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The MMA ran on a venomously anti-U.S. and anti-Musharraf platform–a message warmly received in the tribal areas near the Afghan border. Campaign leaflets endorsing the MMA and denouncing Musharraf were printed and distributed by a former Osama bin Laden aide from Afghanistan. Many tribal-area locals sympathize with Taliban and Qaeda fighters fleeing from U.S. and Pakistani forces, and they particularly resent the “kick down the door” style of some soldiers in the search for terrorists....

I clean the box, hoping that next spring our bluebirds will come back to raise yet another brood. Around March, the pair returns to our snow-covered yard in the high mountains of Colorado. All summer, the brilliant-blue male and subtle-colored female perch on our swing set, rooftop or the railing of our deck. To us, their soft calls and chirps have come to mean summer. My two young children watch the birds snatch grubs from the flower bed, dive-bomb after flying insects or sway in the wind on sagebrush twigs....

Not quite-not yet. Heading into next week’s New York and Wisconsin primaries, Clinton remains the front runner, with half the delegates he needs, seven times as many as Brown. He’s shown the durability to survive wounds that would have killed off other candidates long ago. But Brown’s Connecticut victory exposed the fragility of Clinton’s candidacy in a party that has a pathological distrust of its own powers that be. Since the late ’60s, anti-establishment anger-fanning it or fighting it-has been the party’s disorganizing principle....

Kendrick’s music is just as edgy as his attitude – peppered with dissonant clusters and off-the-changes melody lines, punctuated by crashes from his powerful left hand. On a new album, Dance World Dance (Verve), he writes with Ellington-like lushness for a lit-tle big band, unveils catchy tunes reminiscent of Thelonious Monk and raises holy hell in the spirit of Sun Ra. A minimalist, he pushes clashing chords against each other with simple voicings....

Duro Barroso was little known, or even noticed, at the time. Many accounts of the Azores meeting didn’t mention the host’s name. Last week, however, Duro Barroso was back in the news in a way that ensures he won’t be forgotten. The unassuming 48-year-old lawyer emerged from a bloody selection process as the compromise candidate to succeed Romano Prodi as president of the European Commission, the bureaucratic engine of the European Union....

A moment ago I was–like every other urban commuter–swimming through the soup of afternoon traffic. Suddenly, a puff of black smoke explodes from the slow lane. Then, motion. Or echo of motion as motorists struggle to get out of the way of a car shooting full throttle across seven lanes of traffic. It hits the center divider with enough force to send the vehicle 10 feet into the air. The subcompact lands on its back, flames immediately unleashed from inside....

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, otherwise known as the CDF, is the former Holy Inquisition. The word “holy” is a bit ironic, frankly. These are ordinary human beings who are struggling to do a good job, but in the modern world. I wrote a book in 1993 called “Women at the Altar” just when the debate on the ordination of women was a key topic of conversation, particularly in the United Kingdom....

But the Pekalas are scared. In recent years Jerzy, 41, has been treated for severe depression and Katarzyna, 39, has grown increasingly embittered as the couple has struggled with the farm’s worsening debts. Because of heavily subsidized imports from the European Union, the Pekalas say, hog prices have plunged roughly 50 percent in the past two years, and wheat prices haven’t fared much better. “Our costs keep rising and our prices keep dropping,” Jerzy says....

Bush’s advisers had anticipated that his military record would be scrutinized closely, but they didn’t foresee this curve ball. More than two years ago the Bush camp launched a secretive research operation designed to scour all records relating to his Vietnam-era service as a pilot in the 111th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron of the Texas Air National Guard. The goal was to identify potential vulnerabilities early on and deflect any charges that Bush got favorable treatment....

Like most Latin American photographers of his day, Chambi made his living shooting portraits for the local elite in Cuzco. But, as Ranney discovered, he also had a splendid wandering eye. The calendar is a sampling of his portfolio of majestic landscapes, Aymara and Quechua Indians, and the quotidian splendor of life on Cuzco’s streets. Chambi’s oeuvre is all the more remarkable given his limitations; he worked with a simple box camera, exclusively in black and white, used no artificial lighting and recorded the images on emulsified glass....

This year has been anything but normal, including in the world of national politics. And as lawmakers in Washington, D.C., continue to be thrown curveballs just months away from a major presidential election, Newsweek took a look back at some of the wackier, more light-hearted moments that have occurred in Congress this year. Row, row, row your…vote? Representative Greg Stanton’s watery background on his video conference screen appeared fishy to his colleagues in Washington....

The next day Cooper drove to the offices of the Philadelphia medical examiner to face Rodney once again. This time, though, he got no closer than a whispered identification. Instead of entering a chilly, harshly lit room of slabs, Cooper waited in a bare office equipped with a desk, two chairs and a closed-circuit, black-and-white monitor. The screen rolled over once and there was Rodney, swaddled in a sheet, eyes tightly closed....

At 26, Karenna, a law student, has quietly joined the Gore campaign’s inner circle. As the eldest of his four children, she can speak with authority on women and the Gen-X set, but she also chimes in on a wide range of strategic and policy issues. In past campaigns she helped prep her dad for debates and used her writing skills (developed partly in a stint at Microsoft’s online magazine Slate) to hone his speeches....

To understand why high finance has trounced high tech as a profit center for Seagate shareholders, let’s look at a proposed series of complicated transactions involving Seagate and a company called Veritas Software, in which Seagate owns about a one-third stake. If all goes as planned, Seagate will have made far more for its shareholders in less than two years of tax avoidance than in two decades of disk making....

Born in 1961–22 managers ago–the Los Angeles, then California, now Anaheim Angels are one of only six teams (with Detroit, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Montreal and Tampa Bay) that have not even made the playoffs in the last 13 seasons. They have never been to a World Series. They were one pitch away in 1986, but the pitch became a two-out, two-strike, two-run Red Sox home run. It sometimes seems as though the Angels play 162 road games because scads of people who come to their 81 home games in Orange County, home of transplants, used to live where the visiting team is from, and they root for it....

Thank you for your article “Alzheimer’s: Unlocking the Mystery” (SOCIETY, Jan. 31). I had a rough time reading the article, having watched both of my paternal grandparents slowly deteriorate and eventually die from the disease over the last decade. Your article was informative and helpful. When you better understand the disease, it helps to let go of loved ones who die mentally long before they ever leave you physically. And now, despite the fact that I know my parents and I are more susceptible to the disease, you have given me hope....

Netherlands: The groom in the Dutch version of “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire” turned out to be gay. Germany: In “I Marry the Millionaire,” the bride and groom admitted that they were already dating. Spain: The cast of “Big Brother” revolted and refused to vote anyone out. Germany: The cast of “Island Duel” (like America’s “Survivor”) were supposed to subsist on local fare. Instead, it turned out the producers had fed them spaghetti off-camera....

ANTHONY TOWNSEND COFOUNDER, NYCWIRELESS Like many ideas that changed the world, this one began on a college campus. As a graduate student in urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late ’90s, Anthony Townsend, through his friends at MIT’s renowned Media Lab, became turned on to the possibilities of what we know today as Wi-Fi. On his return to New York City in 2000, Townsend became obsessed with the idea of free, shared wireless connectivity in public spaces....