My heart goes out to them facing such long hard odds.

The theme to Civilization IV made history last night by becoming the first song written specifically for a video game to win a Grammy award. Composer Christopher Tin accepted the award for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalists for the song "Baba Yetu" {wiki}. The lyrics are the Lord's Prayer in Swahili. Vocals are by the Soweto Gospel Choir. This video is for those who love the song and for those not familiar with it.

NPR President and CEO Vivian Schiller said, "We are grateful to the Obama Administration for recognizing the importance of public radio to the life of communities across the nation."

Administration Calls for Cutting Aid to Home Buyers

But administration officials said they had concluded the country could no longer afford to sustain its commitment to minting homeowners. Better to help some people rent

The money thrown around in the Race to the Top grant is paltry compared to what is needed to stave off mass layoffs of teachers and administrative personnel throughout the country. After all, federal dollars are less than 10 percent of education spending. But it's the emphasis here, on challenges and competitions, and the conceit of "investing" in schools at a time when they're hemorrhaging jobs, that rankles. The investment is simply not big enough to fit the crisis; and the focus on pitting schools against one another seeks to solve a nonexistent problem.

This is the problem with the entire budget. It's having a different conversation than people and policymakers are having across the country. It talks about investment when the investment is too low to make a difference. It talks about austerity when the austerity is misplaced (and focused on far too narrow a slice of the budget, magnifying the austerity in those areas). It talks about challenges and competitive grants when the real problems go basically unaddressed. It seeks a middle course on virtually everything and ends up satisfying no one. And by accepting the argument that cuts are necessary even during a jobs crisis, it makes it nearly impossible that the worst cuts can be stopped.

Bahrain, an island tucked between Saudi Arabia and Qatar on the gulf's western shore with fewer than 1 million residents. The home of the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet -- and a recently-launched $580 million U.S. expansion effort slated to double the U.S. Navy's acreage there -- could be in jeopardy if Bahrain's monarchy falls.

A judge in Italy has ordered Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to stand trial in April on charges that he paid an underage girl for sex, and then abused his office by interfering in a police arrest of the young woman. The trial will be heard by a panel of three judges -- all women.

"Maybe I was right, maybe I was not right," he said. "They gave me this chance. I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy."

What went wrong in Iraq? According to Donald Rumsfeld's memoir, U.S. difficulties stemmed not from the Pentagon's failure to plan for the war's aftermath - or Rumsfeld's unwillingness as defense secretary to provide enough troops to secure Iraqis after the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime.

OK. I'll stipulate that I'm a lousy researcher. I'll stipulate that in this particular instance what matters most is that the Flores family were decent, law abiding folks. I'll stipulate that in an "ordinary" (sic!!) case of home invasion, robbery with violence, and murder the citizenship of the victims should be irrelevant.