Violent crime in the United States fell for the fifth consecutive year in 2011 with murder, rape and robbery all going down, although crime remains a serious problem in many urban areas, the FBI said on Monday. James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, said crime has continued to decline from a peak in […]

SEATTLE — With name tags clipped on and PowerPoint at the ready, officials from Northeastern University invited prospective students in one night last week for a peek at a new extension campus, 2,500 miles from the school’s home in Boston and about as far northwest as you can get in the lower 48 without swim […]

Massachusetts’ economic growth slowed significantly over the summer while the national economy showed a modest pickup, according to two reports released Friday. Clayton-Matthews, who compiled the data for the ­UMass report, said he expects economic growth in the state to pick up modestly over the next two quarters to an annual rate of 2.3 percent, […]

Sales of single-family homes and condominiums kept climbing in Massachusetts last month as more buyers decided to take advantage of historically low interest rates, ­according to numbers released Thursday. There were 3,791 single-family homes sold in September, an 8 percent increase compared with the same month last year, according to Warren Group, a Boston company […]

The South Boston Tribune published its final edition Thursday. The Dorchester Argus-Citizen, Jamaica Plain Citizen, and Hyde Park Tribune are also folding. In an era before Facebook, Twitter, and online news sources became the norm, community papers were a constant for many Boston neighborhoods. But as more readers migrated to the Web for their news […]

With the Iraq War recently ended, the Afghanistan War winding down, and a standoff over Iran’s nuclear program raising the prospect of a third U.S. military intervention in the Middle East this century, what should the next president do? Veteran Middle East observers Nicholas Burns and Stephen Kinzer weigh in.