Rolling Stone

"The student-loan industry is as close as you can get to letting industry set their own subsidy rates," says Jason Delisle, a veteran Republican budget staffer who now directs the Federal Education Budget Project for the nonpartisan New America Foundation. "Congress was writing these subsides into law, and the lobbyists encourage them to make it as high as possible." ... Original Article

The highway that leads south out of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, passes through a craggy range of arid, sand-colored mountains with sharp, stony peaks. Poplar trees and green fields line the road. Nomadic Kuchi women draped in colorful scarves tend to camels as small boys herd sheep. The hillsides are dotted with cemeteries: rough-hewn tombstones tilting at haphazard angles, multicolored flags flying above them. There is nothing to indicate that the terrain we are about to enter is one of the world's deadliest war zones. On… more

It's a cold, gray day in December, and I'm walking down Sixtieth Street in the Dora district of Baghdad, one of the most violent and fearsome of the city's no-go zones. Devastated by five years of clashes between American forces, Shiite militias, Sunni resistance groups and Al Qaeda, much of Dora is now a ghost town. This is what "victory" looks like in a once upscale neighborhood of Iraq: Lakes of mud and sewage fill the streets. Mountains of trash… more

Pul-e-charkhi prison, a vast crumbling Afghan fortress twenty miles outside of Kabul, is not an easy place for an American to wind up. Its dank cellblocks house scores of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. Pul-e-Charkhi is also home to Jack Idema, a former U.S. Special Forces sergeant, who, in one of the more bizarre twists in the War on Terror, was arrested in Kabul last year and charged by Afghan authorities with running his own prison -- a sort of… more