

Conflict avoidance, reconciliation and cooperative problem solving could also have been altogether “biological” and positively selected for.

Chimpanzees, we now know, engage in something distressingly akin to human warfare, but bonobos, whose evolutionary lineage makes them no more distant from us than chimps, are justly renowned for making love instead.

Long considered the dusty uniform of an older, more conservative generation, the erstwhile dress of the Alpine regions of Bavaria and Austria has become a wildly popular symbol of the good times and good life of Germany’s most prosperous region.

“Ten years ago, nobody was wearing dirndl and lederhosen to Oktoberfest,” said Thomas Andersch, a Munich native who recently wore his knee-length leather trousers and a traditional shirt to the office so he would be ready to attend a pre-Oktoberfest festival after work. “Now it looks strange if you show up in jeans.”

the revived popularity of the dirndl among young people as a reflection of the confidence of a new generation of Germans who are turning to tradition to define themselves in the face of the encroachments of globalization.

Things came to a head in December 1970, when Sheik Mujib-ur-­Rahman, a pipe-smoking Bengali leader, and his party, the Awami League, won the elections on the promise of autonomy for East Pakistan.

Gen. Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, egged on by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the second-place finisher, arrested Rahman and ordered the army to crush the Bengalis. Dominated by Punjabis, the army moved brutally, shooting and detaining Bengali leaders, intellectuals and anyone who opposed them.

Yahya, its military leader, became Nixon’s secret liaison with the Chinese leader Zhou Enlai. Yahya helped lay the groundwork for the visits to China by Kissinger and then Nixon. It’s hard to overstate just how earth-changing Nixon and Kissinger regarded their trips to China — and how important they thought they were for bringing them about.

A New York Times review of hundreds of child firearm deaths found that accidental shootings occurred roughly twice as often as the records indicate, because of idiosyncrasies in how such deaths are classified by the authorities.

The National Rifle Association cited the lower official numbers this year in a fact sheet opposing “safe storage” laws, saying children were more likely to be killed by falls, poisoning or environmental factors — an incorrect assertion if the actual number of accidental firearm deaths is significantly higher.

The rifle association’s lobbying arm recently posted on its Web site a claim that adult criminals who mishandle firearms — as opposed to law-abiding gun owners — are responsible for most fatal accidents involving children. But The Times’s review found that a vast majority of cases revolved around children’s access to firearms, with the shooting either self-inflicted or done by another child.

While the battle ended two centuries ago, however, hard feelings have endured. Memories are long here, and not everyone here shares Britain’s enthusiasm for celebrating Napoleon’s defeat.

Belgium, of course, did not exist in 1815. Its Dutch-speaking regions were part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, while the French-speaking portion had been incorporated into the French Empire. Among French speakers, Mr. Jacobs said, Napoleon had a “huge influence — the administration, the Code Napoléon,” or reform of the legal system. While Dutch-speaking Belgians fought under Wellington, French speakers fought with Napoleon.

That distaste on the part of modern-day French speakers crystallized in resistance to a British proposal that, as part of the restoration of Hougoumont, a memorial be raised to the British soldiers who died defending its narrow North Gate at a critical moment on June 18, 1815, when Wellington carried the day. “Every discussion in the committee was filled with high sensitivity,” Mr. Jacobs recalled. “I said, ‘This is a condition for the help of the British,’ so the North Gate won the battle, and we got the monument.”

SANTIAGO, Chile — The Chilean courts have long been after Ray E. Davis, a former American Navy captain, accusing him of being involved in the murder of two Americans decades ago that inspired the award-winning 1982 film “Missing.”

But it turns out Mr. Davis may have been right under their noses all along, living in a nursing home in an upscale part of the Chilean capital. Any attempts to haul him into court may now be too late; documents show that he recently died here as well.

The death of Mr. Davis, former commander of the United States Military Group at the embassy in Santiago, would leave many unanswered questions about the possible roles played by United States officials in the killings of the Americans Charles Horman, 31, and Frank Teruggi, 24, while in military custody shortly after the 1973 military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. It was the Horman case that is depicted in the film “Missing” by the director Costa-Gavras.

a lot of Congressional Republicans are resistant to the more plausible conservative proposals  on health care precisely because they don’t want to find the money required to make any of them work — in some cases because they prefer the comforting illusion that the current system represents some sort of free market ideal that would be wrecked if we started providing tax credits to the currently-uninsured, and in other cases because they’re all-too-aware that some of that money would have to come from caps and cuts that affect groups that currently vote Republican.

right now, with the new health care law as-yet-unimplemented, we’re still in a world where the G.O.P.’s politicians and activists and interest groups think of themselves as working from a pre-Obamacare policy baseline. And this, in in turn, creates a strong political reluctance to propose alternatives that deviate from that baseline in ways that might negatively impact the groups — including, as Barro says, “the overwhelmingly insured Republican electorate” — that the party has tried to rally against the health care law from the beginning.

But the first moment when a Republican Congress might actually be able to pass a health care overhaul won’t arrive until February of 2017, at which point Obamacare will have been the baseline for two years

STOCKHOLM — For the first time, the world’s top climate scientists on Friday formally embraced an upper limit on greenhouse gases while warning that it is likely to be exceeded within decades if emissions continue at a brisk pace, underscoring the profound challenge humanity faces in bringing global warming under control.

Just over half that amount has already been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and at current rates of energy consumption, the trillionth ton will be released around 2040, according to calculations by Myles R. Allen, a scientist at the University of Oxford and one of the authors of the new report. More than 3 trillion tons of carbon are still left in the ground as fossil fuels.

Going well beyond its four previous analyses of the emissions problem, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change endorsed a “carbon budget” for humanity — an upper limit on the amount of the primary greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, that can be emitted from industrial activities and forest destruction.

He described Mr. Rouhani as a political “insider” and a moderate, but one who has shunned being called “westernized or liberal, because that would be a curse.”

His message, according to the breakfast organizer, was that Iran is now pro-business and welcomes private investment, if and when sanctions are lifted.

“This was the beginning of exploring if something like that could happen,” the organizer said, asking to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the gathering.

With traffic growing 28 percent a year for the last several years, China’s high-speed rail network will handle more passengers by early next year than the 54 million people a month who board domestic flights in the United States.

The trains hurtle along at 186 miles an hour and are smooth, well-lighted, comfortable and almost invariably punctual, if not early.

China’s high-speed rail system has emerged as an unexpected success story. Economists and transportation experts cite it as one reason for China’s continued economic growth when other emerging economies are faltering.

When his defense secretary at the time, Robert Gates, and his national security adviser, Tom Donilon, told him that he would be crazy to intervene in Libya — a country where, in Mr. Gates’s words, the United States had “no significant national interests” — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mr. Donilon’s successor, Susan E. Rice, recalled the massacre of 800,000 Rwandans during the Clinton presidency, and said Mr. Obama could not allow another genocide in the making. Reluctantly, Mr. Obama agreed, and ordered a bombing attack, alongside NATO and the Arab League. America could not stand by, he said later, because “that’s just not who we are.”

last month, as he debated with his staff what looked like imminent American strikes on Syria, he talked about how the box he found himself in differed from what he had faced on Libya. “He made the case that Libya was a lot simpler,” one participant in the conversation said recently, recounting the stages the president went through as he moved from tentatively embracing a bombing plan, to a failed effort to secure Congressional authorization, to the Russian-authored diplomacy now in place. “In Libya, he had only a narrow window of time to make the decision, or it would have been too late. He had a U.N. Security Council resolution.” The president, the aide said, ran through his long list and concluded that in Syria, “all that is missing.”

Mr. Obama had absorbed some bitter lessons. His decision to stay on in Afghanistan had not enhanced the perception of American power in the region, and Libya, once the bombing was over, descended into new chaos. Mr. Gates said last week that he saw, in the Syria gyrations, a president absorbing the lesson of a decade of American mistakes, and coming to the right conclusion after the worst possible process. “Haven’t Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya taught us something about the unintended consequences of military action?” Mr. Gates asked.

the first animals evolved about 750 million years ago.

But it’s not until around 520 million years ago that many major groups of living animals left behind their first fossils.

For decades, scientists have searched for the trigger that set in motion this riot of diversity in the animal kingdom.

State legislatures across the country approved a host of new immigrant-friendly measures this year, a striking change from just three years ago,

More than a dozen states now grant illegal immigrants in-state college tuition, and nine states and the District of Columbia also allow them to obtain drivers’ licenses.

With an estimated 2.5 million illegal immigrants living in California — more than in any other state in the country — some say the state has no choice but to find additional ways to integrate immigrants.