I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
In Washington, President Obama has overhauled the nation’s nuclear policy, including for the first time declaring that the U.S. won’t use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that aren’t trying to acquire such weapons, even if they attack the U.S. using chemical or biological weapons, according to the New York Times.
California officials are debating whether even to apply for the second round of funding in the federal government’s Race to the Top program, according to the Sacramento Bee. State officials cite two things as the reasons for their hesitation: the lack of buy-in into the state’s application from California’s teachers unions; and the lack of a strong statewide data system to better track students’ progress or lack thereof. States aren’t marked down for lack of support from teachers’ unions in the federal Race to the Top process. But states do earn extra points for every group that signs on in support of a state’s application for federal funding. Delaware and Tennessee won the first round of funding earlier this month. New Mexico applied, but failed to make the finalist cut in the first round.
Twenty five miners died in a West Virginia mine explosion Monday and officials fear that four other miners who haven’t been found may be added to the number of the dead, reports the Washington Post.
Two Alabama state senators are alleging that a lobbyist offered them hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions if they voted for a bingo bill before that state’s Legislature last year, according to the Birmingham News.
On the country’s other coast, the city of Los Angeles soon might not be able to pay its bills because of an ongoing feud between the City Council and the city’s water department, reports the Los Angeles Times.
Anyone want a reminder of how dangerous war journalism is? Here it is, a story from the New York Times about a gritty video showing a Reuters photographer and driver killed in Baghdad in 2007 by American Apache attack helicopter gunfire. Military officials have confirmed the authenticity of the video released by WikiLeaks.org, the Times reports.
On the domestic media front, the Associated Press is forming regional investigative teams, citing the importance of keeping governments accountable, reports the Associated Press.
Are some animals gay? It’s a question raised and explored in a New York Times Magazine story over the weekend. Some scientists are studying the same-sex attractions in animals. A few of these scholars interviewed in the piece hesitate to declare gay-ness, mainly because they want to resist anthropomorphizing their research subjects and, frankly, because being pulled into the debate over whether same-sex attractions in humans is natural or a choice is a disconcerting prospect. But pulled they are regardless of their reticence because of what their findings may or may not say about human behavior.
Jon Meacham, Newsweek’s Pulitzer-winning editor, reviews a history of Christianity written by Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch. In his New York Times Book Review piece Meacham, a practicing Christian, writes about the benefits of bringing a critical orientation to the study of a religion, writing that an “unexamined faith is not worth having, for fundamentalism and uncritical certitude entail the rejection of one of the great human gifts: that of free will, of the liberty to make up our own minds based on evidence and tradition and reason.” Here, here.
