On the evening of Aug. 13, while I was checking Twitter, I started to see reports coming in that the police in Ferguson, Missouri, were forcibly suppressing nonviolent protests. Five days earlier, on Aug. 9, a teenager named Michael Brown had been killed by a police officer under circumstances that are still unclear. I turned […]

Talk about luck. Back in 2009, Congress passed landmark legislation directing the US Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco products, which according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention kill at least 480,000 Americans each year—more than were killed in battle in all of our foreign wars combined. Among the agency’s early moves […]

Federal health-care officials, hospital administrators and emergency-care doctors are preparing for the first cases of Ebola here in the United States. Experts say it’s not a question of if, but rather when it will happen. The good news is that the public health infrastructure in the United States — from the epidemiologists at the Centers […]

In fact, an examination of Coast Guard records found that dozens of key vessels routinely deployed for search-and-rescue and law enforcement missions were never ready last year, and for increasingly longer periods of time. The agency reported that its 34 high and medium-endurance cutters, and 37 large patrol boats, were stuck at the pier and […]

To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, the only major British poet born in St. Louis, September 2008 was the cruelest month. As America marks the sixth anniversary of the financial meltdown which began that month and drove the global economy off the cliff and into the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, the damage it did is […]

Seventy percent of the incidents identified occurred either inside a business or an educational environment, like a public school or a college campus. Sixty percent were over by the time police arrived, all but two involved a single shooter, and in 40% of them, the shooters committed suicide. But at least two prominent criminologists have […]

WHEN IT COMES to education, Massachusetts has always been a land of firsts. We launched the nation’s first college and its first public school. Today we’re first in the United States in K-12 student achievement. Now we should take our leadership to the next level, and find a bold new way to prepare our children, […]

In a class offered at Northeastern University this fall, the required materials go far beyond textbooks: Students are tasked with using cutting-edge technologies such as Google Glass and smart watches to improve healthcare. The class, offered through Northeastern’s Personal Health Informatics program, is open to undergraduate, graduate, and Ph.D. students from a variety of disciplines. Students are […]

Faced with the tedium of an 8 a.m. financial accounting class, two Northeastern University began looking for a way better way to start the day. Constantly pressed for time and unable to get their early morning caffeine fix, freshmen Johnny Fayad and Ali Kothari began building an all-in-one energy bar that was not only nutritious, […]

Some researchers debate whether incidents like these are truly on the rise. Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox has long criticized what he sees as the overuse of the term “active shooter.” In an e-mail, he said that “it is not clear whether the increase in active shooter events is completely related to the actual case count […]

The FBI study defined “active shooters” as a person or people “actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people” in a “populated area.” That is different from mass shooting incidents, which include any shooting in which more than three people are killed. It also excluded domestic violence and drug and gang-related violence. Of the […]

Some researchers debate whether incidents like these are truly on the rise. Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox has long criticized what he sees as the overuse of the term “active shooter.” In an e-mail, he said that “it is not clear whether the increase in active shooter events is completely related to the actual […]