Baltimore Sun

"The supercommittee is still working pretty hard toward trying to get an agreement on a big deal" in excess of their $1.2 trillion mandate, said Jason Peuquet, a policy analyst with the Washington-based Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. ...

It's been said that when elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.

No case illustrates this suffering more than that of Alan Gross, a Maryland resident and USAID subcontractor who was working to connect the Cuban Jewish community to the Internet and was detained by Cuban authorities one year ago. Campaigning for his release these many months, his wife, Judy Gross, fears that her husband has become a "pawn" in the half-century Cold War between the United States and Cuba.

Michael Dannenberg, senior fellow at the New America Foundation, said the school-level data searchable at http://fsadatacenter.ed.gov give students ...

Summer has arrived in Baltimore, and so has summer school -- bringing with it a chance for students who improve on their High School Assessment exams to pocket something more than academic success. A few months ago, Baltimore schools CEO Andres Alonso unveiled a controversial proposal to improve city schools: Pay students to perform. It's a simple idea that has generated quite a bit of controversy from purists who cringe at the thought of paying students to learn and from realists who believe there simply must be a more effective way to spend $1 million in a failing school system.

Pollution Bill Attacked (The Baltimore Sun)

...Environmentalists, scientists, public health experts and alternative energy companies also pledged their support for the Global Warming Solutions Act during a Senate hearing yesterday. The supporters argue that state limits are necessary to spur federal action and will help to prevent deadly floods and economic chaos brought by climate change. ...

More Money, Less Health (The Baltimore Sun)

A few years ago, health journalist Shannon Brownlee was going through some global health statistics. She noticed that even as U.S. health care costs were rising steadily, Americans were not getting healthier. How to explain this apparent paradox?

Over the past century, assassinations of heads of state and other prominent leaders such as the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States and Rabin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in the Middle East have shifted the course of history one way or another.

The full consequences of yesterday's assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto remain to be seen. But some experts worry what impact the event will have in an era where conflict driven by religious extremism transcends the nation state.