Nation & World

TCU coach Gary Patterson has maintained the exact same approach through nine seasons of program building and increasingly predictable questions.

Most of the big-money guys I've talked to made their fortune hitting a baseball or throwing a football. This one Friday was different.

This is a sad day to be a Tar Heel.

Brandon James displayed quite a finishing kick.

By the end, there was nothing to do but count down the final seconds. Six. Five. Four. Quarterback Jacory Harris looked up at the scoreboard. Receiver Leonard Hankerson turned to what was left of a good crowd.

The school doors have barely flung open for the new academic year and already the education profession is caught in a tempest. The Los Angeles Times has published rankings of the effectiveness of 6,000 elementary school teachers in the city's unified school district, based on standardized test scores.

We knew the housing market news was grim when the National Association of Realtors released numbers last week showing that existing home sales dropped 27.2 percent from June to July, a 15-year low. We knew things were even grimmer when Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said recently that despite low interest rates and lower prices, the glut of foreclosed properties and difficulties getting mortgages were "likely to continue to weigh on the pace of residential investment for some time yet." Oh, and then there's the figure of "25 percent of mortgages are underwater" that's been floating around. As far as stats go, that's almost as scary as nearly 20 percent of Americans thinking the president is Muslim.

The following editorial appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Thursday, Sept. 2:

Well, this is just groovy. Something else to be scared silly about. Bedbugs. Who knew? Everywhere you go, people are talking about the nation's trendiest new infestation. Well, I suppose they're better than the nation's previous No. 1 parasites. I refer, of course, to the late Pratt/Montags.

You might have thought the Iraq war was over after listening to President Obama on Tuesday.