“Forget about whether it’s warranted or not,” said [Harvard law professor Alan] Dershowitz in an exclusive interview on Saturday. “It’s really dumb to charge him with what might be considered to be a political offense when they’re trying to extradite him.”

“We’ve received quantities of new types of weapons, including some that we asked for and that we believe will change the course of the battle on the ground,” Muqdad told the AFP news agency…”

I spent the better part of a month studying a few pages daily of perhaps the most extraordinary book that I have encountered in a life that has spanned eight decades.

The Brubaker proposal, which awaits potential Senate floor action next week, once it took effect, would put all future state employees into an investment program with a mandated employee contribution and an employer match, similar to a 401(k) plan.

On Thursday, in the latest release of documents supplied by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor now believed to be hiding in Hong Kong, The Guardian published two documents setting out the detailed rules governing the agency’s intercepts.

FINANCIAL TIMES: The Republican leadership in the US House of Representatives suffered a crushing defeat on a $940bn bill funding farm support and food aid in a vote that bodes ill for coming showdowns over the budget and immigration reform.

HARRISBURG PATRIOT-NEWS: National speculation over Gov. Tom Corbett’s reelection vulnerability has ratcheted up this week after an internal poll showing the governor at startling levels of unpopularity, and two prominent political pundits speculating that the incumbent may not run in 2014.

Inequality is high in both countries, but China has done far more than India to raise life expectancy, expand general education and secure health care for its people. India has elite schools of varying degrees of excellence for the privileged, but among all Indians 7 or older, nearly one in every five males and one in every three females are illiterate.

Several U.S. urban districts, including New York and Los Angeles, make condoms widely available in high schools. So do many suburban school districts around Boston…

The massive disposal effort, which U.S. military officials call unprecedented, has unfolded largely out of sight amid an ongoing debate inside the Pentagon about what to do with the heaps of equipment that won’t be returning home. Military planners have determined that they will not ship back more than $7 billion worth of equipment — about 20 percent of what the U.S. military has in Afghanistan — because it is no longer needed or would be too costly to ship back home.

HUFFINGTON POST: The additions, which in English amount to five words inserted after the Eucharistic prayer, were issued by the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. The new words, “with blessed Joseph, her spouse,” follow a mention of Mary and are included in three different versions of the prayer.

Erdogan (like Russia’s Vladimir Putin) confuses “being in power with having power,” argued Dov Seidman, whose company, LRN, advises C.E.O.’s on governance and who is the author of the book “How.” “There are essentially just two kinds of authority: formal authority and moral authority,” he added.

One main feature of inflation is that it reduces the real value of debt. Think of the $13 trillion in outstanding mortgages or the $12 trillion in government debt held by the public. Inflation would eat away at those obligations, without any need for bankruptcy lawyers. And it would leave more disposable income for Americans to spend…