Free Republic

BROWNSVILLE -- The H1N1 flu knows no boundaries and doesn't recognize borders. It ignores socioeconomic confines and strikes the rich and the poor. The number of confirmed cases in Texas as of Sunday was 40, with one of those in Cameron County and two in Starr County, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those cases include the first casualty of the new flu strain, toddler Miguel Tejeda Vazquez of Mexico City, who died in Houston Monday. "He was not like my kid or your kid," said a pensive Gregory Compean of Compean Funeral Home in Houston who...

BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- Leading the world's wealthiest and probably most famous university sounds like the plummiest job in academe -- with a staff, a house, and a half-million dollar salary among the many perks. But running Harvard isn't easy. Neil Rudenstine, school president from 1991 to 2001, was forced to take leave of absence for exhaustion in 1994. His successor, Lawrence Summers, announced Tuesday he would resign June 30 after a tumultuous five years, his ambitious agenda to get Harvard's territorial undergraduate and professional schools on same page done in by faculty revolts and brusque management style. Harvard-watchers inside...

<p>Stanford University's Bradford Parkinson, a pioneer of the navigation technology that now guides everything from military missiles to misguided motorists, was honored Tuesday with the Charles Stark Draper Prize, the engineering equivalent of the Nobel Prize.</p> <p>Parkinson, a 68-year-old Stanford emeritus professor of aeronautics and astronautics, was instrumental in creating the Global Positioning System, which harnesses the power of 24 orbiting satellites to pinpoint the longitude and latitude of virtually any spot on earth.</p>