‘Ponyo’: More Ani-Magic from Miyazaki

While Hurricane Gustav was chewing up Cuba and storming toward Louisiana, the screen of the Venice Film Festival’s Sala Grande was showing a very sweet tsunami. In the animated movie Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, the swelling waves take the form of dolphins, and when a Japanese coastal village gets submerged no one is killed or hurt — just amusingly displaced. The rising up of the marine world is not insurrection against humanity but gently cautionary instruction for it

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Mastering the mental game

There is one man who will be pacing around the Hazeltine National Golf Club in Minnesota this week hoping to make it three majors in a row — but you won’t find his name when you trail your finger down the list of starters at the 91st PGA Championship. Though his presence may be unnoticed by spectators lining the fairways, his influence on the players he coaches is becoming far more conspicuous.

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Muslim women uncover myths about the hijab

Rowaida Abdelaziz doesn’t want your pity. She doesn’t want your frosty public stares; the whispers behind her back; the lament that she’s been degraded by her father. What the Muslim high school senior wants you to understand is that she doesn’t wear the hijab, the head scarf worn by Muslim women, because she is submissive

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Ave Kludze: Ghana’s rocket man

He was not able to fulfill his childhood dream of being a pilot, but Ghanaian scientist Dr. Ave Kludze has arguably gone one better: developing and flying spacecrafts for NASA. The 43-year-old didn’t enter orbit when controlling a NASA rocket to launch the Calipso environmental satellite in 2006, instead piloting it from the control center on the ground

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Arizona girl’s attack sheds light on rape in Liberia

The allegation is shocking: an 8-year-old girl lured to a storage shed with the promise of chewing gum, pinned down and sexually assaulted by four boys, none of them older than 14. The response from the girl’s family sent a second and equally stunning shockwave through their Phoenix, Arizona, community: “The parents felt that they had been shamed or embarrassed by their child,” reported Phoenix police Sgt. Andy Hill.

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Tom Brokaw on Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite was the most famous journalist of his time, the personification of success in his beloved profession, with all that brought with it: a journalism school named for him, a Presidential Medal of Freedom and the adulation of his peers and audience. Yet I always had the feeling that if late in life someone had tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Walter, we’re a little shorthanded this week

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