historical-nonfiction:

Félix Faure was president of France from 1895 until his death in 1899. His presidency is famous for the Franco-Russian alliance and the Dreyfus affair. It is his death, however, that has spread Faure’s name outside of France. Faure died after suffering an apoplectic episode whilst in bed with his mistress, Marguerite Steinheil, with rumors surfacing that he died while receiving oral sex from her. While the actual event is, of course, shrouded in gloom, it has become an infamous example of political scandal. His tomb shows him draped in cloth (the flag?), though some have seen it as him reclining in his death bed. George Clemenceau gave Faure the epitaph ‘Il voulait être Céwar, il ne fut sue Pompée.’ You can translate that as either ‘He wanted to be Caesar, he ended being Pompey’ or ‘He wanted to be Caesar, he ended being pumped.’

— Jean-Clement Cabrol, M.D., MSF director of operations in Somalia, in The New England Journal of Medicine (via doctorswithoutborders)

— Retired New York Supreme Court Judge Karen Smith, working as a legal observer after the raids on Zucotti Park this Tuesday, via Paramilitary Policing of Occupy Wall Street: Excessive Use of Force amidst the New Military Urbanism (via seriouslyamerica)

teachersworldwide:

[UK] State schools will be told to teach the classic English novels they currently ignore in a radical overhaul of what is taught in the classroom.

The move comes after a survey carried out for ministers found state secondary schools tend to teach children aged 11 to 14 works by contemporary writers such as Louis Sachar and John Boyne, rather than classic authors such as Jane Austen and William Golding.

Ministers now want to see more challenging texts introduced in state schools to mirror what is taught in private schools, where pupils are much more likely to read dead authors whose work has stood the test of time. (via Teach Jane Austen, state schools to be told - Telegraph)

thenewrepublic:

Is pizza a vegetable?

“In January the Agriculture department had this crazy idea to improve nutritional standards for federally-subsidized school lunches. It proposed limiting ‘starchy vegetables’ (read: fries) to one cup per week ‘to encourage students to try new vegetables.’ It also proposed changing the way schools met daily requirements for fruits and vegetables by limiting—not eliminating, merely limiting—the use of tomato paste (read: pizza) to meet that requirement.”

- Timothy Noah, “Saving School Pizza”

Now Congress plans to completely unravel the school lunch standards that the Agriculture Department proposed earlier this year. The bill would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable.

Why is Congress pushing back on healthier lunches by fighting to keep pizza and fries?

Absolutely gorgeous!!! That’s how I always envisioned my wedding gown ;) The embroidery is stunning! On another note, their wedding was apparently Old West-themed? Hah, how cute!

doctorswithoutborders:

Refugee camps in Ethiopia are currently home to roughly 130,000 refugees from Somalia, the majority of whom have fled an ongoing food crisis and conflict. In recent weeks the number of people crossing the border into Ethiopia has increased to approximately 300 per day, up from 90 per day in September and October.

“At the moment, the capacity to receive more people and provide the necessary food, nutritional care, medical care, drinking water, sanitation and more, is grossly insufficient,” said Wojciech Asztabski, MSF project coordinator in Dollo Ado, Ethiopia. Read more

Photo: Ethiopia 2011 © Jenny Vaughn

cwnl:

Alien Life Does Not Require Moon for Survival

Image: Scene from ‘The Time Machine’ - Broken moon

As if it was possible, the hunt for Extraterrestrial life just got even more interesting.

It seems planets don’t need a big satellite like Earth’s moon in order to support life, increasing the number on which life could exist.

In 1993, Jacques Laskar of the Paris Observatory in France and colleagues showed that the moon helps stabilise the tilt of Earth’s rotation axis against perturbations by Jupiter’s gravity. The researchers calculated that without the moon, Jupiter’s influence would make the current tilt of some 23 degrees wander chaotically between 0 and 85 degrees. That could cause huge climate swings, making it hard for life to survive, especially large, land-based organisms like us.

The result was taken by many to imply that complex life is rare in the universe, since Earth’s large moon is thought to have coalesced from the debris of a freak collision between a Mars-sized planet and Earth. Less than 10 per cent of Earth-sized planets are expected to experience such a trauma, making large moons a rarity.

But a study now suggests moonless planets have been dismissed unfairly. “There could be a lot more habitable worlds out there,” says Jack Lissauer of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, who led the research.

Laskar’s 1993 study did not determine how fast these changes in tilt would occur. “The astrobiology community has taken it to mean there will be these really wild variations, and we wanted to test that,” says Lissauer. He and his colleagues simulated a moonless Earth over 4 billion years, about the age of the Earth today. They found that our planet’s tilt varied between only 10 and 50 degrees, a much smaller range than implied by the earlier study. There were also long stretches of up to 500 million years when the tilt was particularly stable, keeping between 17 and 32 degrees.

Full Article: Aliens don’t need a moon like ours

Journal: Icarus, DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2011.10.013

missavagardner:

Grace Kelly photographed by Howell Conant, 1955.

She is absolutely beautiful.

deejaybird:

Cudjoe Lewis is believed to be the last African born on African soil and brought to the United States by the transatlantic slave trade. He was a native of Takon, Benin, where he was captured in 1860 during an illegal slave-trading venture. Congress outlawed the importation of slaves in 1808. Together with more than a hundred other captured Africans, he was brought on the ship Clotilde to Mobile, Alabama. Cudjoe and 31 other enslaved Africans were taken to the property owned by Timothy Meaher, shipbuilder and owner of the Clotilde. 5 years later slavery was over so Cudjoe and his tribespeople requested to be taken back to Africa, but it was left ignored. He and other Africans established a community near Mobile, Alabama which became called Africatown. They maintained their African language and tribal customs well into the 1950s. He died in 1934 at the age of 94. Before he died, he gave several interviews on his experiences including one to the writer Zora Neale Hurston. During her interview in 1928, she made a short film of Cudjoe, the only moving image that exists in the Western Hemisphere of an African transported through the Transatlantic Slave Trade.