Two national ranking publications, The Princeton Review and U.S. News & World Report, have rated St. Ambrose University among the top universities in the region. St. Ambrose is one of the best universities in the Midwest, according to The Princeton Review. The New York City-based education-services company selected the university as one of 158 institutions of higher education it recommends in its "Best in the Midwest" designation. Colleges named "regional bests" represent only about 25 percent of the nation's four-year colleges. This is the fifth year in a row St. Ambrose has been selected. In U.S. News & World Report, St. Ambrose was ranked 36th among "master's universities" in the Midwest. For more information, go to SAU.edu.

Quad Cities arts, cultural, heritage, and festival groups are invited to a community arts marketing discussion from 8:30 a.m. to noon on Wednesday, August 26, at the Quad City Botanical Center, 2525 Fourth Avenue in Rock Island. The meeting is sponsored by the Quad Cities Convention & Visitors Bureau and Quad City Arts to explore ways the arts and cultural community can collaborate to develop larger audiences. In 2004, a study by CH Johnson suggested the Quad Cities could build a stronger arts community by working together. For more information or to RSVP, contact Joe Taylor at (309)277-0937 extension 116 or jtaylor@visitquadcities.com.

The window is closing.

The mass graves aren't going anywhere, and neither is the forensic evidence - cartridges and bullets and bones. The archives are safe. But Father Patrick Desbois has but a few years to talk to people who saw the murders, and only they can identify the exact locations of the bodies and illuminate the problematic accounts in German and Soviet documents.

"We are in the small window I would say, because it's the end of the life of the witnesses, but it's also perhaps the only period in which ... they begin to feel free from the Soviet Union," Desbois said last week in a phone interview. "It's a short-term project. We think six, seven years maximum ... ."

Desbois, a Roman Catholic priest from France, has since 2004 conducted investigations into the "Holocaust by bullets" - the murder of eastern-European Jews by German soldiers during World War II. He will speak at St. Ambrose University on August 27.

Students stepping into Longfellow Elementary in Rock Island this school year will notice physical changes: a new media center and library, a new cafeteria, and a renovation that has added four new classrooms. But a more important change will be the school's new formal partnership with Augustana College.

The relationship will bring a liberal-arts-based curriculum to Longfellow - a contrast to the No Child Left Behind-forced shift in primary education that emphasizes reading and math skills to the exclusion of other subjects. Though the content of the curriculum will still conform to district standards, the way that content is presented will change: The focus will move to collaboration among students, small-group and individualized instruction, interdisciplinary learning, thematic teaching that attempts to make the coursework relevant, and the fine arts.

A No Child Left Behind-influenced curriculum "doesn't have anything to do with creative problem-solving, imagination, collaboration - all of these skills we need to survive in the next millennium," said Pat Shea, an assistant professor of education at Augustana who was part of the planning team for Longfellow. "If we don't get those things taught, it doesn't matter how many facts we know. ... We are so off-target about what it means to be an educated person, and I think we as educators have the first line of responsibility to start speaking to that."