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Their assuredness is as bold as the company behind the school: IMG, the global sports management conglomerate that has helped propel the competitive leap that high school football has made beyond the traditional community team.

convention is being challenged by a more professional model at the highest levels as top players urgently pursue college scholarships, training becomes more specialized, big business opens its wallet, school choice expands, and schools seek to market themselves through sports, some for financial survival.

Increasingly, prep football talent is being consolidated on powerful public, private, parochial, charter and magnet school teams. And recruiting to those schools is widespread in one guise or another.

They are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male, in a nation that is being remade by the young, by women, and by black and brown voters. Across a sprawling country, they reside in an archipelago of wealth, exclusive neighborhoods dotting a handful of cities and towns. And in an economy that has minted billionaires in a dizzying array of industries, most made their fortunes in just two: finance and energy.

Now they are deploying their vast wealth in the political arena, providing almost half of all the seed money raised to support Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Just 158 families, along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in the first phase of the campaign

Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision five years ago.

Community College of Philadelphia has had "mixed success" educating its students, though its tuition is far above the median for similar institutions - and higher than those of all other community colleges in the region, according to a report by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

school's graduation rate was no better than about average, and in some cases was below those of its peers

On the positive side, the school's African American and Asian students graduate at higher rates than their counterparts at peer schools, and the college graduated a record 1,993 students in 2013-14, up from 1,602 in 2007-08, the report found.

Determined not to leave anything to chance, fire-eaters unleashed a storm of propaganda to persuade hesitant South Carolinians. They printed more than 150,000 pamphlets in a matter of months. Some pamphlets targeted non-slaveholders—a narrow majority of the white population—arguing that slavery served as a bulwark against the possibility of white servility. One tract insisted that non-slaveholders had even more at stake in maintaining the peculiar institution than slaveholders, for “no white man at the South serves another as a body servant, to clean his boots, [and] wait on his table…. His blood revolts against this.” A Republican victory put this racial hierarchy, so important to poor and middling whites, at risk.

Other pamphlets aimed to boil the blood of slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike. Lincoln’s election, wrote planter John Townsend, portended “emancipation…then poverty, political equality…insurrection, war of extermination between the two races, and death.” Fire-eating newspapers joined the chorus too. “Should the dark hour come, we must be the chief sufferers,” warned a “Southern-Rights Lady” in the Charleston Mercury. “Enemies in our midst, abolition fiends inciting them to crimes the most appalling…we degraded beneath the level of brutes.” The purity of Southern ladies hung in the balance. Alarmed by the specter of race war and miscegenation, whites across the state rushed to join militia units, vigilante associations and militia companies , bringing together planters, yeomen and poor whites to defend the state against the danger of Republican ascendance. Class distinctions, more formidable in South Carolina than in other states, receded as Low Country planters marched together with the rabble. The secessionists’ arguments were winning the day.

To Chinese viewers, however, “House of Cards” serves as a streaming-video CliffsNotes to the U.S. political system.

“It basically confirms what Chinese think of their own government.”

Which explains the series’ usefulness to Chinese leaders: It helps level the political playing field.

The real lesson from Kansas is the enduring power of bad ideas, as long as those ideas serve the interests of the right people.

In 1998, in the first edition of his best-selling economics textbook, Harvard’s N. Gregory Mankiw — very much a Republican, and later chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers — famously wrote about the damage done by “charlatans and cranks.” In particular, he highlighted the role of “a small group of economists” who “advised presidential candidate Ronald Reagan that an across-the-board cut in income tax rates would raise tax revenue.”

the Brownback tax cuts didn’t emerge out of thin air. They closely followed a blueprint laid out by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which has also supported a series of economic studies purporting to show that tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy will promote rapid economic growth

How can you say Wilson had “no need” to shoot Brown that many times? The reason law enforcement went to high-capacity handguns and dumped the six shooters is because of the ability of people to withstand multiple gunshot wounds and continue fighting (or shooting.) The catalyst for this approach was the 1986 Miami shooting in which to FBI officers were killed AFTER they had shot two bank robbers multiple times. The robbers eventually died of their wounds, but in the meantime, they kept firing and killed the agents. Officer Wilson adhered to his training: shoot until the suspect is on the ground.

Mike Brown is to the Left what Benghazi is to the Right. Preconceptions are everything. Facts don’t matter. Logic doesn’t matter. There’s a narrative of racist-white-cop-kills-harmless-black-kid, and no matter what uncomfortable fact intrudes, like that so many “witnesses” admitted they didn’t actually see what they told the media they saw, the narrative must go on. Because racism.

Balko’s article makes clear that this is not an environment where the police are protecting and serving but instead harassing and self-serving. I am in no way justifying assailing a police officer (or anyone for that matter), verbally or physically, but you are not a young Black man living in what is still ostensibly the South and facing harassment for just being. I challenge you to invite Black males to tell you their stories of police harassment. How many times they have been detained, cuffed, kicked and threatened with death because they fit a profile, looked suspicious or were just somewhere some cop didn’t think they belonged? Yes, this is in America.

The issue at hand was—and still is—the city’s nine elite public high schools. Like most public high schools in the city, these schools can choose who attends. But the elite schools are their own animal: Whereas other schools look at a range of criteria to determine students’ eligibility, eight of these nine elite institutions admit applicants based exclusively on how the students score on a rigorous, two-and-a-half-hour-long standardized test.

The test-only admissions policy is touted by supporters as a tactic that promotes fairness and offers the best way to identify the city’s most gifted students. But the complaint, which is still pending, tells a different story—one of modern-day segregation, in which poor kids of color are getting left behind.

Public schools in cities across the country—schools intended to break down the walls typical of expensive, elite private institutions by opening up access to stimulating, quality education for kids of all means—are closed in their admissions. In other words, kids aren’t just automatically enrolled because they live in the neighborhood—they have to apply to get in

More than a thousand inmates in the nation's prisons who were sentenced as juveniles to life without the possibility of parole can now challenge those punishments, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday.

As a general matter, rulings do not apply retroactively. The courts have long held that society has an interest in the finality of convictions. advertisement But by a vote of 6-3, the Supreme Court said its 2012 ruling fit in a special category of exceptions applying to decisions that ban certain forms of punishment for a class of offenders because of their status.

Monday's case involved Henry Montgomery, a Louisiana man who at age 17 killed a deputy sheriff in East Baton Rouge. The court in his trial was barred by law from considering arguments that his age should matter, "including evidence that as a scared youth, Mr. Montgomery shot in panic as the officer confronted him playing hooky," his lawyers said.

Auschwitz trial: guard entreated by survivor to reveal role

A 94-year-old former Auschwitz concentration camp guard has gone on trial in western Germany accused of being an accessory to the murders of 170,000 victims of the Holocaust.

“Mr Hanning, we are more or less the same age, and soon we will both be before the highest court,” he said. “Speak here about what you and your comrades did.” His hands and the paper he was holding trembled as he spoke.

Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart was a one-eyed, one-handed war hero who fought in three major conflicts across six decades, surviving plane crashes and PoW camps.

Carton de Wiart served in the Boer War, World War One and World War Two.

In the process he was shot in the face, losing his left eye, and was also shot through the skull, hip, leg, ankle and ear.

Jim Webb ended his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination at a press conference Tuesday, telling reporters he will consider an independent bid.

Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, Webb argued the Democratic Party has moved away from "millions of dedicated, hard-working Americans.""For this reason, I am withdrawing from any consideration of being the Democratic Party's nominee for the presidency," he said.

"The very nature of our democracy is under siege due to the power structure and the money that finances both political parities," Webb said, adding later that it is "time for a new Declaration of Independence -- not from an outside power but from the paralysis of a federal system that no longer serves the interests of the vast majority of the American people."Webb, who said he couldn't see himself endorsing any other candidate, said he is considering an independent run and will spend the "next couple of weeks talking to people, people I have not felt comfortable talking with as a Democratic Party candidate."

who is the longest-held American prisoner in Iran was allowed to receive medical treatment in a hospital outside his prison in recent weeks

Iranian judicial authorities had allowed Mr. Hekmati to leave the prison, albeit temporarily, for the first time since he was incarcerated more than four years ago

considering a conditional release of Mr. Hekmati for good conduct

More than 100 marchers took to Chicago's streets Saturday morning to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as call on city leaders to stop corruption and police brutality.

Black Youth Project 100 members, and marchers from groups with similar goals, came together for the event.

"What we are all fighting for is equality and equality is intersectional," said marcher Kristen Rogers.

But Europe never joined. The task of absorbing the migrants has been left to Germany and Sweden

so far identified are mostly Moroccan or Algerian, not Syrian. There really is a cultural gulf between rich, liberal, secular

Europe and some of the countries from which recent migrants come

Bush’s life and presidency “can be a reminder that what we’ve got is profoundly abnormal,” said Eliot Cohen, who served as a senior official in George W. Bush’s State Department. “The great danger of the Trump presidency is the normalization of character traits and behaviors that would have been an absolute abomination to his predecessors.”

Most presidential funerals have provided an opportunity for presidents past and present to stress their shared sense of patriotism, mission and purpose.

It’s hard to envision Trump even sitting in a room with Clinton, whom he has attacked as a corrupt abuser of women and a “hypocrite” or Obama, whom he labeled “bad (or sick) guy.” The two Democrats have been just as critical of Trump, branding him as a threat to American democracy. Trump’s relationship with George W. Bush has been similarly strained

only narratives can show dilemmas across time. It’s not enough to display choices like slivers on a microscope slide. We need to see change happen, and we can do that only by reconstituting the past as histories, biographies, poems, plays, novels, or films. The best of these sharpen and shade simultaneously: they compress what’s happening in order to clarify, even as they blur, the line between instruction and entertainment. They are, in short, dramatizations. And a fundamental requirement of these is never to bore.

Numerous studies have found that voter fraud is far from a major issue in the U.S., and in-person fraud of the sort Trump and Kobach like to talk about — things like non-citizens showing up to vote or people returning to vote multiple times under different names — is vanishingly rare. A 2007 study by NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice memorably found that an individual American is more likely to get struck by lightning than to commit in-person voter fraud.

as of last summer, 68 percent of Republicans thought millions of illegal immigrants had voted in 2016, and almost three quarters said voter fraud happens “somewhat” or “very often.” The same survey found that nearly half of Republicans believed Trump had won the popular vote.

The idea that Nixon gracefully and expeditiously chose not to fight the outcome is a myth, the historian David Greenberg demonstrated back in 2000. Nixon did, however, eventually give in — but in the process, he turned the notion that the Democrats had stolen the election into an article of faith among Republicans, especially conservative ones.

WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump has delivered a series of speeches promoting the Republican tax reform agenda and a series of tweets undercutting it.  Download Trump’s speeches focus on how the his party’s tax plan, which has only been sketched in broad outlines, would cut business taxes in a way that would ultimately help working families.  In an effort to replace some of the missing revenue from that corporate tax cut, however, Republicans want to do away with a number of expensive tax breaks that help middle-class families, ostensibly while still delivering the middle class a net benefit.

A similar pattern played out earlier this year when Republicans tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. After the House passed a plan to repeal Obamacare that Trump initially hailed, he later characterized some of its details as “mean.” The repeal effort ultimately failed. 

Americans from coast to coast plan to commemorate the one-year anniversary of President Donald Trump’s 2016 election win by screaming into the void. Download Thousands of Facebook users have signed up to attend events on Boston Common in Boston and in Washington Square Park in New York on Nov. 8. Events are also planned in Miami, Philadelphia, Dallas, Austin and in Bellingham, Washington.

Some 2,100 people said they will attend the New York protest and 15,000 more indicated an interest in going. More than 4,500 people were registered for the Boston event with 33,000 others showing an interest.