Late last month, Mike Huston crouched in a prickly pear patch. His blood-stained quiver—sewn from the hide of a deer he killed—was full of arrows fashioned from turkey feathers, wild plants and sharpened stones...

Retired U.S. autoworker John Demjanjuk was convicted of thousands of counts of acting as an accessory to murder at a Nazi death camp and sentenced on Thursday to five years in prison, a groundbreaking verdict that closed one chapter in a decades-long legal battle...

Marines were on a foot patrol last fall in the Taliban stronghold of Marja, Afghanistan, when they shot and killed a lethal threat: a local dog that made the mistake of attacking the Marines’ Labrador retriever.

Capt. Manuel Zepeda, the commander of Company F, Second Battalion, Sixth Marines, was unapologetic. If the Lab on the patrol had been hurt, the Marines would have lost their best weapon for detecting roadside bombs — and would have called for a medevac helicopter, just as they would for a human. An attack on the Lab was an attack on a fellow warrior. As Captain Zepeda put it that day, “We consider the dog another Marine.”...

When depicting their family origins for public consumption, American presidents tend to downplay the importance of Dad while idealizing Mom. Dwight D. Eisenhower described his mother, who was a pacifist and Jehovah's Witness, as "saintly." Richard Nixon called Hannah Milhous Nixon a "Quaker saint." Jimmy Carter wrote one of his many post-presidential books about his "remarkable mother," Miss Lillian, who went to India with the Peace Corps at the age of 68. George W. Bush identified with saber-toothed Barbara as a way of differentiating himself from the male parent he physically resembled...

Microsoft has peered into the future, and placed a bet that people the world over want to stay in touch with someone anytime and anywhere — preferably at no cost...

Until cancer attacked his vocal chords, the author didn't fully appreciate what was meant by "a writer's voice," or the essential link between speech and prose. As a man who loved to talk, he turns to the masters of such conversation, both in history and in his own circle...

The Mississippi River crested here Tuesday morning, flooding low-lying neighborhoods in the city but falling short of record levels that would have caused far more damage. The river topped out at 47.8 feet early Tuesday, far above flood stage, but 4 inches lower than the predicted crest of 48 feet and almost a foot lower than the record crest of 48.7 feet in 1937...

Around sunset on a recent spring evening in Manhattan, a nervous-looking young woman was clutching a clipboard outside the entrance to the East 57th Street apartment belonging to Tina Brown and Harry Evans. Guests were shown into a large room filled with fresh-cut flowers, caterers bearing trays of hors d’oeuvres and wall-to-wall chatter. The hum was baritone: men in suits outnumbered women in heels two to one. The billionaire chairman of Starbucks, Howard Schultz — whose book, “Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul,” was the reason for the party — stood a head taller than the crowd, watching with a smile as flush-cheeked beefy guys from his scrappy youth in Canarsie, Brooklyn, knocked back the free booze...

Pakistani media aired the name of a man they said is the Central Intelligence Agency's station chief, prompting questions about whether the Pakistani government tried to out a CIA operative in the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden. The U.S. is looking into the matter. There are no plans at this time to withdraw the station chief. If the government had attempted to publicize the name, that would be the second such outing in the past six months, a sign of how deeply U.S.-Pakistan relations have soured...

It is the urban driver’s most agonizing everyday experience: the search for an empty parking place. It is part sleuthing and part blood sport. Circling, narrowly missing a spot, outmaneuvering other motorists to finally ease into a space only to discover that it is off limits during working hours. In this city, it is also a vexing traffic problem. Drivers cruising for parking spots generate 30 percent of all downtown congestion, city officials estimate. Now San Francisco professes to have found a solution — a phone app for spot-seekers that displays information about areas with available spaces...