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• The schools of the Pac-10 (now the Pac 12), Atlantic Coast Conference, Big Ten and Big East also averaged six-figure spending per student athlete in 2010, the study finds. Across Division I, athletic spending --though still smaller in absolute terms -- rose twice as fast as academic spending between 2005 and 2010. During that period, the schools competing in the top-level Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) of the NCAA upped their athletic expenditures on average $6,200 per athlete each year, according to data compiled by the Delta Cost Project at American Institutes for Research as part of an ongoing project with the pro-reform Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics.
• The report does not provide information about ratios at individual institutions.
• Overall, FBS schools spent on average $92,000 per athlete in 2010, or just under seven times what they were spending per student on academics at a time of falling state funding for higher education in much of the country, and tuition increases widely outpacing inflation. The report did find, however, the growth rate seemed to be slowing.
• ___

• KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- Not so long ago Fakira roamed the mean streets of the Afghan capital, hawking magazines for 13 U.S. cents apiece to support her poverty-stricken family.  Next month, the 15-year-old cellist appears in America's most prestigious concert halls, performing alongside other former street children and orphans of Afghanistan's decades of violence.
• "Suddenly my whole life changed, and now I am going to America," she says, recounting her chance encounter with a rather improbable school that's reviving music, both Western classical and Afghan, in a country where the Taliban had made even listening to it a crime -- and where a generation of musicians vanished through killings, old age or exile.
• The teenager, who uses only one name like many Afghans, will be playing in the Afghan Youth Orchestra, which on Feb. 3 begins a 12-day U.S. tour that includes concerts at Washington's Kennedy Center -- President Barack Obama has been invited -- New York's Carnegie Hall and the New England Conservatory in Boston.  
• "Most reports about Afghanistan are about suicide bombings, killings, destruction, corruption, (depicting) Afghanistan as a place where hope has died," says Ahmad Sarmast, who leads the youth orchestra. He says the young musicians will try "to show a different Afghanistan, an Afghanistan where hope is alive and the

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