read the news more

I’m a political science major, yet I still always feel so uninformed when people talk about politics. There has to be some way to remedy this.

Seems like I can NEVER read the news on a regular basis.
So I’ve decided to schedule it in. 1/2 hr every morning. Hopefully this will work.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-distress17nov17,1,2836806.story?coll=la-headlines-world

well after creating this “I want to” goal, i made a heading link to BBC World News. I’m trying to read it quite often, as I don’t always get the chance to watch the tv news – plus i find written news a lot more informative, well-rounded.
i am no longer just relying on MSN highlights when i log out of hotmail. and, despite my american roots, i dont trust mainstream american news sources (cnn, for ex) any longer.
Love the BBc – who doesn’t. Any other highly recommended liberal-press news sites anyone can suggest?

Which could never have happened if I was born and lived under Militant Islamic Rule…..

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-04-29-turkey_N.htm

RUMI …wherever you are
...........WE NEED YOU TO COME BACK TO EARTH NOW!

It is from our local paper:
Oregonian (dot com)“A Man From Narrows”
>>>(Of course I would rename it:::>”Those Dang Rich Kids”
The rural Virginia town is a world away from the campus where Jarrett Lane was cut down at the gateway to a new life
Friday, April 20, 2007
LARRY BINGHAM
Jarrett Lane, 22, died Monday in the carnage at Virginia Tech. He was from Narrows, Va. And, in a sense, so am I.
You have to know Virginia pretty well to know Narrows even exists. It’s a town of about 2,100 people on the western side of the state. The same highway that runs by the campus in Blacksburg runs through Narrows, curving alongside the New River. Narrows, though, is as much a state of mind as an actual place.
I used to drive through Narrows on my way home from college. It’s not far from the campus, only 28 miles to the west, but it’s a world away as far as cultures go. Some of the 32 victims, plus the shooter who killed himself, came from the northeastern Virginia suburbs outside Washington, D.C. Few called the more rural pockets of Virginia ..especially the far western coal fields where I’m from.. home
But grow up in one of those southwest Virginia towns, a small town like Narrows, and getting accepted into Virginia Tech is a big deal. I know. When I arrived at Tech in 1984, I had little more than a high school diploma and an insatiable desire to be anywhere but the hicksville I had grown up in. My twin brother and I were the first in our family to go to college. Our dad was a coal miner. So was our grandfather. His father, too. Leaving a town of a few thousand for a campus of 25,000 students, I thought I was finally going somewhere.
But college is the great equalizer. On campus, every student becomes just another well-worn pair of Levi’s and a sweat shirt purchased at the bookshop. Despite the cliche, an education really can open doors. For the son of a coal miner like me, Virginia Tech was Ellis Island.
When I think about Jarrett Lane, a senior one month from graduating, I see a young man at the gateway to a new world, like I was. But he was slaughtered at the gate. Jarrett Lane won’t, like me, have a wife, two kids, a good job, a nice house, security.
I can only imagine where his life would have taken him. By all accounts, he was bound to leave a mark. He graduated in 2003 from Narrows High, a school of 330 students, with a 4.0 grade-point average that earned him the title of valedictorian.
In the moment he was killed, he was in a hydrology class.
In our corner of Virginia, we grew up rooting for the Virginia Tech Hokies. Few of us got into the prestigious University of Virginia in Charlottesville. An English major, I tell people I went to Tech not for the renowned engineering school that drew Jarrett Lane, but because it was cheap, close to home—and because it let me in.
I remember the thrill I felt when my parents dropped me off. And then the sinking fear that my mountain twang would give me away for the hillbilly I was. And am.

Page 2 of 2
But everyone shows up lost at college. We all carry into those cramped dorm rooms and ivy-covered walls some kind of baggage …secret insecurities and the fear we don’t fit in….whether we admit it or not.
Bad things are not supposed to happen in college, but of course they do. I know that, too. My twin brother, Barry, moved into my dorm room with me at the close of our freshman year after encountering demons he didn’t know he had. He was no longer a big fish in a small pond, but just another lonely young man among many, and far from home. He was clinically depressed and suicidal when he left Tech, never to return, never to finish college, never to fully recover. He’d die of an accidental overdose, in 1993, at 27.
So many memories are bound to a college campus, a place particular to a time in our lives when all our senses are heightened, when everything and anything seems possible. I cannot help but wonder if Jarrett Lane experienced Tech in some of the ways I did.
Did he go inner-tubing down the New River in the dark?
Did he ever wind up on a stool at Carol Lee Donuts with a hangover?
Did he drink a beer at the Top of the Stairs? Cheer for the Hokies in Lane Stadium? Where did he like the pizza best—The Cellar or Backstreets? Did he play in the snow on the drill field? Did he watch the sun set from a study carrel at Newman Library and wish he was out there?
Lane’s mother and grandmother raised him. His high school principal, Robert Stump, said Narrows held a candlelight vigil at two churches because none was large enough to accommodate the crowd.
“You can’t describe him in words,” Stump said.
Lane had received a full-ride scholarship to do graduate work in coastal engineering at the University of Florida. He was planning to go on and get his doctorate.
Everybody in Narrows knew him. He ran track in high school and played football, basketball and tennis. He was active in the First Baptist Church. He told his principal he’d like to stay close to home after graduation but that he’d go wherever his life took him.
That’s what I’ve tried to do.
Except Jarrett Lane never got the chance, which only deepened my sadness over what happened Monday.
The Oregonian
Larry Bingham: 503-221-8262;
larrybingham@news.oregonian.com

Kremlin officials have vetoed a fresh probe into the mysterious death of the first man in space, nearly 40 years ago.

A fresh look into the death of Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin has been vetoed by the Kremlin.

Although Gagarin’s flight into space in 1968 lasted only 68 minutes, his death has long been the subject of speculation.

The Kremlin has insisted that the “most probable cause of death” was a plane crash near Moscow, after the MiG-15 Mr Gagarin was flying swerved to avoid collision with a weather balloon.

However, theories to contradict this official line abounded after his death – ranging from claims that he was drunk on vodka, to abduction by aliens, to the idea that Gagarin staged his own death after the pressures of fame became too much.

Experts have long petitioned President Vladimir Putin to sanction a new investigation to put an end to the conspiracy theories.

However, in an interview with the Independent, aviation engineer Igor Kuznetsov, is angered by the Kremlin’s decision to quash a new investigation into the crash.

He believes Mr Gagarin’s death was caused by the cockpit not being hermetically sealed, with a partially open ventilation panel causing pressure in the cabin to cause the plane to crash.

“Unfortunately there are people who do not want to know the truth, people who have been saying the same thing about how Gagarin died for almost 40 years and can’t face admitting that they have been wrong,” he said.

“But for as long as this vacuum exists, people can say whatever they like and insult the pilots and by association the now-defunct USSR.”

The move coincides with Cosmonauts’ day, celebrated to mark the anniversary of Gagarin’s orbit around the Earth on April 12th 1961.

Monks reveal brutal state crackdown
By Richard Spencer
Last Updated: 1:51am GMT 21/02/2007
Tibetan monks suffer harassment and imprisonment at the hands of the authorities, who attempt to force them to renounce the Dalai Lama.

They are rarely able to talk openly about their experiences under Chinese rule. But The Daily Telegraph used new rules relaxing reporting restrictions in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics to meet monks without information ministry minders being present…......

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/19/wtibet19.xml

ps The Planet Earth Show on the Discovery Channel is worth watching! :) :)

Well, since I’m going into journalism, this is a “well, no shit!” goal. But I’m just so busy that sometimes I don’t have time to sit down and read a newspaper. Usually, if I do read the news, I just go to www.cnn.com or www.usatoday.com and look at the top headlines. I need to at least invest one hour a day reading the news online. Wish me luck!