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Photos of a dog buried alive up to its head in France sparked an outpouring of anger on social media Wednesday, and police said the owner was taken into custody. The dog was surrounded by stones and her lead was attached to a sack of gravel to prevent her breaking free from the earth…"shocked and dehydrated". The 21-year-old owner … denied burying the dog, saying that the animal had run away. However, investigators said this was "not very plausible".

hen Newsweek broke the story last week that the College Board had redone its controversial 2014 AP U.S. history (APUSH) framework, the headline blared: “Revised AP U.S. History Standards Will Emphasize American Exceptionalism.” That headline was quickly echoed across the web, with Slate promising an APUSH course “Juiced Up With More ‘American Exceptionalism,’” New York Magazine following suit, and Think Progress decrying the College Board’s supposed “cave” to conservative pressure. A more accurate headline would have been, “College Board Inserts Meaningless Mention of American Exceptionalism to Shut Conservatives Up: Liberals Go Nuts.” Early coverage of the renewed APUSH controversy has...

It began quietly enough. A talking head on television would say it’s unfair to expect the robust economic boom of the 90s again; we had the “peace dividend” to thank for it, and it’s not like the Soviet Union is going to fall again. Or a columnist reminds us of the invention of the modern computer in the early 80s, and then the arrival of the internet age in the 90s; such technological breakthroughs were a once-in-history occurrence; they’re responsible for the booms we remember, nothing else. Or some caller on the radio, aged and experienced, with opinions fortified by...

The company behind Advanced Placement courses for U.S. high school students will release a revision to the standards for AP U.S. history on Thursday morning, after significant pushback from conservatives who claimed the redesigned course framework, released last year, painted American history in too negative a light. More at: http://www.newsweek.com/revised-ap-history-standards-will-emphasize-american-exceptionalism-358210

The company behind Advanced Placement courses for U.S. high school students will release a revision to the standards for AP U.S. history on Thursday morning, after significant pushback from conservatives who claimed the redesigned course framework, released last year, painted American history in too negative a light. The new framework significantly pares down last year’s framework, simplifying and condensing the course’s Thematic Learning Objectives from 50 to 19, according to an official at the College Board, the nonprofit organization that administers AP exams. In the process, a new section on the concept of “American exceptionalism” has been added. Some names...

Unraveling the axis of stupid: How Iran deal sends neocons, exceptionalists and Fox News xenophobes to dustbin of history Let Know Nothings, Tea Party and Trump crowd rail against the deal. They rail against reality, modernity, history Is there a way to summarize neatly what the document the White House just sent to Congress puts on the table? My candidate is a true delight to write: This signals the beginning of the end of American exceptionalism, however long the final act may drag out. This Iran deal, sealed a week ago, makes me think of those cruises people take up...

The phrase is just one of many that faculty were advised not to use. A University of California faculty leader-training handout instructed professors not to say that “America is the land of opportunity” because that’s a racist, sexist microaggression. According to the handout, called “Tool: Recognizing Microaggressions and the Messages they Send,” the statement “assert[s] that race and gender [do] not play a role in life successes” — despite the fact that saying opportunities exist and saying that opportunities are more easily attainable for some people than others are not mutually exclusive assertions. Other microaggressions listed on the document include...

What if the King decides that a 2016 Presidential Election is superfluous? I am a long-time admirer of American Exceptionalism, as I understood America to be the very first society in history to recognize that our freedoms arise from something innate within us and not from the government. Or as the Founders put it, “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” To this end the Founders created the Constitution of the...

You probably know from his weepy reminiscences that the speaker of the House, John Boehner, once worked as a bartender and a janitor, and took seven years to get out of college. Maybe you’ve heard that Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin is a preacher’s son who churned out burgers and fries at McDonald’s. And you had to catch that bit from Senator Joni Ernst about putting bread bags over her shoes while growing up kind of poor in rural Iowa. People from humble beginnings often carry an extra load of empathy through the success of their later lives, a sense...

I was recently invited to make some remarks at a charity dinner for a cause that I strongly support. The organizers worried that, because their cause affected only Third World nations, they would have a hard time raising money from an American audience. Localism, it seemed, in everything from farm produce to charity giving, was the new vogue. People wanted to see their dollars at work locally rather than watch them disappear into the coffers of some international organization. Could I help them make the case for international giving? On the night of the dinner it occurred to me to...

Does anybody really buy the Left’s faux outrage over former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani’s opinion, offered at a private event for Wisconsin governor Scott Walker last Wednesday, that President Obama does not love America? After all, it’s a matter of orthodoxy on the right that Barack Obama’s opinion of America ranges from mild disapproval to outright hatred. In my own estimation, it is somewhere between. A thought experiment for you: How do you think a spouse, a friend, or a colleague would react if you suggested — in your nicest voice — “I think you’re wonderful, but I...

"....Ah, American exceptionalism again. This is in part about a fundamental difference in views. It is a definitional difference, not about the meaning of love but about the meaning of America and its place in the world. Does exceptionalism — if one accepts the premise — bestow exemption from critique? Is uniqueness perfection? Does our difference require some sort of arresting of development?..... ....In a way, this is an ideological battle. Conservatism is rooted in preservation; progressivism advances alteration. These are different love languages. These languages turn on your view of change itself: When you think of America, do you...

Meanwhile, Walker, a leading Republican contender for the White House in 2016, said Saturday that he doesn't know whether Obama loves his country. 'You should ask the president what he thinks about America,' the Wisconsin governor told The Associated Press while in Washington for a weekend meeting of governors. 'I've never asked him so I don't know.' Democrats have assailed Giuliani for questioning the Democratic president's love of country, and they urged the potential field of Republican presidential candidates to rebuke Giuliani for his comments. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, another possible 2016 candidate, said he didn't think 'it helps to...

It may not be true that history is written by the victors, but in certain places, they’re making a hell of an effort to make sure it’s at least taught by them. In Oklahoma this week, a legislative committee took aim at Advanced Placement U.S. History classes in public schools. House Bill 1380, introduced by Republican Rep. Dan Fisher, would give “give sole control of curriculum and assessment to the state,” with particular regard to Advanced Placement classes offered for students to earn college credit. Fisher happens to be a member of the ominously named Black Robe Regiment, a group...

In the film, "Girl, Interrupted," Winona Ryder plays an 18-year-old who enters a mental institution for what is diagnosed as borderline personality disorder. The year is 1967 and the country is in turmoil over Vietnam and civil rights. While lying on her bed one night and watching TV, she sees a news report about a demonstration. The narrator says something that might apply to today's turmoil: "We live in a time of doubt. The institutions we once trusted no longer seem reliable." As 2014 ends, the stock market is at record highs but our traditional institutions and self-confidence are in...

<p>And in a vivid display of just how far self-hating Americans will go to smear their own country, look no further than this quickly infamous leftist-generated so-called CIA report. Its title as bequeathed by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program.</p>

I have been out of the country twice this year. The first time, I was in Mexico when protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, over the shooting death of Michael Brown; more recently, my two weeks in Argentina coincided with nationwide demonstrations against the lack of grand jury indictments in the cases of Brown and Eric Garner, the Staten Island police chokehold victim. Witnessing a nascent anti-police brutality movement from a distance has given me a different perspective on it, because the novelty of getting out in the streets in America and demanding justice stands in stark contrast to the...

Events in Ferguson, Missouri have spawned an intriguing phenomenon. A casual pursuing of the popular center-left blogosphere like Slate or Salon, replete with its Upper East Side White Guilt, could make black folks wonder, ‘What the hell am I still doing here?’ A quick channel flip past MSNBC would have us believe that African Americans are Public Enemy Number One among militarized police officers wielding the authority of our government to act as if operating under a state of martial law to maintain order.Were a fraction of these fallacies accurate, a cry from the black community would rise up across...

In 1961, John F. Kennedy said the United States, beaten into space by Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, would put a man on the moon and return him to earth within the decade. In July 1969, President Nixon, on the deck of the carrier Hornet, welcomed home Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins of Apollo 11. What ever became of that America? What ever became of that can-do nation? What has happened to us? This October saw the vaunted Center for Disease Control and Prevention fumbling over basic questions on how to protect Americans from an Ebola epidemic in three small countries of...

It's hard to get through an Obama speech these days without the president patriotically reminding his audience that the U.S. is the "one indispensable nation" in the world. But it wasn't always so.