Jewish & World News

U.S. newspaper circulation dropped 8.7 percent in the six months through March, led by declines at USA Today, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. The Audit Bureau of Circulations today released daily average circulation figures for 602 newspapers. The latest decrease slowed from an 11 percent fall in the period through September, compared with a year earlier. Daily circulation at Gannett Co.’s USA Today fell 14 percent to 1.83 million and the New York Times dropped 8.5 percent to 951,063, ABC said. News Corp.’s Wall Street Journal, the largest U.S. publication by circulation, gained 0.5 percent to 2.09 million, according to ABC data. Tribune Co.’s Los Angeles Times saw its daily circulation decline 15 percent to 616,606, according to ABC. BusinessWeek

The White House is pushing back on a report suggesting that the U.S. government learned details about the suspect in the botched Christmas Day terrorist attack while he was in the air. The Los Angeles Times published a report Wednesday saying that U.S. border security officials became aware of the suspect's alleged extremist ties while he was en route from Amsterdam, Netherlands, to Detroit, Michigan, and planned to question Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab once he landed. "As we have indicated before, there were bits and pieces of information about AbdulMutallab available in a variety of areas in the system prior to December 25. There was no new information that emerged when the plane was in the air," an administration official said. The White House on Thursday plans to release an unclassified report by John Brennan, the assistant to the president on homeland security and counterterrorism, detailing what went wrong and also to reveal new steps intended to thwart future...