billso.com

USA: Yahoo! News - Education Officials Review Use of Tenure: “Yet with federal law requiring schools to have a top teacher for every core class, more administrators are questioning whether tenure keeps them from getting rid of even a small number of instructors who just are not good enough in the classroom.”

Space: Yahoo! News - Cassini Pierces Titan’s Veil of Smog, Clouds: “Black-and-white photos taken at 210,600 miles above Titan’s surface show a murky landscape that Turtle likened to a ‘melting ice cream sundae’ with some fuzzy linear structures that could be mountains, rivers or fault lines. ”

World: Yahoo! News - My, how the Dutch have grown: “He became interested in height as an economic barometer after a lecture by Robert Fogel, the University of Chicago Nobel laureate who published a landmark study on the slave economy in the American South. African-American slaves, it seems, were significantly taller than their African ancestors but shorter than their owners for reasons that defied conventional wisdom. ‘People with better incomes and higher educations are taller. Everywhere and always,’ Komlos said. ‘Even in communist countries that were supposed to be classless. It’s one of the basic laws of heights.’ ”

USA: Yahoo! News - New York’s 9/11 ‘Freedom Tower’ Cornerstone Laid: There’s no mention in this article of the originally scheduled date: September 11, 2004, after the GOP coronation in NYC. Wonder why they changed their minds? Are W’s handlers getting nervous?

USA: Yahoo! News - Rumsfeld ‘Can’t Imagine’ Revived Military Draft: If W wins the election, I can imagine lots of different things happening. It might get drafty in January. “‘I just can’t imagine it,’ Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week when asked under what circumstances it might be necessary to resume the draft. ‘As a matter of fact, despite all the talk about the stress on the force, today we still are having very good results with respect to recruiting and retention. And we do not have a problem of attracting and retaining the people we need in the military,’ Rumsfeld said. “