Israeli officials say it so often they've taken to apologizing for using the example, acknowledging it's become a clich: Israel and Hamas can lob shells into and out of the Gaza Strip indefinitely without risking actual war, the explanation begins. Each side wants to appear tough, and over four years the call and response has grown as delicately calibrated as a minuet. But should one of Hamas' hastily fired, unguided rockets happen to land on a kindergarten, ...

The cute little couple looked as if they should be sauntering through Great Adventure or waiting in line for tokens at the local arcade. Instead, the 14-year-olds walked purposefully into the Teen Center in suburban Salt Lake City, Utah. They didn't mince words about their reason for stopping in. For quite some time, usually after school and on weekends, the boy and girl had tried to heighten their arousal during sex. Flustered yet determined, the pair wanted advice on the ...

Every year around this time, millions of American kids graduate from high school, throw massive parties and get drunk. Police end up arresting a lot of these kids, causing them legal trouble for months or even years. So, every year around this time, there's a new debate about whether we should lower or even abolish the legal drinking age. What's different this time is that an entire organization — a conspicuously sober group led by a ...

While visiting home during a holiday in 2002, Rajendra Tharu awoke in his parent's house to find himself surrounded by childhood classmates. But they had not come to welcome him back. Since finishing school, Tharu had joined the police; the others, from the same farming village in Bardiya, had become supporters of the Maoist revolutionaries fighting against the government. As far as they were concerned, Tharu's job made him complicit in the state's hard-handed counterinsurgency. "They ...

In a shaded, peaceful residential district near Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., nine Negro children quietly laid out their best clothes for the next morning. It was the eve of school integration in Little Rock. City police, who had checked carefully and found no hint of trouble, followed routine patrols through the quiet streets. Then, at 9 p.m.. Little Rock came awake with a shock: a National Guard unit, 150 strong, with MIS, carbines and billies, churned up ...

People say money doesn't buy happiness. Except, according to a new study from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, it sort of does — up to about $75,000 a year. The lower a person's annual income falls below that benchmark, the unhappier he or she feels. But no matter how much more than $75,000 people make, they don't report any greater degree of happiness. Before employers rush to hold — or raise — everyone's salary to $75,000, the study ...

In junior high school, one of my classmates had a TV addiction — back before it was normal. This boy — we'll call him Ethan — was an encyclopedia of vacuous content, from The A-Team to Who's the Boss? Then one day Ethan's mother made him a bold offer. If he could go a full month without watching any TV, she would give him $200. None of us thought he could do it. But Ethan quit TV, just ...

"What's the story, morning glory? / What's the word, hummingbird?" That was Broadway teen talk back in the early '60s, when the high school kids in Bye Bye Birdie gossiped about their friends in a game of telephone tag. More than 40 years later, another band of gossipy girls is peeking out of another set of windows on a Broadway stage. How far have we advanced? Well, the kids are in a college sorority now, and the squeals of excitement--and ...

Having been denied the right to puff in public buildings, workplaces and bars, staff and student smokers in Pennsylvania public colleges and universities now find themselves forced to leave campus property before lighting up. And they're fighting back. Opposition is mounting to a new ordinance banning smoking anywhere within the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education . As one of the most far-reaching prohibitions in the country, the ordinance forbids smoking both inside and outside campus buildings, ...

Mrs. Levy Mayer, widow of the celebrated Chicago attorney who died a year ago, presented $500,000 to Northwestern University for the erection of a new Law School building. It will be named Levy Mayer Hall, and ground for it will be broken early next Spring. The Dean of the Northwestern University School of Law is Colonel John H. Wigmore. He is the author of a Treatise on Evidence—the most celebrated treatise of its kind ever written. During the War, ...