Another teacher has been arrested at Miramonte Elementary School in Los Angeles on allegations of lewd acts on young pupils, authorities said.

Up to 20 inches in Denver, 6 feet elsewhere; Flights grounded, interstates shut, but ski resorts are happy

Fidel Castro has released a previously unannounced two-volume memoir of his life, Cuban state-run media reported Saturday.

The draft resolution before the U.N. Security Council would demand an end to the bloody crackdown on government opponents in Syria.

A wave of protests broke out at Syrian embassies on several continents amid reports of more than 200 deaths in one Syrian city on Friday and before a possible U.N. Security Council vote on a response to the violent crackdown in the country. Here's a breakdown of some of the demonstrations:

A citizen of a Western European country, who works in the United States for a fast-growing Internet startup company, writes today:

In many of your TSA related post, a key theme is the illusion of security through ineffective and "invasive" means. Seems like there is more of this going on in the broader "security" world.

-A young British couple was sent back from the US after some ill-advised but innocuous tweets;

-Muslim man gets arrested for using term "blow away the competition" in a text message

It's one thing to have Google and Facebook data mine your life to make money for themselves. It's another thing if innocent communication gets you in trouble with a humorless bureaucracy without adequate recourse.

The fact that as a green card holder I seriously hesitated before hitting "send" on this message means something I think.

On Jan. 21, 2011, Allami sent a text message to colleagues urging them to "blow away" the competition at a trade show in New York City.

According to [a lawsuit for damages he has filed], he was arrested without warning by police three days later and detained for over a day while his house was searched. During his detention, a team of police officers allegedly conducted an "intrusive" four-hour search.

"The whole time, the officers kept repeating to the plaintiff's wife that her husband was a terrorist," the filing reads.

"Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America," one of the tweets read. Bryan told The Sun [in England] that in this context "destroy" just meant party.

"The Homeland Security agents were treating me like some kind of terrorist. I kept saying they had got the wrong meaning from my tweet but they just told me 'You've really f***ed up with that tweet, boy'," Bryan told The Sun.

A Naperville man has been charged in the stabbing death of an elementary school teacher and injury of two other people at a Naperville bar early this morning, authorities said.

As it prepares to make Chicago its North American headquarters, the German-based ThyssenKrupp manufacturing company is facing allegations that company supervisors in the city created a hostile and intimidating work environment for an African-American employee.

School vouchers not only help the students who use them -- they also give public schools extra incentive to improve

Above: Students at a New Orleans charter school (Lee Celano/Reuters)

Several years ago, Paul was one of many children struggling through the Washington, D.C., public school system. In an interview as an 11-year-old, he looked back on his public school experience this way: "People screamed at the teacher, walked out of school during class, hurt me, and made fun of all my friends." His school experience changed dramatically after receiving a voucher through the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, enacted in 2004. His family was able to send him to a parochial school in the District, setting him one step closer to fulfilling his dream of becoming an architect.

The idea that public education does not have to mean government education was a trailblazing one in the 1950s, when Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman first outlined the idea of school vouchers. To paraphrase Friedman, just because Americans have agreed to the public financing of education does not mean they believe government should dictate where a child goes to school.

It was academic idea at the time, but school choice has caught fire in recent years and is now taking hold in states and districts across the country. The thirst for more options accelerated the movement in 2011, when 12 states and the District of Columbia either expanded existing programs or created entirely new options. In Arizona, for instance, parents of special-education children can now deposit 90 percent of the money the public school system would have spent on their children into an education spending account. They can then use those funds to pay for private school tuition, online learning, or special education services, or even roll it into a college savings account.

School choice works to improve outcomes so well, in fact, that many of the gains are produced at a far lower cost than what public school systems spend. Competition produces improvement but also works to lower expenses. It's a notion that is ubiquitous in other sectors of American society. As Senator Jim DeMint put it in a recent speech, to concede education to a government service is a terrible way to run schools.

Yet, for reasons having more to do with entrenched special interests than anything else, some people are uneasy about instilling market forces in our classrooms. They argue that allowing students to opt out of the public school system hurts those who remain behind. Not every parent is savvy enough to research all the options, this reasoning goes, which means that the most helpless children end up abandoned together in underfunded schools where nobody cares.

But let's look more closely at this argument. As it happens, the research tells a different story. In a meta-analysis published last March, education researcher Greg Forster looked at all of the gold-standard empirical studies conducted to date on school choice. Not surprisingly, in nearly every study, the students who participated in school choice showed marked improvement (and no study showed any negative impact on their achievement). But 18 out of 19 studies also showed that in areas where school vouchers were offered, students who stayed behind in public schools also had improved outcomes. The competitive pressure improved public school education in those communities as well.

In the words of researchers Jay Greene and Marcus Winters, the facts run "contrary to the hypothesis that school choice harms students who remain in public schools." Greene and Winters have seen this firsthand. Their study of a voucher program for special-needs children in Florida found that the competitive pressure significantly increased achievement for area children who remained in the public system.

School choice is such an objectively beneficial policy that it's drawing high-profile supporters from both sides of the political divide. At last week's kickoff event for National School Choice Week in New Orleans, Democratic political operative James Carville told a reporter from Reason magazine that he was "very excited about" school choice. "I think we ought to give our children the best we possibly can, and I think we're moving in that direction," he said.

In cities like Washington, D.C., the impact is especially clear. Imagine being a low-income parent of a child in the D.C. school system, where, during the 2007-2008 school year, more than 900 calls from D.C. Public Schools were placed to the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department to report violent crimes.

When the D.C. voucher program came along in 2004, poor parents finally had an escape route. Violence was such an issue for parents in Washington, D.C., that even after their children were enrolled in private schools, their primary concern was school safety. But after two years, researchers found, parents felt assured that their children were in safe environments. At that point, their chief concern became the academic performance of their children - which is exactly as it should be.

The impact of school choice also is seen, perhaps most importantly, on graduation rates. When the D.C Opportunity Scholarship Program began in 2004, Congress mandated annual evaluations of the program's performance. The most recent found that students who used vouchers to attend private schools had a 91 percent graduation rate. (Graduation rates in D.C. Public Schools hover under 60 percent.)

University of Arkansas professor Patrick Wolf, who led the evaluation, noted that graduation rates have a profound impact on a child's future success. As Wolf points out, "How far you go is more important than how much you know." Graduating from high school, Wolf pointed out, impacts earnings, incarceration rates, and even marital stability. In the meantime, Wolf found, school choice has a positive impact on family dynamics, prompting parents to "move from the margins of their child's educational experience to the center."

And the choices are becoming as diverse as the student needs they seek to meet. While the school choice movement has long been confined to options like vouchers, education tax credits, and charter schools, new innovations are providing entirely new funding mechanisms to help families tailor their child's educational experience. Some states are even considering options that would give students choice down to the credit level, empowering them to craft a customized education.

Which is what school choice is all about: Customizing a child's education so it fulfills the child's unique needs, not the needs of the adults in the system.

The philosophical groundwork laid by Friedman has been won through the stories of families who have benefited so much, and through the large body of empirical evidence demonstrating its efficacy. The will of families to provide the absolute best for their children is stronger than any army of education unions or the status quo. For that reason, parental school choice will continue its long-overdue march forward.

Dozens of police, including riot squad on horseback, surround McPherson Square, say they're enforcing ban on camping

Early entrance polling shows Republican caucus-goers in Nevada are primarily concerned with electability

Security Council resolution calling for President Assad to step down is rejected   Obama on Syria's "relentless brutality"

A United Nations Security Council effort to end the violence in Syria ended in acrimony hours after the Syrian military attacked the ravaged city of Homs.

In ending its combat role in Afghanistan a year earlier than expected, the United States will rely more on special forces that hunt insurgent leaders and train local troops, officials say.

Mitt Romney has a chance today in Nevada to do what no Republican presidential candidate has done so far this election cycle: win two contests back to back.

In order to avoid financial ruin, the people of Vallejo, California had to find common ground