Deasy wants 30% of teacher evaluations based on test scores

L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy announced Friday that as much as 30% of a teacher's evaluation will be based on student test scores,...

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The Quirky World of Competitive Snow Carving Comes to California

Team Truckee entered the competition late, after Team Russia was unable to get visas in time. Their sculpture: "Rising Tide."The weekend at Northstar ski resort in Truckee, California, is beautiful, sunny, and in the 30s. For eight teams of snow carvers from around the world, though, it’s terrible — the melty snow is sloppy, hard to carve, and even dangerous.Teams of three from Finland, Japan,...

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Livestrong Tattoos as Reminder of Personal Connections, Not Tarnished Brand

As Jax Mariash went under the tattoo needle to have “Livestrong” emblazoned on her wrist in bold black letters, she did not think about Lance Armstrong or doping allegations, but rather the 10 people affected by cancer she wanted to commemorate in ink. It was Jan. 22, 2010, exactly a year since the disease had taken the life of her stepfather. After years of wearing yellow Livestrong wristbands, she...

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The Education Revolution: In China, Families Bet It All on a Child in College

Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesWu Caoying studied English under her father’s watchful eye in 2006. She is now a sophomore in college. More Photos »HANJING, China — Wu Yiebing has been going down coal shafts practically every workday of his life, wrestling an electric drill for $500 a month in the choking dust of claustrophobic tunnels, with one goal in mind: paying for his daughter’s education. ...

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'Blade Runner' Oscar Pistorius weeps as he faces murder charge

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee revered in South Africa for overcoming his...

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Lebbeus Woods: The Architect Who Dared to Ask 'What If?'

He envisioned underground cities, floating buildings and an eternal space tomb for Albert Einstein worthy of the great physicist’s expansive intellect. With such grand designs, perhaps it’s not too surprising that the late Lebbeus Woods, one of the most influential conceptual architects ever to walk the earth, had only one of his wildly imaginative designs become a permanent structure.Instead of working...

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River Phoenix rises again as final movie finished

BERLIN (Reuters) – American actor River Phoenix has returned to the big screen 20 years on from his death after “Dark Blood” director George Sluizer salvaged the footage of his incomplete 1993 film and filled in the gaps with voiceovers.Phoenix was considered one of the most promising performers of his generation before he died suddenly of a suspected drug overdose aged 23, 10 days before shooting...

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Fat Dad: Baking for Love

Fat DadDawn Lerman writes about growing up with a fat dad.My grandmother Beauty always told me that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, and by the look of pure delight on my dad’s face when he ate a piece of warm, homemade chocolate cake, or bit into a just-baked crispy cookie, I grew to believe this was true. I had no doubt that when the time came, and I liked a boy, that a batch of...

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Income Gains After Recession Went Mostly to Top 1%

WASHINGTON — Incomes rose more than 11 percent for the top 1 percent of earners during the economic recovery, but barely at all for everybody else, according to new data. The numbers, produced by Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, show overall income growing by just 1.7 percent over the period. But there was a wide gap between the top 1 percent, whose...

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Oscar Pistorius remains in jail facing murder charge

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- South African athlete Oscar Pistorius, who made history last year as the first double amputee...

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'Blade Runner' Oscar Pistorius Charged With Girlfriend's Murder

In a tragic epilogue to the inspiring story of a man who never gave up, Olympian Oscar Pistorius — who ran alongside able-bodied athletes on futuristic blades of carbon fiber as millions of people watched — has been charged with murder in the shooting death of his girlfriend.News of the 26-year-old runner’s arrest in his hometown of Pretoria, South Africa, following the shooting death of model...

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‘Melrose’ actress gets 3 years for deadly NJ crash

SOMERVILLE, N.J. (AP) — A former “Melrose Place” actress who was drunk when her SUV plowed into a car and killed a woman was sentenced Thursday to three years in prison, infuriating the victim’s relatives, who had hoped for the 10-year maximum.“What a travesty!” the victim’s husband, Fred Seeman, yelled after the sentence was read.“This is not justice,” the victim’s 26-year-old son, Ford Seeman, told...

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Doctor and Patient: Afraid to Speak Up to Medical Power

The slender, weather-beaten, elderly Polish immigrant had been diagnosed with lung cancer nearly a year earlier and was receiving chemotherapy as part of a clinical trial. I was a surgical consultant, called in to help control the fluid that kept accumulating in his lungs.During one visit, he motioned for me to come closer. His voice was hoarse from a tumor that spread, and the constant hissing from...

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DealBook: Blackstone Keeps Most of Its Money With SAC

The Blackstone Group, the largest outside investor in the hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, said it would keep most of its $550 million with the hedge fund for three more months while it monitors developments in the government’s insider trading investigation.The move by Blackstone comes as SAC’s clients faced a regularly scheduled quarterly deadline on Thursday to decide whether to continue investing...

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Dorner manhunt: Investigators work to ID charred human remains

After what LAPD Chief Charlie Beck called "a bittersweet night," investigators Wednesday were in the process of identifying...

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Domestic-Drone Industry Prepares for Big Battle With Regulators

For a day, a sandy-haired Virginian named Jeremy Novara was the hero of the nascent domestic drone industry. Novara went to the microphone at a ballroom in a Ritz-Carlton outside Washington D.C. on Wednesday and did something many in his business want to do: tenaciously challenge the drone regulators at the Federal Aviation Administration to loosen restrictions on unmanned planes over the...

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Phys Ed: Getting the Right Dose of Exercise

Phys EdGretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.Fitness TrackerMarathon, half-marathon, 10k and 5K training plans to get you race ready.A common concern about exercise is that if you don’t do it almost every day, you won’t achieve much health benefit. But a commendable new study suggests otherwise, showing that a fairly leisurely approach to scheduling workouts may actually be more beneficial than...

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Hearings Begin on Treasury Nominee

Doug Mills/The New York TimesRepublicans have promised to grill Jacob J. Lew, center, President Obama’s nominee for Treasury secretary, over the government’s trillion-dollar deficits. WASHINGTON — Jacob J. Lew, President Obama’s nominee for Treasury secretary, faced some fierce questioning on Wednesday from the Senate Finance Committee on his tenure at the bailed-out Citigroup and on an...

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