Young Men

Kate Bolick is an attractive, educated and professionally accomplished 39-year-old who despite 20 years of dating and a string of steady relationships has — cue the ominous organ music — never married. In a long (at 12,000 words, very long) article that's part personal essay, part enfilade of facts, stats and interviews with experts, she tells her story in the Atlantic this month. It doesn't end happily ever after — at least it hasn't so far — but this leaves Bolick not so much sad or even angry but surprised by what she's found: a dating pool of men who increasingly cannot keep up with their female counterparts.

Reporting from New Bern, N.C. Federal prosecutors call it a slam-dunk case of "homegrown terrorism" — an American-born Muslim convert conspiring with young Muslim American recruits in North Carolina to kill or kidnap non-Muslims overseas as part of a violent jihadist plot. Lawyers for the three accused young men call it an overblown prosecution of impressionable youngsters who made foolish Facebook boasts and spent too much time shooting guns and praising jihad. A federal jury will begin deliberations Wednesday on whether Omar Aly Hassan, Ziyad Yaghi and Hysen Sherifi, all of Raleigh, N.C., are guilty of conspiring to kill or kidnap people overseas or of providing material support for a terrorist plot to kill non-Muslims.

They huddle beneath dry-docked boats at the edge of the Mediterranean, petrified that the rebel gunmen who now own the streets will confuse them with mercenaries for the despot. "We are workers, we are not soldiers," said Godfrey Ogbor, 29, voicing a plea shared by hundreds of men from sub-Saharan Africa trapped at this makeshift coastal camp 15 miles west of Tripoli. "We don't know politics. We have no guns. " But the new masters of Tripoli suspect that many are something else: shock troops for a reviled regime, collaborators who deserve no pity.

As rebel fighters root out remnants of Moammar Kadafi's forces, ad hoc neighborhood councils that make their own rules are imposing the only semblance of order on the streets of Tripoli and enforcing it at hundreds of checkpoints, many staffed by heavily armed teenagers. They are being asked now to abandon that sudden rush of power and hand authority to a group of men they don't know well. Libya's opposition leadership, the Transitional National Council, says its top figures will arrive within days to take control of an unruly capital somewhat suspicious of its motives but largely willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

To be Assyrian is to go to church. There is little distinction between religion and culture in a people who define themselves as the earliest Christians. So when this Central California outpost of a dwindling ethnic minority lost three promising young people to powerful Vernal Fall in Yosemite National Park on Tuesday, its residents went to their churches. On Wednesday, the father of 21-year-old victim Ramina Badal made his way down the aisles of St. George's Church in Ceres, though he could barely stand, leaning on those around him for every step.

Every morning, Salah Fatour is at his post with his worn rake and wheelbarrow, tending the garden of the dead. In a city besieged by war, he finds peace among the graves of a long-ago conflict. He steps gently around the whitewashed tombstones, pulling a weed, caressing a flower, careful not to disturb the souls of soldiers who died on foreign soil seven decades ago. Fatour, his rough hands calloused from raking, performs the sacred duties once carried out by his father, who tended the Benghazi War Cemetery for three decades after World War II. Fatour, who was born at the cemetery, has maintained it for 25 years, preserving the memories of the dead.

He is a soft-spoken 22-year-old with a massive Belgian machine gun. " Allahu akbar! " Radwan Othman cries out as he opens fire in response to a barrage of rockets fired by Moammar Kadafi's troops less than two miles across the valley. Afterward he goes silent, staring into space with glazed eyes. He doesn't talk much, and his friends at this front-line position at the far eastern edge of rebel-controlled territory in the Nafusa Mountains worry about him. Until the uprising against Kadafi's 42-year rule began in February, Othman sold women's clothes at a shop in Tripoli and had never handled a gun in his life.

Thirty years ago Sunday, a brief report in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report described cases of a rare form of pneumonia called Pneumocystis carinii in five young Los Angeles men, "all active homosexuals. " The cases were noteworthy because the men had previously been healthy, though their particular pneumonia had only been seen in people with severely depressed immune systems. Within a month, a second report had identified 54 young gay men with a rare cancer known as Kaposi's sarcoma, another disease that had been almost unknown in young men. And by the following summer, the mysterious disease underlying these reports had a name: acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS.

Atlanta-based megachurch leader Bishop Eddie Long and four men who accused him of sexual misconduct have settled out of court, spokesmen for both sides said Thursday. The men had alleged that the pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church coerced them into sexual relations with gifts including cars, cash and travel when they were 17. One suit also claimed Long had sexual contact with one of them during trips he took them on in the U.S. and abroad. Long denied the allegations, and federal and state authorities didn't investigate because Georgia's age of consent is 16. Eight months ago, when the allegations surfaced, Long told his a 25,000 member congregation in Lithonia, Georgia, that he would fight the accusations against him. Both sides declined to discuss terms of the deal, other than to say the civil suits in state court would not go forward.

Reporting from Winchester, Calif. -- Before the competition had even begun, Ty Kastendiek was told, again and again, that he and his boys had already won. The math and social studies teacher at Camp David Gonzales, a juvenile probation camp in Calabasas, had worked tirelessly with a group of incarcerated young men to turn a kit of wooden planks into a solar-powered boat, able to compete against vessels built by high school students from across Southern...