ATLANTA -- Vivian Malone Jones, one of two black students whose effort to enroll at the University of Alabama led to George Wallace's infamous "stand in the schoolhouse door" in 1963, died Thursday. She was 63.

Jones, who went on to become the first black to graduate from the school, died at Atlanta Medical Center, where she was admitted Tuesday after suffering a stroke, said her sister, Sharon Malone.

High school girls are more likely to exercise vigorously if they're in girls-only physical-education classes that offer a variety of activities such as dancing, aerobics and brisk walking, a new study reports.

And they do better if the school in general promotes activities for girls, says the report in September's American Journal of Public Health.

The council calls its course a nonsectarian historical and literary survey class within constitutional guidelines requiring the separation of church and state.

But a growing chorus of critics says the course, taught by local teachers trained by the council, conceals a religious agenda. The critics say it ignores evolution in favor of creationism and gives credence to dubious assertions that the Constitution is based on the Scriptures, and that "documented research through NASA" backs the biblical account of the sun standing still.

In the latest salvo, the Texas Freedom Network, an advocacy group for religious freedom, has called a news conference for Monday to release a study that finds the national council's course to be "an error-riddled Bible curriculum that attempts to persuade students and teachers to adopt views that are held primarily within conservative Protestant circles."

The number of tenure offers made to women increased this year for the first time during Lawrence H. Summers presidency, reversing a three-year decline that saw only 13% of offers go to women last year. [snip]

Of 33 tenure offers made by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) during the 2004-2005 academic year, nine of those, or 27 percent of all offers, went to women.