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Thirty-one years later, my wife, Mary, and I were married in a church whose very name, Our Lady of Sorrows, seemed to emphasize the tribulations over the joys that awaited us. A family friend, a nun with connections, presented us with our own papal blessing, this time linking a wedding in suburban New Jersey [...]

ALICE TERRELL opens the door to Miss Hargrove%26#8217;s first grade at Blessed Sacrament School, where nine children sit attentively at desks arranged like pieces on a checkerboard. The room is huge and they are tiny, but the 92-year-old school was built when Catholic education was flourishing and a typical classroom held 40 [...]

Lijia Zhang is a child of the 1980s. In %26#8220;Socialism Is Great!,%26#8221; her coming-of-age memoir, that decade is to her what the 1960s were to American baby boomers. Zhang grew up in Nanjing, a faded former capital on the Yangtze River, at a time when her family, friends and bosses were trying to divine [...]

The earliest %26#8220;typical%26#8221; Stravinsky interviews %26#151; charming, crafty, hyperarticulate, unerringly self-serving %26#151; appeared in St. Petersburg newspapers in 1912, and the stream, or torrent, continued unabated for nearly six decades, in dozens of languages and on every continent but Antarctica. By the end of his life he said he was living in a perpetual [...]

A FRANKLIN stove circa 1830. Replicas of 150-year-old wooden rocking chairs. Antique fishing tackle. Duck decoys a century old. Stuffed wild turkeys. Rows of narrow, footlong lockers to fit liquor bottles. Keys to lock up the alcohol. These are just some of the items in the billiard room of the former Southside Sportsmen%26#8217;s [...]

The Financial Times
DARLING CALLS FOR SWIFT ACTION TO TACKLE MARKET TURMOIL
Alistair Darling will send an open letter to fellow finance
ministers ahead of the Group of Seven meeting in Washington this
weekend calling for “a clear and detailed plan of action” for
dealing with turmoil in the global financial markets. “The
problems [...]

A new report demonstrates we are now seeing the lowest marriage rates on record and more ‘freemales’ living alone. Released last week by the Office for National Statistics, it shows that the number of women living alone aged between 25 and 44 - the age when traditionally they would be married and having families - [...]

My first movie memory derives from 1937. I’d just started school in Leicester, where my father, who kept being shifted around by the company he worked for, was based. Due to his constant moves, I became acquainted with the cinemas of half-a-dozen towns. Because he was an insurance man, we could never agree about Billy [...]

Another Canadian soldier was killed Friday in Afghanistan when his armoured vehicle struck an improvised explosive device in a district of the country long acknowledged as the birthplace of the Taliban.
Pte. Terry John Street, 24, of Hull, Que., was with the 2nd Battalion of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, based in Shilo, Man., said [...]

By Ben Blanchard
ANKANG, China (Reuters) - Tom Tang and Dong Mijuan
represent the two opposite ends of one of China’s most glaring
social problems — the growing gap between rich and poor.
Economic reforms over the past three decades may have
lifted millions out of grinding poverty and helped fuel a
rising middle [...]