Word: civilities
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...exact origins of Memorial Day are disputed, with at least five towns claiming to have given birth to the holiday sometime near the end of the Civil War. Yale University historian David Blight places the first Memorial Day in April 1865, when a group of former slaves gathered at a Charleston, S.C., horse track turned Confederate prison where more than 250 Union soldiers had died. Digging up the soldiers' mass grave, they interred the bodies in individual graves, built a 100-yd. fence around them and erected an archway over the entrance bearing the words "Martyrs of the Race Course...
...outset, Memorial Day was so closely linked with the Union cause that many Southern states refused to celebrate it. They acquiesced only after World War I, when the holiday was expanded beyond honoring fallen Civil War soldiers to recognizing Americans who died fighting in all wars. It was also renamed Memorial Day. Some critics say that by making the holiday more inclusive, however, the original focus - on, as Frederick Douglass put it, the moral clash between "slavery and freedom, barbarism and civilization" - has been lost. Most Southern states still recognize Confederate Memorial Day as an official holiday, and many celebrate...
Infrastructure and sanitation remain huge problems. Major roads are still in need of repair; large towns still do not have safe tap water. Schools cannot provide students with textbooks, and civil servants grumble over the $100 monthly salary they receive. And Zimbabwe owes international financial organizations more than $1 billion. While the World Bank has agreed to resume aid to Zimbabwe for the first time since 2000 with a tentative $22 million grant, bigger loans will follow only after Harare retires its debt. (See pictures by James Nachtwey on some of the poorest people in the world, including in Zimbabwe...
Obama, President Barack •ambivalent reactions to civil liberties/national security speech...
...president's way of keeping local leaders from trying to up their status by basking in his reflected glory. Rakhmon, a former cotton farm boss whose prezident.tj website features nearly a dozen pictures of him on the homepage alone, led pro-communist forces against Islamist rebels during Tajikistan's civil war in the 1990s and became leader of the nation in 1992, a year after independence. The nation's longest-serving president, Rakhmon continues to command popular support, despite his rule being plagued by rampant corruption, vote rigging and unemployment that has forced around half of the male population...