Features

  WASHINGTON / AP How often do students miss school? Are they ready for college? Are they physically fit? Is their school a welcoming place? States are beginning to outline new ways to evaluate their schools, rather than relying just on traditional measures such as test scores. The plans are required under a new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds …

  DEARBORN / AP In her job as a refugee case manager, Fatimah Farooq would come to work in a hijab and speak with her clients in Arabic. Nonetheless, she found herself being asked whether she was Muslim. It’s not easy, Farooq says, navigating her dual identities as black and Muslim. “I’m constantly trying to prove that I belong,” said Farooq, …

  New York / AP On the island where Lyon Farrell comes from, they cherish the golden sand and hanging 10. In the place where he’d love to land next winter, he’ll need a snowboard, not a surfboard, and will get more mileage out of a backside 1260 than riding waves. Farrell is that rarest of birds — an elite snowboarder …

  New York / AP Miss Kindergarten is in the million-dollar club. So are Lovin Lit, the Moffatt Girls and about a dozen other teacher-entrepreneurs who are spinning reading, math, science and social studies into gold by selling their lesson plans online to fellow teachers around the world. Despite worries from some educators, such online marketplaces are booming, driven by rising …

  HARTFORD / AP Rick Maynard found the manila envelope containing letters from the battlefields of World War I while he and his sister were cleaning out the basement after their father’s death. The more than three dozen letters were written, some in pencil, by Paul Maynard, Rick’s great-uncle. “He was on the front lines,” said Rick Maynard, the parks and …

  AWEIL / AP Two months after the world’s youngest nation declared a famine amid its civil war, hunger has become more widespread than expected, aid workers say. South Sudan’s Northern Bahr el Ghazal region is on the brink of starvation, with 290,000 people at risk of dying without sustained food assistance. Humanitarian workers say conditions will only deteriorate as the …

  KHAZER / AP Six-year-old Mustafa suffers nightmares, cries at the sound of airplanes and occasionally wets himself, symptoms that worsened last year when an explosion in Mosul killed his cousin and wounded his father before his eyes. He was a young witness to more than two years of IS rule and months of heavy fighting aimed at driving the extremists …

  DALLAS / AP A Faberge egg and the jeweled elephant designed to fit inside it are being reunited for the first time in almost a century thanks to a loan from Queen Elizabeth II to a Texas museum. A gallery that opens on Monday at the Houston Museum of Natural Science features the elephant, which only recently was discovered to …

  PORT-AU-PRINCE / AP Aspasie Tanis lives hand-to-mouth on the edge of eviction in the best of times, scraping out a living selling packets of spaghetti and cookies outside her low-slung concrete shack in Haiti’s capital. Now the death of her father by stroke threatens to send her into a lifetime of debt. The distraught single mother is frantically seeking loans …

  NEW YORK / AP If you build it, they will stay. The small businesses that dominate the home remodeling industry are expecting robust growth in the next few years, thanks partly to baby boomers who want to remain in their homes. Home remodelers say they’ve had a pickup in projects from boomers who are in or approaching retirement and are …