* Tracking high school students preparing for the gaokao, China's national exams. * Video: Distribution of American post offices, 1700-1900. * New York store that sells only fancy umbrellas—$38 to $995—has begun phasing out the $38 models. * Story behind archivists restoring nine films Hitchcock directed in the 1920s.
* Convicted UK rioters receiving 25% longer sentences—one got four years for inciting violence on Facebook. * U.S. to review 300,000 illegal immigrant cases, dismiss deportation for those who pose no threat. * Libya's DC embassy reopens under TNC, who wants to unfreeze Gadhafi's assets, purchase
* UN indicts Hezbollah for assassination of Lebanon's Hariri. * Life in Ethiopia is not all famine. * Recent statistics about American drinking: wine ties beer. * According to studies, weed doesn't make you stupid, but may improve your imaginative powers. * New interpretive system Veritas turns sentences blue when they&
* Defense Dept. report finds Army did not properly test body armor, may have substandard field protection. * Downgraded by Fitch, New Jersey's credit is now the third-worst in the U.S., ahead of California and Illinois. * Capybara, the world's largest rodent, is now roaming California'
* President Bachmann's foreign policy. * For desk-bound Sherlocks, a real-life Australian beach mystery from 1948, "one of the world’s most perplexing cold cases." * Mid-week short fiction: "Village 113," from TMN contributor Anthony Doerr's award-winning Memory Wall. * Color of
* Local flavor may be lost as agricultural pageants become a path to Miss America. * Original Village People lead singer disputes work-for-hire claim, seeks rights to "Y.M.C.A." * WSJ: "Abercrombie and Fitch offers to pay 'The Situation' to stop wearing its clothes.
* The past 10 years have seen fewer war deaths than any decade in the last 100 years. * Al Jazeera live blogs Mubarak's trial. * Whether Kenya's famine could have been avoided. * About one year ago, $5.6 billion was pledged to relief in Haiti; one-third has
* Holding elections and building commerce, shadow nations threaten to destabilize their neighbors. * Next big UN assembly announcement to come from Russia, which plans to annex 380,000 square miles of the Arctic Ocean. * After years of looking for cancer clues in 2% of the genome, researchers find the rest holds
* China pours billions into Africa, and billions go straight into private pockets. * Warren Buffett: Thank you, Congress, for all the tax breaks, but we super rich are sick of lower job creation. * Historian known for making dumb remarks on TV blames London riots on English whites going Jamaican black. * Elif
* What it's like to lose to Rick Perry. * Herman Cain is a fan of Pokemon: The Movie 2000—or its inspirational theme music. * Rembrandt drawing swiped in a "carefully planned heist" at a Marina del Rey Ritz-Carlton. * Legal analysis of the case against a New
