Northern Illinois University students returned to campus Monday ready to get on with their semesters, even as the deadly shooting rampage of 10 days ago weighed heavily on their minds. Students wearing red lapel pins in honor of their school colors returned to lectures and labs as classes began for the first times since the Feb. 14 shootings, in which former NIU graduate student Steve Kazmierczak opened fire on students – killing five and wounding 16 – before committing suicide.
Raul Castro, Cuba’s first new president in nearly half a century, crushed hopes that a new generation would shape the country’s future by promising to defer to his ailing brother Fidel Castro and the Communist Party’s old guard on major issues. Shunning younger candidates, the island’s parliament tapped 77-year-old revolutionary leader Jose Ramon Machado for the government’s No. 2 spot, meaning Raul Castro’s constitutional successor is even older than he is, by a year.
Iran may have continued work on nuclear weapons past 2003, the year U.S. intelligence said such activities stopped, a senior British diplomat said Monday. Simon Smith, the chief British delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency, commented after an IAEA presentation of documentation that – if accurate – would strongly back U.S. claims that Iran at one point worked on programs linked to attempts to make nuclear weapons. That assertion was also made by a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, summarized and made public late last year said. That report also said, however, that the Iranians froze such work in 2003.
Turkey’s military said Monday it had killed 41 more separatist Kurdish rebels in clashes in northern Iraq, raising the reported guerrilla death toll in its cross-border operation to 153. A statement posted on the military’s Web site also said two more soldiers were killed in fighting, but gave no details. The deaths would drive the total Turkish military fatalities since the start of the incursion Thursday to 17. It said the military had hit some 30 targets of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in the last 24 hours.
Nearly four decades after a rural Georgia county stopped segregating its schools by race, it wants to divide students again – this time by sex. Greene County is set to become the first school district in the nation to go entirely single-sex, with boys and girls in separate classrooms – a move born of desperation over years of poor test scores, soaring dropout rates and high numbers of teenage pregnancies. “At the rate we’re moving, we’re never going to catch up,” Superintendent Shawn McCollough told parents in an impassioned speech last week. “If we’re going to take some steps, let’s take some big steps.”
