I can be pretty hard on myself for not completing things I wanted to do while I was in my 40s. (Well, if they haven't gotten done by now, lighten the fuck up why don'cha?) I'll just reschedule. Simple.
On Monday night, workers and officials at the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority volunteered to paint the X’s on a third of the system’s buses and trains to symbolize the 30 percent cut in service the agency is facing because of a decline in sales tax revenue and a Republican-dominated Statehouse that has been slow to help.
[...]
“We are just crawling out of a recession,” said Sam Massell, a former mayor of Atlanta, “but we will be knocked back into another one if the salespersons are not behind the store counters, if the restaurant workers are not in the kitchens, if the office staff are not behind their desks.”
About 46 percent of the more than 100,000 people who use Marta to get to work each day say they do not have access to other forms of transportation.
More than 80 percent of the nation’s transit systems are considering or have recently enacted fare increases or service cuts, including those in Kansas City, Mo., Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C., according to a survey released this month by the American Public Transportation Association.
From coast to coast, public schools face the threat of tens of thousands of layoffs this year in a fiscal crunch likely to result in larger class sizes and fewer programs to help students in need.
Reports of deep staffing and service cuts are emerging in several states, including California, Illinois and New Jersey, as school officials say that finances have been stretched to the breaking point.
[...]
Education Secretary Arne Duncan estimated that education layoffs could total from 100,000 to 300,000 unless Congress acts.
"It is brutal out there, really scary," Duncan told reporters on Capitol Hill. "This is a real emergency. What we're trying to avert is an education catastrophe."
Conflicts generally known as "Indian Wars" broke out between American government and Native American societies. The Battle of Little Bighorn (1876) was one of the greatest Native American victories. Defeats included the Creek War of 1813-14, the Sioux Uprising of 1862, the Sand Creek Massacre (1864) and Wounded Knee in 1890.[68] These conflicts were catalysts to the decline of dominant Native American culture. By 1872, the U.S. Army pursued a policy to exterminate all Native Americans unless or until they agreed to surrender and live on reservations "where they could be taught Christianity and agriculture."
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.
This land is my land, it is not your land
I've got a shotgun, and you don't got one
I'll blow your head off, if you don't get off
This land was made just for me.
He was only 64 and died of mesothelioma.Mr. McLaren was a keen student of the French Situationists, who believed in staging absurdist or provocative incidents as a spur to social change
In 1972 Mr. McLaren and Ms. Westwood took over a store on King’s Road in Chelsea called Let It Rock and began selling hipster Teddy boy fashions. The business was run along unconventional lines.
In a 1997 article for The New Yorker, Mr. McLaren recalled, “We set out to make an environment where we could truthfully run wild.” On most days the shop did not open until the evening and closed within a few hours. The goal, Mr. McLaren wrote, “was to sell nothing at all.”
The death toll from a blast at a West Virginia coal mine rose to 25 on Tuesday, federal safety officials said, making it the worst mining accident in the United States in 25 years.
[...]
Mine safety officials said that there were three groups of miners affected by the blast. One group consisted of nine miners who were leaving the site at the end of their shift in a vehicle known as a “mantrip.” Seven of the miners in the man trip were killed by the explosion while two others were injured and taken to the hospital by rescue workers.
A second group of 18 miners was said to be working a bit deeper in the mine, closest to the area where coal was actually being extracted. All 18 of them died.
A third group of four miners — the ones still unaccounted for — was even deeper in the mine.
The miners were all thought to be working more than 1,000 feet underground.
But some religious leaders are already concerned about the image it could paint for Jonesboro. "I'm not excited about it," said John Miles, senior pastor of the First United Methodist Church of Jonesboro. "Not many of us want to be known as the town with the organized atheist group."
Easter Sunday Mass in St. Peter's Square, the Catholic church's most joyous celebration, began with a senior cardinal defending Pope Benedict XVI from what he called "petty gossip" and hailing him for "unfailing" leadership and courage.
But the pontiff himself ignored accusations that he perpetuated a climate of cover-up for pedophile priests, even as sex abuse scandals threatened to overshadow his papacy.
[...]
Jewish leaders, and even some top Catholic churchmen, were angered after Benedict's personal preacher, in a Good Friday sermon, likened the growing accusations against the pope to the campaign of anti-Semitic violence that culminated in the Holocaust.
The preacher, the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, told Corriere della Sera daily in an interview Sunday that he had no intention "of hurting the sensibilities of the Jews and of the victims of pedophilia," expressed regret and asked for forgiveness.
He was quoted as saying that the pope wasn't aware of what the sermon would say beforehand, and that no Vatican officals read the text before the Good Friday service.
The apology satisfied one Jewish leader, Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants.
"Now that he has apologized and the Vatican has distanced itself from those remarks, the matter is closed," Steinberg said in a statement.
Separately, in Germany, where the church is facing intense criticism about the widening abuse scandal, a man attacked the Roman Catholic Bishop of Muenster with a broom handle during an Easter service in the city's cathedral, police said.
Bishop Felix Genn, 60, defended himself with an incense bowl and was unharmed. After the incident, he continued celebrating the Easter service. The man's motive was unclear, police said.
Count me out among those who are pushing to have Ulysses Grant replaced with Ronald Reagan on the $50 bill.Representative Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina wants President Ronald Reagan’s likeness to replace that of President Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill.
But the bill introduced by Mr. McHenry and 17 co-sponsors, the majority from Southern states, has run into a hornets’ nest of opposition from Ohio lawmakers who will not stand still for any slight to their home-state hero.
Among other things, Grant also signed the 15th Amendment (a measure that [Keya] Morgan, [founder and author of the Grant Homepage, the largest collection of Grant material in the world], said made Barack Obama's presidency possible)
