Stefan Schnitzer paused along one of the trails that crisscross this forested island in the Panama Canal waterway. Around him were trees, their high canopies muting the light from the tropical sun, the occasional woody vine, or liana, climbing up their thick trunks. But Dr. Schnitzer’s attention was turned to a break in the forest just a few yards off the trail. There, in harsher sunlight, a tree stump was all but obscured by a riot of lianas, their tangled stems forming a heavy thicket. Clearly the tree had come down at some point, which created an opening in the forest canopy that allowed the vines to run amok...

This week, an off-year special election in Buffalo and a purely symbolic vote in the Senate might tell Republicans all they need to know about the mercurial politics of Medicare reform...

Until recently, Moneygall's most famous son wasn't even human. It was a horse, Papillon, who streaked to the title as a long shot in a nail-biter at Britain's prestigious Grand National race in 2000. But for months now, the modest sign marking Papillon's achievement has been muscled aside by pictures celebrating the new hero in this tiny pit stop on the Dublin-to-Limerick road: President Obama -- or, as they like to call him here, Barack O'Bama...

The Damascus Spring of 2001 was so called because Syrian democrats hoped that President Bashar al-Assad, a mild-mannered doctor trained in London, who had been installed as the successor to his ruthless father, Hafez, might forswear tyranny. That Spring ended, and some of the hopeful landed in torture rooms. Four years later, activists issued the Damascus Declaration for Democratic National Change, which called on Assad to hold free parliamentary elections, “launch public freedoms,” and “abolish all forms of exclusion in public life.” Instead, he imprisoned the document’s leading signatories...

Faith is a huge force in American life, and it’s common to hear the Bible cited to bolster political and moral positions, especially against same-sex marriage and abortion. So here’s my 2011 religion quiz. Choose the best responses (some questions may have more than one correct answer)...

What began as seamy gossip about an affair between a famous British soccer player and a reality TV star has quickly become another test over how far the rights to privacy and free speech extend online, where social media operate in countries with vastly different laws...

President Obama is telling AIPAC at the moment that he expected the controversy over his comments Thursday on the 1967 lines, and elaborates...

It starts with a well-worn fiddle, held in equally well-worn hands above a tapping black cowboy boot. Then in comes the banjo, plucked with steel finger picks, followed by the autoharp, the mandolin, the percussive beat of an upright bass. Another banjo grabs the melody, and suddenly the room is bursting with knee-slapping, country-porch music. A man in a crisp checked shirt gets up and starts to dance, bouncing out a complicated bumbumBAM bumbumBAM with his feet, moving as smoothly as a Martha Graham dancer, hitting the floor on the downbeat...

The circus Roger Ailes created at Fox News made his network $900 million last year. But it may have lost him something more important: the next election...

President Barack Obama, seeking to get ahead of historic changes rolling through the Middle East, promised support for democratic uprisings in the Arab world and called for the first time to begin negotiations for a Palestinian state based on Israel's pre-1967 borders...