For too many students, a college education that is supposed to create opportunities can also mean years of struggle to pay off tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Schools must be required to do more to educate students about the real cost of their education and about a complex borrowing process that even the most sophisticated people have trouble understanding. An article in The Times last week described the experience of 23-year-old Kelsey Griffith. She currently earns a meager wage as a restaurant worker and owes $120,000 in student loans for an undergraduate degree from Ohio Northern University, a college whose recent graduates are among the most indebted in the country. Nationally, about two-thirds of bachelor’s degree recipients now borrow from either public or ... Continue reading →
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A Pakistani doctor who helped the Central Intelligence Agency pin down Osama Bin Laden's location under cover of a vaccination drive was convicted on Wednesday of treason and sentenced to 33 years in prison, a senior official in Pakistan said. A tribal court in northwestern Pakistan here found the doctor, Shakil Afridi, guilty of acting against the state, said Mutahir Zeb Khan, the administrator for the Khyber tribal region. Along with the jail term, the court imposed a fine of $3,500. Dr. Afridi, who may appeal the verdict, was then sent to Central Prison in Peshawar. He had been charged under a British-era regulation for frontier crimes that unlike the national criminal code does not carry the death penalty for treason. Under ... Continue reading →
Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters Facebook on the NASDAQ Marketsite.Just days before Facebook went public, some big investors got nervous about the social network.After publicly warning about challenges in mobile advertising, Facebook executives held conference calls to update their banks’ analysts on the business. Armed with the new information, analysts at Morgan Stanley and other firms started reaching out to their clients to dial back expectations for the Internet company.One prospective investor was told that second-quarter revenue could be 5 percent lower than the bank’s earlier estimates. Another analyst warned that revenue could be light for the next two years.As investors tried to digest the developments, Morgan Stanley was busy setting the price and the size of the I.P.O.While some big institutions chose not to buy the stock, ... Continue reading →
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to address one of the biggest controversies surrounding the response to the Sept. 11 attacks – the government’s aggressive use of electronic surveillance. The justices will decide whether a challenge to a 2008 federal law that broadened the government’s power to monitor international communications may proceed. The challenge was brought by lawyers, journalists and human rights groups who say the law allows the government to intercept their international telephone calls and e-mails. Some of the plaintiffs say they now meet clients or sources only in person. The government contends that the plaintiffs have not suffered an injury direct enough to give them standing to sue. Last year, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Unites States Court of ... Continue reading →
Human Rights, Religious Groups Deliver Petition Today (Washington, D.C.) – Today, Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture delivered to the White House a petition of more than 60,000 signatures asking President Obama to extend a formal apology to Maher Arar. Arar is a Canadian citizen who was detained in 2002 by the United States and sent to Syria where he was tortured and imprisoned without charge for a year. Arar was ultimately released and allowed to return to Canada. He was never charged with a crime. Maher Arar, who lives in Canada with his family, expressed appreciation for Americans working on his behalf. “I am very grateful to all those Americans who have worked hard on ... Continue reading →
I ALWAYS liked that the name of my religion was also an adjective meaning all-embracing. I was a Catholic and I wanted to be catholic, someone engaged in a wide variety of things. As James Joyce wrote in “Finnegans Wake:” “Catholic means ‘Here comes everybody.’ ” So it makes me sad to see the Catholic Church grow so uncatholic, intent on loyalty testing, mind control and heresy hunting. Rather than all-embracing, the church hierarchy has become all-constricting. It was tough to top the bizarre inquisition of self-sacrificing American nuns pushed by the disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law. Law, the former head of the Boston archdiocese, fled to a plush refuge in Rome in 2002 after it came out that he protected priests who molested thousands of ... Continue reading →
BEIJING — Chen Guangcheng, the blind legal defender who made a dramatic escape from house arrest and whose decision to seek sanctuary in American Embassy jolted U.S.-Sino relations, was scheduled on Saturday evening to leave China for the United States, according to friends who have spoken to him. Mr. Chen was booked on a United Airlines flight scheduled to leave Beijing Saturday afternoon and fly to Newark with his wife and two children, although the flight has been delayed five hours, according to the airline. “I have mixed feelings,” he said as he waited to board, said Steven Zhang, a reporter for CNN who was on the flight and spoke to him by phone. The family was dropped off at Beijing International Airport by staff ... Continue reading →
Mitt Romney is decidedly unpopular. Polling by the Times and CBS News shows his approval rating languishing at around 30 percent. Other polls show voters think President Obama is more likely to have good ideas about improving the economy than Mr. Romney.Peter Hart, the veteran Democratic pollster, wrote in a memo this week that participants in his focus groups call Mr. Romney “indecisive,” “inconsistent,” and a “flip-flopper.”“If he were a member of the family,” Mr. Hart wrote, voters would consider him a “dad who is never home.” The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, conducted by Mr. Hart and his partner, Bill McInturf, gave Mr. Obama an edge of about 30 points in areas like “cares about average people,” and “compassionate.”Why, then, is Mr. Romney ... Continue reading →
