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Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain (Ariz.) told a campaign audience that charges he has a bad temper make him angry. “In fact, I had to deck one of my senate colleagues for calling me ‘Senator Hothead,’” McCain announced. “For me, fighting for this country and my beliefs isn’t just a figure-of-speech.” McCain argued that he is “the perfect candidate for those bitter Americans who cling to guns and religion and have antipathy toward those who hate our country.” Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) called McCain’s remarks “a vindication of my plan to rejuvenate America by sweeping aside the angry...

Quote: "It is wonderful to be back in Oregon," Obama said. "Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go. Alaska and Hawaii, I was not allowed to go to even though I really wanted to visit, but my staff would not justify it."

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The only surviving copy of the 500-year-old map that first used the name America goes on permanent display this month at the Library of Congress, but even as it prepares for its debut, the 1507 Waldseemuller map remains a puzzle for researchers. Why did the mapmaker name the territory America and then change his mind later? How was he able to draw South America so accurately? Why did he put a huge ocean west of America years before European explorers discovered the Pacific?... ... Although the map conceals many mysteries, one thing is clear: it represents a...

Everyone is having a good belly laugh at the expense of Lauren Caitlin Upton, the contestant in the Miss Teen USA pageant who imploded in a painful display of verbal and intellectual chaos in response to question about geographically challenged Americans. Lauren Caitlin Upton of Lexington, S.C., shown in this undated modeling photo. The 18-year-old has become national sensation after her gramatically challenged response to a question at the Miss Teen USA pageant in Pasadena, Calif., Aug. 24, 2007 (photo courtesy Locke Management) While everyone is fixated on the answer, no one has taken time to respond to the question...

The Miss Teen USA pageant contestant who became a YouTube sensation after butchering a question about why many Americans cannot find the U.S. on a world map says she was overwhelmed by her national television appearance and chalks up the experience to being “human.”

A Swansea University historian hopes to discover more about an ancient discipline which may have provided "the GPS system" of its day, 500 years ago. Dr Adam Mosley will study cosmography, a subject believed to combine geography, history and astronomy. He will also try to find out how it died out in around the 17th Century. The lecturer wants to discover more about its study and how strong its links were with the seafarers' art of navigating by the stars. The subject became popular around 500 years ago but died out and part of Dr Mosley's work will be to...

Science Daily — Although the discrepancy is not large, it is significant: Geodesists from the University of Bonn have remeasured the size of the Earth in a long lasting international cooperation project. The blue planet is accordingly some millimeters smaller than up to now assumed. The results are important, for example, to be able to demonstrate a climate contingent rise in sea level. View of the Earth as seen by the Apollo 17 crew traveling toward the moon. (Credit: Image courtesy of NASA/Johnson Space Center) The system of measurement used by the Bonn Geodesists is invisible. It consists of radiowaves...

With calm determination, 14-year-old Caitlin Snaring snared a title on Wednesday that only one other girl in geographic history has held: She won the National Geographic Bee.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Although the Global Positioning System has made meridians obsolete in mapmaking, a group of geographers used the GPS to mark the exact spot where the old prime meridian of Italy passed through the Vatican. Standing at the end of a technologically guaranteed straight line of flower pots, the geographers and Vatican officials dedicated a plaque marking the spot in the Vatican Gardens Feb. 23. A prime meridian is an arbitrarily determined line running around the globe from north to south; it is used to determine longitude as well as time zones. Although an international agreement was...

Map of NCAAF I-A Team Fan Areas Important: this map is highly inaccurate and should be understood only as a demonstration, and not as any kind of reliable data yet. It is based on only a few thousands of votes spread across all teams, across the country. Areas with virtually no data are shown in gray, and many boundaries are still expected to change their shape drastically. A map with more accurate boundaries will gradually emerge as the number of votes reaches the upper tens of thousands. Within the colored area associated with each team, more fans support that team...

Dave's in a sorry state BY DAVE BARRY (This classic Dave Barry column was originally published on Aug. 1, 1999.) Most Americans are pitifully ignorant of geography. This was clearly demonstrated recently when the Gallup Organization sent its pollsters to Chicago to ask randomly selected residents if they could name at least three of the six major continents. The results were shocking: Most of the pollsters never found Chicago at all; of those who did, all but one fell into the Chicago River. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident of American geographical ignorance. Just last month, the major U.S....

Liberals fly their colors, by Mike Rosen It was two years ago that North High School was the center of controversy over a foreign flag. A Mexican flag was given equal prominence with an American flag in a permanent wall display in the school lobby and in a social studies classroom. The teacher who hung the Mexican flag in his classroom said he wanted his students to feel welcome. This was a nice sentiment, but a direct violation of Colorado law. Although North High is almost 85 percent Hispanic, this is still an American school in the United States, funded...

July 07, 2006, 7:46 a.m. Failure of IntelligenceIf stupid hurt, we’d all be in a world of pain. Well, ow. By Denis Boyles Surely, after Christmas, the July 4th weekend must be the Internet equivalent of August in Paris. Nobody’s around but us tourists. So you may have missed the results of a poll published in the Daily Telegraph last weekend showing “Most Britons see America as a cruel, vulgar, arrogant society, riven by class and racism, crime-ridden, obsessed with money and led by an incompetent hypocrite.� Such is the fury of an ex-, I suppose, but it’s good...

The powerful earthquake that hit Indonesia was just the latest display of violent seismic activity on the archipelago, which stretches across one of the most unstable parts of the Earth's surface. The country's position on the planet's crust means it will continue to experience such catastrophes, just as it has done for the past 50 million years or so, according to seismologists. "The problem with Indonesia is that you have an area of intense seismic activity coinciding with a very densely populated part of the world," said Gary Gibson, professor of seismology at the RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. "It...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- After more than three years of combat and nearly 2,400 U.S. military deaths in Iraq, nearly two-thirds of Americans aged 18 to 24 still cannot find Iraq on a map, a study released Tuesday showed. The study found that less than six months after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, 33 percent could not point out Louisiana on a U.S. map.

Governor Bill Owens of Colorado has cut through the cant about "free speech" and come to the defense of a 16-year-old high school student who tape-recorded his geography teacher using class time to rant against President Bush and compare him to Hitler. The teacher's lawyer talks about First Amendment rights to free speech but free speech has never meant speech free of consequences. Even aside from laws against libel or extortion, you can insult your boss or your spouse only at your own risk. Unfortunately, there is much confusion about both free speech and academic freedom. At too many schools...

School District to Taxpayers and Parents: Up Yours ..... and the Homeschooling Movement Gets a Yet Another Shot in the Arm: Here is yet another reason for parents to homeschool their children if at all possible (By the way, the story is hopelessly slanted -- The lecture was objectively biased; plus, the primary issue here is teaching the subject matter, and secondarily the political indoctrination Jay Bennish engaged in while not doing his job): Bennish to teach again Punishment not revealed; teacher returns MondayAn Aurora social studies teacher accused of giving a biased lecture that sparked national debate over academic...

Article Launched: 3/10/2006 01:43 PM Controversial teacher keeps job By DenverPost.com A Cherry Creek social studies teacher will not lose his job, after a student went public with a tape recording of controversial comments the teacher had made in class. Superintendent Monte C. Moses said Jay Bennish will be reinstated to his job at Overland High School, and will be teaching on Monday. At a news conference this afternoon, Moses said Bennish doesn't deserve to be praised, nor does he deserve to be fired. "Jay Bennish has promise as a teacher, but his practice and deportment need growth and refinement,"...

One of the biggest problems confronting higher education is the fact that most students entering colleges and universities lack basic social science skills and knowledge. In a recent survey of college students in Buffalo, for example, almost half did not know who George Pataki is. Eighty percent had no idea, correct or incorrect, as to what communism is. Nearly the same number of students couldn’t define capitalism. For whatever reason, social science education in America has collapsed at the high school level. For a democracy that relies on an informed electorate, such ignorance is toxic.

Graphic shown today on ESPN during World Baseball Classic had a list of the number of players from foreign countries, including the country of... Puerto Rico. What...did they forget the country of New Mexico? :)

LONDON, July 10 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – A U.S. author has launched a blistering attack on U.S. president George W. Bush’s war on terror, a U.K. newspaper reported Wednesday. In his latest book titled Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got To Be So Hated, Gore Vidal raised several question marks, U.K. daily newspaper the Daily Mirror reported. The outspoken 76-year-old said the U.S. provoked the September 11 attacks with its own military intervention in countries around the world, the paper said. Staunch democrat Vidal, a former White House aide to John F. Kennedy, insisted the U.S. should...

When and where on earth can you see the longest sunrise? And how long can you see it? Stumped? Well, then, sample another. What would you see from the moon more often: the sun or the earth? A five-member team of 14-to-17-year olds will hone their skills over the next 10 days to unravel a few more secrets that the skies hold. Their aim: to win as many medals as possible at the International Astronomy Olympiad that kicks off in Beijing on October 25. It will not be an easy task — they will be up against competition from over...

A few weeks ago, the web world was captivated by the stunning images produced by Google Earth, an interactive 3D model of the globe. The ground detail is a montage of satellite images, which means you can zoom in to very, very high detail. In some cities this is complemented by 3D models of individual buildings. And because it would be crazy not to, it can also be overlaid with road maps to give you directions from A to B. If you insist, it will even fly the route for you. It is certainly a far cry from the online...

Young members of the United States' geographic competition team, Karan Takhar, left, Andrew Wojtanik, center, and Jesse Weinberg, right, stand on the stage after winning the 7th National Geographic World Championship in Budapest, Hungary. A team of three American school students has won the National Geographic World Championship in Budapest, Hungary Thursday. The team from Russia came in second and Canada was third. Looking relieved three teenagers of the United States received the golden medals in an Olympic style ceremony at the end of the National Geographic World Championship in the Palace of the Arts in Budapest. They received them...

They correctly identified a photograph of the Mayan ruins in Tikal, Guatemala, gained an early lead and never looked back. A team of three American teenagers on Thursday won the National Geographic World Championship, the fourth consecutive U.S. victory in the contest that tests knowledge of geography. Russia took the silver medal, passing Canada in the penultimate round, when they noticed that unlike Iberia, Arabia, Kamchatka and Baja California, Siberia is not a peninsula. "The questions were tough and they involved lots of thinking," said U.S. team captain Andrew Wojtanik, 15, of Overland Park, Kan. His teammates - Karan Takhar,...

On to the State Quiz

Student shines in competition despite being homeless for years. Nick Clemons knows the location of the Chinese province of Qinghai. He knows every bus stop in San Francisco. He knows where a tiny sliver of British Columbia separates Alaska from the Yukon. But he doesn't know where his home is. Nick, who is 14, used to wander the halls of San Francisco's Roosevelt Middle School alone, an anonymous kid with long, stringy hair and an armload of books. His mother vanished more than a year ago, and he says he has no idea how to contact her. He's been homeless...

WASHINGTON -- Nathan Cornelius, a home schooled seventh grader from Cottonwood, Minn., won the 17th annual National Geographic Bee competition today, with a dazzling display of knowledge about places, cultures, cities, countries and rivers around the globe. For winning the competition, which started with 5 million students nationwide, Nathan was awarded a $25,000 scholarship. He bested nine other finalists during the taping of the event moderated by TV’s ''Jeopardy!'' host Alex Trebek. He was one of two contestants to survive a double elimination first round that took 105 questions. Then he outlasted Karan Takhar, 14, of Rhode Island,in an 11-question...

FORT HOOD, Texas (Army News Service, May 6, 2005) -- When the 1st Cavalry Division first started preparing to go to Iraq in 2003, Chris Caesar, a Killeen High School world geography teacher, saw an opportunity to turn the deployment into a teaching experience. His efforts culminated May 4, when a group of his students met with more than 20 recently returned First Team Soldiers to document their experiences in Iraq. The students, in groups of three, used video cameras to preserve Soldiers’ accounts of their time in Iraq as part of an oral history project. Caesar said it all...

A Roper poll commissioned by the National Geographic Society several years ago found that just 13 percent of Americans between the age of 18 and 24, or one in seven, could find Iraq on a map, and 83 percent could not locate Afghanistan. (Just over a third of the 18- to 24-year-olds polled, however, knew that the Marquesas Islands, featured in a previous season's "Survivor" television show, are in the South Pacific.) As a result of this survey and similar reports, nonprofit organizations have taken up the cause of trying to improve Americans' awareness of geography and its importance; those...

Last year's state champ in the National Geographic Bee won't be able to compete in this year's contest due to a little-publicized rules change, his parents said. Matt Savage, a home-schooled seventh-grader from Francestown, had already won a school-level Bee at Great Brook School in Antrim. But after his win, officials with the Bee called and told parents Larry and Diane Savage that he couldn't go on to the state contest because of rules governing how home-schoolers can enter the event. "We want to follow the rules, but it would have been appropriate to advertise the rules," Mrs. Savage said,...

National Geographic Society retreats The Marze Por Gohar Party is happy to announce that with the hard work of our compatriots for defending the Persian Gulf, the National Geographic Society has been forced to retreat from their earlier stance regarding the Persian Gulf. The National Geographic Society has reportedly removed the illegitimate name from its maps, however there is an asterisk now explaining that some countries use another (unrecognized) name to refer to the Persian Gulf. Though the Islamic Republic would like to have Iranians believe that the matter regarding the National Geographic’s use of an illegitimate name for the...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - America may dominate the world in sports and culture but in one arena where size doesn't matter, the "Geography Olympics," the United States was 88th behind minnows such as Madagascar and the Marshall Islands. More than 46,000 Americans have taken part in this online geography competition started by a man with a mission: Roger Andresen, who quit his job as a fiber optic engineer two years ago when he realized most Americans have never heard of Nauru and don't know Cameroon is in Africa. Working from his home in Georgia -- the U.S. state, not the...

David Bell, the Chief Inspector for Schools, thinks he has worked out why the number of pupils taking GCSE geography has fallen by a third in the past eight years: it's all because school geography courses fill pupils with too many facts and aren't "relevant" enough. "We need to engage pupils more purposely," he says. "Water shortages, famine, migrations of people, disputes over oil, globalisation and debt are all major issues with which our world is grappling and this is the geography of today." I have an alternative explanation for the drop in pupils studying geography: maybe it is just...

October 24, 2004 Unfortunately due to powerful anti-Iranian activities and the typical incompetence of the Islamic Republic that occupies Iran, the southern states of the Persian Gulf who have only come to existence thanks to foreign powers, have slowly become more brazen. As a result the National Geographic Society has printed at least three major erroneous statements in its Atlas of the World 2005 (Eighth Edition, ISBN: 0-7922-7543-8 & ISBN: 0-7922-7542-x) regarding Iran and the Persian Gulf. Considering the fact that the National, Geographic is the biggest non-profit educational and scientific institution, it is hard for us to fathom how...

[] With the addition of Cuban native Jose Contreras, the White Sox are now represented by nine countries. Damaso Marte, Timo Perez, Rafael Santana (first-base coach) and Juan Uribe are from the Dominican Republic. Sandy Alomar, Jr., Joey Cora (third-base coach) and Jose Valentin are from Puerto Rico. Manager Ozzie Guillen, Freddy Garcia and Magglio Ordonez are from Venezuela. Shingo Takatsu is from Japan, Carlos Lee is from Panama, Man Soo Lee (bullpen catcher) is from Korea, and Herm Schneider (head trainer) is from the Netherlands. [sic] []

Papers have been flapping with new headlines about the latest in a long line of alleged dinosaur ancestors of birds. This one is claimed to be a sensational dinosaur with feathers on its hind legs, thus four ‘wings’.1 This was named Microraptor gui—the name is derived from words meaning ‘little plunderer of Gu’ after the paleontologist Gu Zhiwei. Like so many of the alleged feathered dinosaurs, it comes from Liaoning province of northeastern China. It was about 3 feet (1 meter) long from its head to the tip of its long tail, but its body was only about the size...

High Standards A gentleman in Alaska has sent me a copy of an exam the state of Washington required of all 8th-graders in 1910. I suspect that today many college graduates would have difficulty passing it. All of the questions were essay, and students were graded on their ability to write as well as on penmanship. Teachers did not "teach to the test." In fact, after the tests were handed out, the teachers left, and an outsider sat in the room. Students were not allowed to ask questions, and no explanations were given. Minimum passing grade in grammar and arithmetic...

The below is from Stanford's list of its history faculty and their specialties.  East Asia David Como, Professor of Early Modern England. Ph.D Princeton 1999. Puritanism, Politics, English Revolution  Peter Duus, William H. Bonsall Professor of Japanese History. Ph.D., Harvard University. Berkeley Prize, 1996-1997. Senior Fellow (by courtesy), Hoover Institution. Modern Japanese History  Zephyr Frank, Assistant Professor of Latin American History. Ph.D Illinois 1999. Family, Social Structure, Wealthholding, Slavery  

Today: April 01, 2004 at 9:09:41 PST Students to test global knowledgeBy Mary Manning <manning@lasvegassun.com>LAS VEGAS SUNOne hundred students from around the state -- including 49 from Southern Nevada -- will test their knowledge of geography Friday in the National Geographic Bee at Greenspun Junior High School. The state winner will receive $100, a globe and a trip to Washington, D.C., for the national finals May 25-26. Contestant Alexandra Spinkelink is a typical 11-year-old who attends Grace Christian Academy in Boulder City, her mother Jennifer said. "History and geography are the ones (classes) she has always enjoyed," her mother said....

One of our many rural legislators here in Arkansas came by the office the other day to tell me how the cow ate the cabbage and who's in the catbird seat. -snip- A master of country speech, and something of a political scholar, my visitor was tellin' it with the bark off: Politics in Arkansas, he explained, isn't determined by party but by geography, history and ethnicity. Didn't I know that? He might as well have asked if I realized the sky was blue. Geography, history and ethnicity. Not to mention altitude. The simplest measure of Southernness itself is mean...

Link post: to make interested readers aware of the post in the FR "Chat" section, where any discussion should take place: Geology Picture of the Week, January 4-10, 2004

<p>We've taken a drubbing for a while now in press reports that paint Americans as dim bulbs with big mouths, big cars and lousy foreign policy.</p> <p>The threads of this ongoing America-bashing include differences over the war on terrorism and resentment of American culture in general and President Bush in particular.</p>

JERUSALEM (AP) - The Dead Sea is dying, and only a major engineering effort can save it, Israel's Minister of the Environment said Monday. The Dead Sea gets its name from its heavy salt content, because no aquatic creatures can live in it. Now there's a new ``death threat'' - the Dead Sea is drying up and disappearing. An Israeli TV reporter, illustrating the government report, stood on a spot where, just 20 years ago, water met land. Now that point is 2,000 feet of parched ground away, he said, as the sea gradually recedes. Because it is landlocked in...

U.S. wins world geography championship Reuters July 16, 2003, 3:27 PM EDT TAMPA - A team of American teen-agers correctly identified Bahrain and Crete to win the National Geographic World Championship of geography Wednesday, defeating teams from Germany and France. It was the fourth victory for the United States in six championships that have been held every two years since 1993. Australia and Canada won the other two.

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times Sterling Forest State Park, in Orange County, N.Y., is a preserve of nearly 18,000 acres that conservationists consider a model for maintaining land without development. It stretches from the forests of the North to the farmlands in the South, from woodlands where bobcats scream and cerulean warblers warble to lawns where deer and groundhogs graze. More than 4.5 million people drink water drawn from its aquifers. Fourteen million people use it each year for recreation, more than visit Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon combined. Twenty-five million people live within an hour's drive. It has...

Washington (CNSNews.com) - It's that time of year when spelling and geography whiz kids head to the nation's capital. And once again this year, home schoolers were among the best in both competitions. Even though students from public schools dominate the contests, home-schooled students are making their presence -- and their smarts -- known to people around country. Last week, home-schooled eighth grader James Williams of Vancouver, Wash., took home first place in the National Geography Bee. Then on Thursday, another home-schooled eighth grader, Evelyn Blacklock of Tuxedo Park, N.Y., was the runner-up in the National Spelling Bee. Winning isn't...

Concord, New Hampshire-AP -- Former President Ronald Reagan is about to have a mountain named after him in New Hampshire. The state legislature in Concord has completed action on a bill to wipe Mount Clay off maps of the Presidential Range in the White Mountains and write in Mount Reagan. The bill now goes to Governor John Sununu for his signature. The peak is about a mile from Mount Washington, the highest mountain in the Northeastern United States. Supporters say it is a fitting memorial for Reagan, since Henry Clay, the mountain's namesake, was never a president. Other mountains...

Many rural communities are in danger of dying out, and the problem could threaten the nation's economic growth SEOUL - Just one school remains open in the village of Dongmyun, deep in the heart of South Korea's countryside in central Chungcheong province. There used to be four schools in the area. But in the past 30 years, the number of pupils has fallen dramatically from more than 1,000 to just over 100. Village head Hong Ui Jeong fears that without drastic action, communities like his may die out totally. With fewer than 20 babies born last year, he is doing...

The Old Man of the Mountain has collapsed. The beloved New Hampshire symbol fell from its rocky perch 1,200 feet above Profile Lake in Franconia some time within the past day. Workers at the Flume reported the incident early this morning. It is unknown exactly when the face fell because it has been hidden by clouds and fog for more than a day. Dick Hamilton, president of the White Mountain Attractions, said it appears the forehead fell and took the nose with it. “I never thought I’d see the day this would happen,” said Hamilton. The face was comprised of...