Matching Up College RoommatesNo longer satisfied with universities' practices of randomly assigning housing, students -- and some colleges -- are using matching websites to identify compatible roommates. Read Article   

  Obama has no stomach for this fightObama's Afghanistan strategy oozes with desperation not to be there – and the Taliban will bide their time until the exitComments (66)  Simon Jenkins guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 2 December 2009 Article historyBarack Obama's announcement of an Afghan "surge" is his frantic bid to rescue what promises to be a stumbling re-election campaign that must start in 2011. It oozes with his desperation not to be in Afghanistan. The question is how best to disengage. As in Vietnam and as the Russians found, withdrawal tends to be possible here in Afghanistan only after the generals on the ground have been given a last chance to claim victory.The chance is generous. With 30,000 more troops at a staggering cost of $1m per soldier per year, Obama's generals are charged with giving the Taliban a "knock-out" blow sufficient to send them reeling back into the mountains. This is supposed to allow the Kabul government to establish its sovereignty over its nation or, more plausibly, at least to give Nato a breathing space to escape.This surge bears no relation to that in Iraq, except as an exit strategy. In Iraq it involved the intensive policing of the Baghdad suburbs plus the blatant recruitment of Saddam Hussein's old Sunni militias to keep the peace in their enclaves, despite the potential threat this posed to the al-Maliki government of Shias. It gave Baghdad's enclaves a measure of security and established a new, if tenuous, balance of power in the provinces. Above all, it took Iraq and its continued deaths and bombings out of the headlines.In Afghanistan the strategy advanced by General Stanley McChrystal is not new. It…

  Air France crash: plane may have broken up in mid-air The Air France plane which went missing over the Atlantic this week is likely to have broken up in mid-air, experts have said.   By Henry Samuel in Paris
Published: 5:59PM BST 03 Jun 2009     

The vast area over which debris has been found suggested there was an explosion while the aircraft was in flight.Unnamed experts quoted by the Le Monde newspaper said the "wide dispersion of wreckage discovered suggests that the Airbus (A330-200) exploded at high altitude".   Terrorism has not been ruled out but they said the most likely scenario was that the break-up was caused by massive depressurisation inside the plane.If such depressurisation had occurred at high altitude, passengers would have almost certainly fallen instantly unconscious and may have been unaware of the their fate.Professor Philippe Juvin, head of casualty at Beaujon hospital west of Paris, said: "It would have been as quick as the moment when one falls asleep."Investigators will examine a bomb threat made against a flight from Buenos Aires to Paris just days before Flight 447 disappeared.One anonymous Air France pilot suggested that a bomb could "very well" be the cause of the crash. He said: "One can very well imagine that a bomb caused the aircraft's depressurisation and that the plane took time to break up. It could just as well have been a big bomb that blew up the entire plane, which would explain why the aircraft didn't have time to send an alert signal."Jean-Louis Borloo, the ecology minister in charge of transport, said yesterday: "Terrorism cannot be ruled out at this stage. There is no indication it was a bomb for now. We cannot rule it out 100 per cent, but…

   Damon Winter/The New York Times The Roots of Rage at a Town Hall Meeting By IAN URBINA and KATHARINE Q. SEELYE A town hall meeting with Senator Arlen Specter, like many such events, was punctuated with rowdy moments. Above, the senator left with his security detail.