Swami Laxmananand Saraswati, an 80-year old Hindu priest, and five others were murdered by what is suspected a Christian mob recently in Orrisa. The news is that “police have arrested Pradesh Kumar Das, an employee of the World Vision, a Christian Charity, from Khadagpur while escaping from the district at Buguda. In another drive, two other persons Vikram Digal and William Digal have been arrested from the house of Lal Digal, a local militant Christian, from Nuasahi at Gunjibadi, Nuagaan. They have admitted to having joined a group of 28 …

On March 8th, 2008, Richard Dawkins spoke at the Wheeler Auditorium on the UC Berkeley campus during his US book tour for his book “The God Delusion.” I am an absolute admirer of Prof Dawkins.
You could see the google video of Richard in Berkeley (56 mins) or you could see it in six parts on YouTube. Here’s YouTube part 1/6 of Richard at Berkeley:

Part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6.
Related post: Darwin’s Big Idea

An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal (Aug 13th) by Charles Murray, “For Most People, College is a Waste of Time” has many points that I agree with. (Hat tip: R S Malapati.)
For a while I have been convinced that it is better to separate teaching from testing and evaluation. See this post “De-linking Teaching and Testing” (Feb 2005) where I wrote:

Pro-industrial policies promote industry, pro-health policy promote health, pro-education policies promote education. So it is natural that India’s pro-poor policies — and let’s be very clear that every single one of India’s economic policies have been pro-poor — work and promote poverty and the number of poor keeps on going up. The absolute number keeps growing. What about the percentage? It does keep improving.
So what’s the latest on poverty in India from the World Bank? It is reported that the WB released some study which talks about the changes in …