History Readings

This year alone, officials have detained at least 15 U.S. citizens — nine of them female — who were trying to travel to Syria to join the militants. Almost all of them were Muslims in their teens or early 20s, and almost all were arrested at airports waiting to board flights.

Authorities are closely monitoring Twitter, Facebook and other social media networks, where recruiters from the Islamic State aggressively target youths as young as 14.

“This was not a spur-of-the-moment trip but rather a carefully calculated plan to abandon their family, to abandon their community, and abandon their country and join a foreign terrorist organization,” Hiller told the judge.

With the midterms over, Mr. Christie and Mr. Bush have begun pushing top bundlers to commit to them in advance should they announce a White House bid, according to several donors, putting intense pressure on the corps of contributors who helped Mr. Romney and the Republican Party raise a billion dollars for the 2012 campaign. Those requests have intensified the discussion in some circles about whether to coalesce behind a candidate early or, alternatively, delay until after the early Republican debates next summer.

“When you get that call” to commit to Mr. Bush or Mr. Christie, said one prominent Republican fund-raiser, “the answer to that question is yes.”The fund-raiser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve his relationships with all three men, added: “Anything else and you’re on the B team. You’re on the second list. People that like to do this want to be on the A team.”

Up to 35pc of Britain's jobs will be eliminated by new computing and robotics technology over the next 20 years, say experts

Advances in technology will destroy jobs in a way similar to the industrial revolution, as depicted at the Olympic opening ceremony

“When you use a public office, pretty shamelessly, to vouch for a private party with substantial financial interest without the disclosure of the true authorship, that is a dangerous practice,” said David B. Frohnmayer, a Republican who served a decade as attorney general in Oregon. “The puppeteer behind the stage is pulling strings, and you can’t see. I don’t like that. And when it is exposed, it makes you feel used.”

But Mr. Pruitt’s ties with industry are clear. One of his closest partners has been Harold G. Hamm, the billionaire chief executive of Continental Resources, which is among the biggest oil and gas drilling companies in both Oklahoma and North Dakota.

“It is quite new,” said Paul Nolette, a political-science professor at Marquette University and the author of the forthcoming book “Federalism on Trial: State Attorneys General and National Policy Making in Contemporary America.” “The scope, size and tenor of these collaborations is, without question, unprecedented.”

the ever-expanding number of houses the size of Hyatt resorts rising in the most expensive precincts of Los Angeles

“Twenty-thousand-square-foot homes have become teardowns for people who want to build 70-, 80-, and 90,000-square-foot homes,” Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz said. So long, megamansion. Say hello to the gigamansion.

Why are people building houses the size of shopping malls? Because they can. “Why do you see a yacht 500 feet long when you could easily have the same fun in one half the size?”

From the day he took office, his legitimacy has been challenged, his American birth has been suspect, and he’s been personally insulted, lectured, yelled at and disrespected in public, by public figures, in a way that few if any American presidents have ever face

he crude comments of a Republican congressional staffer, Elizabeth Lauten, about the first family.

Many of the people who dwell in the uglier recesses of social media, or make casual conversation among the like-minded, will not grant Obama the family man the respect he has earned, or Obama the president the dignity that comes with the office.

In recent months, as Mrs. Clinton has prepared for a likely 2016 presidential campaign, she has often framed those White House years as a period when, like many working mothers, she juggled the demands of raising a young daughter and having a career.

She talks about championing women’s rights globally, supporting her husband during years of robust economic growth, and finding inspiration in Eleanor Roosevelt to stay resolute in the midst of personal attacks.

ow carefully controlled at 67, then she was fiery and unpredictable, lobbing sarcastic jabs in private meetings and congressional hearings. Now criticized as a centrist and challenged from the left, Mrs. Clinton then was considered the liberal whispering in her husband’s ear to resist the North American Free Trade Agreement and a welfare overhaul.

said her relatives seemed more outraged by the demonstrations than the killing, which she saw as an injustice.

Race has never been an easy topic of conversation in America. But the recent high-profile deaths of black people at the hands of police officers in Ferguson, New York, Cleveland and elsewhere — and the nationwide protests those deaths spurred — have exposed sharp differences about race relations among friends, co-workers, neighbors and even relatives in unexpected and often uncomfortable ways.

Put bluntly, many people say, they feel they are being forced to pick a team.

On Friday, the Labor Department reported that United States payrolls rose by 321,000 jobs in November and that hourly wages jumped, easily beating economists’ expectations. This year will be the best for job creation since the boom years of the late 1990s

he number of uninsured Americans has fallen 30 percent in a year.

And the budget deficit, already below its 40-year average as measured against the economy, is likely to fall again this fiscal year, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which said on Friday that tax receipts in the first two months of the new fiscal year were 6 percent higher than a year ago, while spending was up only 2 percent.

“I think we’re always looking for common ground, and when we can agree — it’s magic,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List.

This high-minded rapprochement, alas, has not made its way into the halls of Congress. Thirty-three senators have signed onto the Pregnancy Workers Fairness Act, and 142 members of the House. They’re all Democrats.

For sure, given that the next session of Congress is going to be entirely run by Republicans.

Given the House's rejection of the Senate's work in 2013, a strategy is emerging for 2015 to have the House take the lead in the hope of making better progress.

McCain said bills improving border security, establishing an online system for companies to check their workers' immigration status and expanding visas for high-tech foreign workers could be first out of the gate. The latter two are important to U.S. businesses.

Obama warned business leaders this week that "it's going to be hard, I think, for me and for other Democrats" to support piecemeal legislation that deals with the concerns of business but does not address undocumented Americans.

Who is health care reform supposed to benefit if not working-class people on the way up? These are EXACTLY the people who lacked insurance, who were at risk from even small hospital bills, and so forth.

What were the elements of Schumer‘s extended economic package that Obama never took up? There never were any.

Pre-election polls showed the GOP with a large edge over Dems in trust over handling the economy, in sharp contrast to Ray Fair’s economic model, which said Dems should get 52% of the House vote. That’s absurd, a political failure the likes of which we’ve never seen

What President Obama should have done, claims Mr. Schumer, was focus on improving the economy as a whole.

This is deeply wrongheaded in at least three ways.

First, while it’s true that most Americans have insurance through Medicare, Medicaid, and employment-based coverage, that doesn’t mean that only the current uninsured benefit from a program that guarantees affordable care. Maybe you have good coverage now, but what happens if you’re fired, or your employer goes bust, or it cancels its insurance program?

What actually constitutes an economic giant?

A country’s economic size is essentially driven by two long-term forces: the nation’s workforce in terms of the number of people able and eligible to work, and its productivity.

On the list of the top 20 largest economies in the world, most have large populations. From the developed world, Japan (No. 3), Germany, France, Britain and Italy all sit among the top 10, although their relative ranking has slipped in the past decade as China, Brazil and Russia have entered this group