Gregarius

South Korea implemented sanctions against 126 Iranian companies and individuals, despite Tehran’s warnings that the penalties would endanger the countries’ ties.

Studying a roach's tiny brain may help develop new antibiotics designed to counter deadly drug-resistant bacteria

Edward stands 2-feet, 3-inches tall — slightly bigger than a piece of carry-on luggage
World's Shortest Man

Marie Osmond has amassed hundreds of dolls over the years. Is she an avid collector or does she have a hoarding problem? You decide...

Miley Cyrus' brother Trace has a new show about UFOs, on which he's joined by yet another Cyrus! Find out who ...
Miley Too Sexy?

Diane Lane's character in 'Unfaithful' seems to have everything — yet she's still searching for more. Our sexpert takes a deeper look into why women cheat...

Battle grows in the living room &#8212 and consumers could reap all the benefits as Apple unveils a revamped TV product

There may not be any politicians on this season of 'Dancing With the Stars,' but here are some you'd like to see grace the stage...

With so many changes in the fashion media, designers are having a tough time deciding who gets the best seats.

An American psychiatrist’s program of techniques to reduce stress has helped people in Gaza and Israel deal with the effects of violence.

Beijing officials have shelved a much-attacked plan to redevelop the Gulou Drum Tower neighborhood into a tourist spot with high-end stores.

A powerful blast ripped through a residential compound for police officials in Pakistan’s restive northwest, killing at least 18 people.

A district governor from Baghlan Province was assassinated by Taliban insurgents on Monday night in the north of Afghanistan, officials said.

Two independent lawmakers said they will support Prime Minister Julia Gillard, ending weeks of political impasse.

Two officials told the Security Council that the number of reported victims in attacks last month had risen.

Nanyang Technological University and the Singapore Exchange on Tuesday opened the Center for Financial Education, promoting it as Asia's first live trading lab within a university.

Two White House officials were involved in a series of meetings in Beijing that were aimed at repairing a dialogue that has been strained.

Religious leaders held an “emergency summit” to denounce bigotry toward Muslim Americans, while the imam behind a planned Islamic center finally spoke out about the controversy.

The old Giants Stadium carries about $110 million in debt, or nearly $13 for every New Jersey resident. There are similar stories for taxpayers across the nation.

President Hamid Karzai, his brother and another prominent set of brothers struck agreements that have publicly backfired.

President Hamid Karzai, his brother and another prominent set of brothers struck agreements that have publicly backfired.

President Obama’s decision not to extend tax cuts for the rich adds a populist twist to an election-season economic package designed to entice support from big businesses and their Republican allies.

Bedbugs are showing up in commercial settings, creating a bonanza for companies that deal with the scourge.

The difference between viewing housing as a luxury good or as a staple is the subject of a debate about the recovery.

A San Diego restaurant owner has been thrust into one of the nation’s most contentious debates, sending a current of fear through the restaurant industry.

The Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa has been in ill health, which limited his participation at the Saito Kinen Festival in Matsumoto.

Timeline: Mayor Daley's Career

A firefight erupted inside an Iraqi Army base north of Baghdad.

While President Obama touts the new health care law everywhere he goes, many members of his party are saying just the opposite in re-election ads, making sure their constituents know they voted against the unpopular overhaul.

Attorney General Eric Holder was meeting Tuesday with Muslim and other religious leaders to discuss recent attacks on Muslims and the uproar over a planned mosque near Ground Zero in New York.

The incumbent senator says she's been inundated with calls and e-mails from supporters, asking her not to leave the race, and she's weighing her options

The rifle had been looted as a war trophy by an American soldier after the 2003 invasion.

U.S. Officials to Discuss N. Korea Impasse in Asia

Longtime Chicago Mayor Richard Daley announced Tuesday that he will not seek re-election, a stunning decision that apparently ends a political dynasty that dominated the city for more than a half century and paves the way for Rahm Emanuel to chase his dream job.

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

The fall issue of Foreign Policy magazine features Fred Kaplan's "The Transformer," an article-cum-interview with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. It received a flurry of attention because Gates indicated he might leave his post "sometime in 2011." The most significant two lines in the piece, however, were so ordinary that the usual pundits thought them not worth pondering. Part of a Kaplan summary of Gates's views, they read: "He favors substantial increases in the military budget... He opposes any slacking off in America's global military presence."

Now, if Kaplan had done a similar interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, such lines might have been throwaways, since a secretary of state is today little more than a fancy facilitator, ever less central to what that magazine, with its outmoded name, might still call "foreign policy." Remind me: When was the last time you heard anyone use that phrase—part of a superannuated world in which "diplomats" and "diplomacy" were considered important—in a meaningful way? These days "foreign policy" and "global policy" are increasingly a single fused, militarized entity, at least across what used to be called "the Greater Middle East," where what's at stake is neither war nor peace, but that "military presence."

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Paul Conrad, who we lost this weekend, was an idol to me and all caricaturists and cartoonists who wondered at the power of ink on paper as a force in the world. I slotted in here his rendering of Nixon as Richard III, a favorite of mine. Conrad's lines were simple but contained great energy and unraveled anger. He, Bill Mauldin, and Herblock were the big three cartoonists who went into battle in America's clearest moments of truth. Media played an important role; it was fact-based then. All three men had the power of major-circulation dailies behind them. There isn't an equivalent today. LBJ and Nixon had as much to fear from the cartoonists as they did from the great editorial and column writers of the day: Vietnam, Watergate, and Jim Crow America were clear and vitally important targets. Conrad did us proud, and he inspired this artist, among many others. Below is the Los Angeles Times remembrance by his friend, Tim Rutten, and the complete documentary on Paul by Barbara Multer and Jeffrey Abelson. Happy to present it here. Remembering Conrad today, and always.

Paul Conrad was powerful, inspiring—and a friend

By Tim Rutten

He never lost his sense of outrage.

My friend Paul Conrad, who died Saturday at 86, was the premier editorial cartoonist of his generation and, for many years, this newspaper's most visible public face. Outrage informed his journalism and animated his art. He woke up each morning angry about some new injustice and allowed sleep to overtake him each night only so that he could get up mad the next day and do it all again.

He was always and everywhere on the side of decency and ordinary men and women. His targets were the self-satisfied powerful, those indifferent to or antagonistic to our common good, and they included presidents—as in these cartoons—as well as governors, mayors, popes and corporate executives. Among his proudest accomplishments was making Richard Nixon's enemies list.

Conrad had the strength to speak out so forcefully—through his incomparable drawings—because he was, in Yeats' phrase, a "rooted man." His values were rooted in the New Deal's politics of remedy, in the social gospel of his Catholic faith, and in the experience of the family he treasured beyond all else. The astonishing thing about his three Pulitzer Prizes was that he won them in three decades that were among the most tumultuous in modern American history. His willingness to engage our common condition, intensely and personally, was a hallmark of his work.

For those of us who came of age on the Times in the 1970s, he was an inspiration. Those of us who worked with him got up each morning hoping we'd live up to his example and knowing we'd fall short.

    

The White House says President Obama will mark the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks at the Pentagon.

The Obama administration's latest get-the-economy-out-of-its-rut proposal will create jobs "immediately," the president says -- so long as immediately doesn't mean this year. 

It may look like a second stimulus and smell like a second stimulus, but President Obama insists that's no way to describe the new set of initiatives he's introducing this week in his latest effort to boost the flagging economy.

The State Department described as "un-American" plans by a controversial church to burn Korans in memory of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks -- though the head of that church says he is not deterred. 

Lack of funds and organizational issues have plagued a program meant to lure fighters away from insurgency.

I've been trying to sit Indian-style with the Afghan people for this entire tour in Afghanistan, and my foot is starting to fall asleep.

Condoleezza Rice advised President Bush to stay away from Washington in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by raising her voice in a heated exchange and hanging up the phone, the former national security adviser revealed in a documentary interview.

A new wave of polls and projections capping the Labor Day weekend shows voters are souring, perhaps irreversibly, toward the idea of giving Democrats another chance at shaping the agenda in Washington. 

As a battle rages behind the scenes over who will head the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we play a speech by bailout watchdog Elizabeth Warren, who has emerged as a frontrunner for the position. [includes rush transcript]

We speak with veteran journalist and Truthdig editor, Robert Scheer, about his latest book, The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street. [includes rush transcript]

It’s the economy, stupid. As President Obama faces devastating unemployment, foreclosure and bankruptcy rates, with no end in sight, he’s begun a ten-week campaign around the country leading up the November midterm elections. We speak with John Nichols, the Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine, who says Obama should borrow a page from FDR and call for economic justice. [includes rush transcript]

The questioner who triggered an Internet-sensation retort from Rep. Barney Frank at a town hall meeting last year is challenging the 15-term Democrat's re-election bid. 

• Obama Unveils $50B Infrastructure Proposal
• Pakistani Towns Face New Flooding
• Scores Killed in Pakistan Suicide Bombings
• 7 Killed in Mozambique Food Protests; UN to Hold Summit on Rising Prices
• Afghans Protest Church's Plan to Burn Quran
• NATO Seeks 2,000 More Troops for Afghanistan
• 12 Killed in US-Militant Gunfight in Baghdad
• Bahrain Intensifies Crackdown on Opposition, Human Rights Groups
• Israeli Foreign Minister: Peace Deal Impossible, Settlements to Resume
• Castro Gives First Speech Since 2006
• Blair Cancels London Book Signing over Antiwar Protests
• Muslim Workers Accuse JBS Swift of Mistreatment, Discrimination
• Regulators Exempted Mariner Wells from Environmental Review
• Jefferson Thomas of Little Rock 9 Dies at 67

In an honor that could be misinterpreted as a slap in the face, a Los Angeles school district has named a new academy after Al Gore -- the only problem is the school was built on toxic soil. 

The U.S. government's financial commitment to Afghanistan is likely to linger and reach into the billions long after it pulls combat troops from the country, newly disclosed spending estimates show. 

Below, an illustrator's take on Rick Santorum's Google problem. Read all about Santorum's campaign issues here, or watch a related slideshow of magazine illustration outtakes.

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A Florida church's plan to burn Korans on Sept. 11 isn't doing the troops in Afghanistan any favors, Gen. David Petraeus said Monday.

Rick Santorum would very much like to be president. For the past few years, he has been diligently appearing at the sorts of conservative events—the Values Voters Summit, the Conservative Political Action Conference—where aspiring Republican candidates are expected to show up. But before he starts printing "Santorum 2012" bumper stickers, there's one issue the former GOP senator and his strategists need to address. You see, Santorum has what you might call a Google problem. For voters who decide to look him up online, one of the top three search results is usually the site SpreadingSantorum.com, which explains that Santorum's last name is a sexual neologism for "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex."

Santorum's problem got its start back in 2003, when the then-senator from Pennsylvania compared homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia, saying the "definition of marriage" has never included "man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be." The ensuing controversy prompted syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage, who's gay, to start a contest, soliciting reader suggestions for slang terms to "memorialize the scandal." The winner came up with the "frothy mixture" idea, Savage launched a website, and a meme was born. Even though mainstream news outlets would never link to it, Savage's site rose in the Google rankings, thanks in part to bloggers who posted Santorum-related news on the site or linked to it from their blogs. Eventually it eclipsed Santorum's own campaign site in search results; some observers even suggested it may have contributed to Santorum's crushing 18-point defeat in his 2006 campaign against Bob Casey.

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When the Justice Department's report on the so-called torture memos was released in February, the agency's internal watchdog noted that the five-year inquiry "had not been routine" and included the intriguing detail that a trove of key documents had been destroyed. These included almost all of Justice Department official John Yoo's emails. The report noted that investigators for the agency's Office of Professional Responsibility had been informed that these records "had been deleted and were not recoverable." Without the emails of one of the primary authors of the memos, the OPR could only cobble together a partial picture of how Bush administration lawyers had crafted a legal rationale for the use of torture. "Given the difficulty OPR experienced in obtaining information over the past five years," the report said, "it remains possible that additional information eventually will surface."

Months later John Yoo's emails have surfaced—some of them, at least. But these are probably not the records the OPR gumshoes were after. So the mystery of the missing Yoo emails remains.

In response to a lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Justice Department has produced 900-plus pages of email records, and it says it has identified but is withholding an additional 147 documents for as-yet unspecified reasons. This might sound like a lot, but given that Yoo's tenure as a top political appointee in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel spanned almost two years, from July 2001 to May 2003, the emails account for what would be less than week's worth of email traffic for most routine email user. Though the OPR noted that the supposedly destroyed records included "relevant documents" to its investigation, nothing of the sort was included in the files Justice handed to CREW. These emails are remarkable if only because they are so mundane—and because virtually none of them have anything to do with Yoo's official Justice Department work. If the messages are at all representative of Yoo's stint there, they suggest that the bulk of his time was devoted to arranging speaking engagements, authoring journal articles, and, as CREW put it in a release, "expanding his credentials" for his return to academia.

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An accounting firm hired by Al Sharpton's National Action Network found the civil-rights group in such financial disarray that it flunked its record-keeping -- and may not even survive, The New York Post has learned.

An annual exodus called “mudik” at the end of Ramadan is a chance for city dwellers with rural roots to reconnect with their families — and to show off their success.

The chairman of the Central Bank of Afghanistan promised Monday to lend the embattled Kabul Bank “as much as it wants” to stave off a collapse.

The 7.1-magnitude earthquake that struck South Island last week caused $1.4 billion in damage and will hinder the country’s economic recovery, Prime Minister John Key said Monday.

The government found that as many as 200 commercial pilots may have falsified their résumés in 2008 and 2009, according to news reports.

Declining salaries and an unstable labor market have led young Japanese to work additional jobs.

The British novelist Colin Cotterill, who lives on a Thai beach, stands apart from his books’ setting, the Communist Laos of the 1970s.

Fort Stevens in Washington is an endangered battlefield. Coming to a historical site near you: Wal-Marts and Gen. Robert E. Lee slot machines.

A Middle East peace plan from King Abdullah has been floating out there in the ether for years now. It’s time to bring it out of the air.

The proposal, to allow businesses to write off 100 percent of new investment in plant and equipment, tops a raft of announcements, from a proposed expansion of the research and experimentation tax credit to $50 billion in additional spending on roads, railways and runways

The biggest battle of all will be over what to do about the Bush tax cuts, most of which expire at the end of the year

Sean Duffy was supposed to be the 2010 Republican sacrificial lamb running against one of the U.S. House's longest-serving liberal lions, Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., but instead could face Democrat Julie Lassa.

As summer comes to a close, here's a look back at the celebs who have been frolicking on the beach in style

If Lindsay Lohan is bumming you out, take a look at these inspiring celebs whose lives didn't end up in shambles

There's an idea that all life on Earth was seeded from comets, asteroids or meteors which struck the planet, kickstarting the evolutionary process

The Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry may be about teaching magic, but Universal Orlando's version is a basic physics lesson: finite space + thousands of Potter fans = crowds

Hip-hop star is still feeling the pain over his ambush of Taylor Swift last year — and he's expressing his pain all over Twitter

As the summer night sky draws to a close, there are still awesome cosmic objects that may beckon skywatchers equipped with a small telescope, binoculars or their own two eyes

Learn what you need to know before pedaling and pushing your way to a healthier lifestyle