A dumb rich kid is now more likely to graduate from college than a smart poor kid, according to Robert Putnam of Harvard University.

Forbes’s wealthiest 100 are worth as much as all 42 million African-Americans, the report says.

So it’s healthy for American voters to be demanding change. But when societies face economic pain, they sometimes turn to reforms, and other times to scapegoats (like refugees this year

Cruz wraps himself in an American flag and spits on all the institutions that it represents.

America didn’t become the richest country in the world by practicing socialism, or the strongest country by denigrating its governing institutions, or the most talent-filled country by stoking fear of immigrants.

It got here via the motto “E Pluribus Unum” — Out of Many, One.

The Iowa Democratic caucuses were a “virtual tie,” especially after you consider that the results aren’t even actual vote tallies, but state delegate equivalents subject to all kinds of messy rounding rules and potential geographic biases.

he official tally, for now, is Hillary Clinton at 49.9 percent, and Mr. Sanders at 49.6 percent with 97 percent of precincts reporting early Tuesday morning.

But in the end, a virtual tie in Iowa is an acceptable, if not ideal, result for Mrs. Clinton and an ominous one for Mr. Sanders. He failed to win a state tailor made to his strengths.

Ms. Davidson’s complaint states that men with the same job title — district representatives — were quoted in news accounts without being fired. It says she was the only woman with that title and that men with the same title were paid more.In an interview, Ms. Davidson said she was paid $2,000 a month and was classified as part-time because she also had a job as a paralegal. But she said another district representative, Marc Elcock, was paid more though he, too, has a day job, as a lawyer.

According to public filings, several men who held the same title, including Mr. Elcock, were paid $3,500 to $4,000 a month.

The complaint says Mr. Trump’s suggestion that Ms. Davidson and a female volunteer could “do a lot of damage” occurred when they were introduced to him last summer. It included no other details about the exchange.

Yet now, amid the Republican Party’s civil war, there are intriguing initiatives by the House speaker, Paul Ryan, and some other conservatives to revive an interest in the needy.

hether Medicaid is expanded, whether we get high-quality pre-K, whether we tackle addiction, family planning and job training, whether lead continues to poison American children — all these will depend mostly on Republicans who control Congress and most states.

A real debate would also elevate issues that now are largely neglected, and it would create an opening to hold politicians’ feet to the fire: If Ryan cares, then why did he try to slash budgets for evidence-based programs that help children?

Several million people have responded since Mr. Lew issued an invitation to the public last June to help redesign the nation’s cash. His question: Which woman from American history should be chosen as the first on paper currency since Martha Washington briefly graced the $1 silver certificate in the late 19th century?

The bigger issue, however, turned out to be Hamilton versus Jackson. Many respondents asked: Why displace Hamilton, the first Treasury secretary and the architect of the American financial system, rather than eject Jackson from the $20 bill given his record of violence against Native Americans and opposition to national banking?

A rollout in 2020, not coincidentally, would be just in time for the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

If a child can’t open a bottle of aspirin, we should also make sure she can’t pull the trigger of a gun.

Yet today, the gun industry is almost entirely unaccountable. Thanks to the gun lobby’s decades of efforts, Congress has blocked our consumer products safety experts from being able to require that firearms have even the most basic safety measures. They’ve made it harder for the government’s public health experts to conduct research on gun violence. They’ve guaranteed that manufacturers enjoy virtual immunity from lawsuits, which means that they can sell lethal products and rarely face consequences. As parents, we wouldn’t put up with this if we were talking about faulty car seats. Why should we tolerate it for products — guns — that kill so many children each year?

Change will be hard. It won’t happen overnight. But securing a woman’s right to vote didn’t happen overnight. The liberation of African-Americans didn’t happen overnight. Advancing the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans has taken decades’ worth of work.

Wheaton College, a prominent evangelical school in Illinois, has placed a professor on administrative leave after she posted on Facebook that Muslims and Christians “worship the same God.”

The official school statement Tuesday about associate professor of political science Larycia Hawkins’s suspension said Wheaton professors should “engage in and speak about public issues in ways that faithfully represent the College’s evangelical Statement of Faith.”

The attack at the Olympic Village stands as one of sports’ most horrifying episodes. The eight terrorists, representing a branch of the Palestine Liberation Organization, breached the apartments where the Israeli athletes were staying before dawn on Sept. 5, 1972. That began an international nightmare that lasted more than 20 hours and ended with a disastrous failed rescue attempt.

The treatment of the hostages has long been a subject of speculation, but a more vivid — and disturbing — account of the attack is emerging. For the first time, Ms. Romano, Ms. Spitzer and other victims’ family members are choosing to speak openly about documentation previously unknown to the public in an effort to get their loved ones the recognition they believe is deserved.

Among the most jarring details are these: The Israeli Olympic team members were beaten and, in at least one case, castrated.

et in January 1939, Americans polled said by a two-to-one majority that the United States should not accept 10,000 mostly Jewish refugee children from Germany.

If the Islamic State wanted to dispatch a terrorist to America, it wouldn’t ask a mole to apply for refugee status, but rather to apply for a student visa to study at, say, Indiana University. Hey, governors, are you going to keep out foreign university students?

Or the Islamic State could simply send fighters who are French or Belgian citizens (like some of those behind the Paris attacks) to the U.S. as tourists, no visa required. Governors, are you planning to ban foreign tourists, too?

Another 53 people made it ashore after the dinghy sank shortly before dawn on Sunday in choppy waters, according to an official at the Greek Shipping Ministry. “It was very windy, about 6 or 7 Beaufort,” the official said, describing near gale force conditions.

The dead children were aged 2 and 7, she said, adding that the ethnic origin of the migrants was not known.

Well, in the spring the United States begins daylight saving time several weeks before most of Europe, while in the autumn — this week, in fact — most of Europe ends daylight saving time a week before the United States. Admittedly, some might find this revelation irrelevant, but let me assure you: For airline pilots, trans-Atlantic travelers and the significant number of American expatriates in Europe, these glorious weeks are God’s time.

There is actually a group in France dedicated to the cause. The French Association Against Double Summer Time is made up of about 500 members who — in their spare time, naturally — do what they can to let people know that it’s time for a change.

Ms. Gabarain and her colleagues point out that, geographically, France is clearly in the wrong time zone. Based on its location, it ought to be on Greenwich Mean Time (like England) instead of Central European Time (like Poland). That fact explains why it has been pitch-black outside until 8 a.m. here this month — Freezing Time, as my daughter Hannah calls it — and also why we basically have to hang thick black vinyl sheets on our curtain rods in July if we want the children to go to sleep before 11 p.m.

They pointed out the longstanding partnership between Russia and the Assad regime and the great threat of the Islamic State to Russia, where an estimated 14 percent of its population are Sunni Muslims. Later, I questioned President Putin about his support for Mr. Assad, and about his two sessions that year with representatives of factions from Syria.

Iran outlined a general four-point sequence several months ago, consisting of a cease-fire, formation of a unity government, constitutional reforms and elections. Working through the United Nations Security Council and utilizing a five-nation proposal, some mechanism could be found to implement these goals.

The needed concessions are not from the combatants in Syria, but from the proud nations that claim to want peace but refuse to cooperate with one another.

And if you think, as Amnesty International suggested recently, that the solution is to decriminalize the commercial sex trade around the world, then pay special heed.

Poonam thus became one of 20.9 million people worldwide — a quarter of them children — subjected to forced labor, according to the U.N.’s International Labor Organization. In the United States, tens of thousands of children are trafficked into the sex trade each year.

and Koirala says that Maiti Nepal has helped prosecute 800 people for involvement in trafficking. In America as well, we need to prosecute traffickers rather than their victims.

Though Zain is only 4, this is by no means his first surreptitious border crossing, and he remembers his father’s admonition at the very start of their journey, when they slipped from their homeland of Syria into Turkey: Don’t make a sound, or the guards will beat us.

To one side of the railroad tracks in Idomeni, Greece, near the border with Macedonia, a group of about 20 people rest on the ground under a spreading shade tree, one day in late August. Standing in the middle, examining his cellphone, is a man in an orange shirt, at 6-foot-2 appearing unusually tall among the other refugees.

The reality of what they would face in Europe became apparent only after they landed on the Greek island of Lesbos. There was no shelter awaiting them or the thousands of others streaming there. They slept on the street, and had to walk more than a mile to use a bathroom in a public park.

The United States has accepted only a small fraction ofthe four million refugees who have fled Syria. But theyare settling in new places, and more are on the way.

President Obama has said the UnitedStates will accept five times as manySyrian refugees this year as the totaladmitted over the last four years.

Syrians still account for a small share ofall refugees admitted in the United States.

The Greeks allowed slaves who ran away from abusive masters and even some criminals to seek sanctuary in certain temples; ‘‘asylum’’ comes from their word for inviolable.

The right of asylum might seem as culturally embedded as the ruins of one of the old temples.

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain invoked insects when he warned of a ‘‘swarm’’ of ‘‘illegal migrants.’

In one of the worst bursts of violence that this tense refugee summer has seen, Hungarian riot police responded on Wednesday to rocks, taunts and small fires set by agitated migrants at the border crossing here with water cannons, head-cracking batons and both tear gas and pepper spray.

But Hungary did not change its mind — prompting a grim demonstration of what can happen when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.

But having gotten this far from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and other desperate countries, they grasped at hopes that the Hungarians would relent — just as they did when a huge migrant encampment sprouted outside the main train station in Budapest this month.

The Iran nuclear deal is now sealed — from Washington’s end. But since this has been one of America’s most important foreign policy shifts in the last four decades, it’s worth looking back and grading the performance of the key players.

His prediction last week that Israel won’t be around in “25 years” was perfectly timed to complicate President Obama’s effort to get the deal through Congress.

Through this deal Khamenei gets Iran out from under crippling sanctions, which his people want, by pushing the breakout time for Iran to make a nuclear bomb from two months to a year — for 15 years — but getting the world to bless Iran’s “peaceful” nuclear enrichment program, even though it cheated its way there. And he’s done it all while giving his hard-line base the feeling that he’s still actually against this deal and his negotiators the feeling that he’s for it. So all his options are open, depending on how the deal goes.

if you throw in the earlier loser debate, it was the longest ever.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates would go on for three hours. But that was back when in many towns, the most exciting public activity of the year was pole-raising.

And then there was the completely, unbelievably irresponsible Trump of the finale who claimed he knew people whose daughter got autism from a vaccine shot. (This happened, he said, to “people that work for me just the other day.”)