A generator, cow and goat were raffled off. Wizened elders sat on carpets and sipped green tea. Some wealthy farmers seemed interested. Others seemed keen to attend what they saw as a picnic.

These are not what I could call hedge funds. This is just gambling.

"Who won the cow? Who won the cow?"

"You can't win them all," Mr. Silber said.

Excuse me, but what exactly are we fighting for in Iraq, or in this wider war against Islamist extremism, if the murder of 500 civilians can be shrugged off?

... "a sheik engagement," the Pentagon itinerary said ...

Eighty suspected terrorists killed. An enormous weapons cache recovered. And, in what the report called "pocket litter," a notebook with the name and phone number of the imam of a mosque halfway around the world, here in the state capital.

"We are entering a new golden era of vaccinology."

Winemaking in France is entering a crucial period, some might say an end-game.

In a French country kitchen a woman recalls, with horrified outrage, a trip to Chicago, where she encountered "the fattest people I ever saw in my life."

Why is my favorite brand of lipstick more expensive than a nice bottle of Italian wine?

Chuck Prince, chief executive of Citigroup, dismissed fears about an early end to the postmillennial debt frolics. "When the music stops," he told The Financial Times, "in terms of liquidity, things will get complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing."

Harper, 37, described the record as "not rock, not folk, not gospel, but with all those elements included."

It's nylon-string solo acoustic guerrilla folk.

I don't feel rooted here. But New York... [ Read More (0.9k in body) ]