Greg Jeloudov was 35 and new to America when he decided to join the Army. Like most soldiers, he was driven by both patriotism for his adopted homeland and the pragmatic notion that the military could be a first step in a career that would enable him to provide for his new family. Instead, Jeloudov arrived at Fort Benning, Georgia, for basic training in May 2009, in the middle of the economic crisis and rising xenophobia. The soldiers in his unit, responding to his Russian accent and New York City address, called him a "champagne socialist" and a "commie faggot." He was, he told Newsweek, "in the middle of the viper's pit." Less than two weeks after arriving on base, he was gang-raped in the barracks by men who said they were showing him who was in charge of the United States...

Hours from a government shutdown, the leaders of the House and Senate offered dramatically different reasons for a budget stalemate and expressed little hope that the two sides will reach an agreement by midnight.  In a terse statement to reporters, House Speaker John Boehner said there is “only one reason we do not have an agreement yet and that is spending,” and asked “when will the White House and when will Senate Demorats get serious about cutting spending?” Moments later, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, offered a lengthier, scathing criticism of Mr. Boehner and House Republicans, accusing them of wanting to shut down the federal government by insisting on cutting funds for women’s heath services...

Recent fieldwork in upstate New York has uncovered an ancient creation myth that should be of interest to baseball fans. Ethnologists translate it, literally, as follows: In the beginning, the entire world was only a spherical nugget of cork and rubber. One day as it bounced around the formless void, this nugget was discovered by the Great Spirit World-Father, who performed upon it a magic incantation. He plucked his longest beard hair and wound it tightly around the nugget, many times, until it formed a fist-size ball. This beard-ball he wrapped with the strongest and most precious material in the cosmos: the dried palm-calluses of his own Father, which he pulled taut and stitched closed with the strong red cord of his own umbilicus. This was the mystic Fatherball, sacred orb of the patriarchy...

Biologists have found a new way to peer back 130 million years in time, illuminating the catastrophic period in which the dinosaurs perished and birds and mammals arose. The new approach rests on reconstructing the family tree of lice. Vincent S. Smith, a louse taxonomist at the Natural History Museum in London, has found that the tree stretches so far back in time that the host of the first louse would have been a dinosaur, probably one of the theropod dinosaurs that were the ancestors of birds...

Libyan rebels retreating from their positions outside the oil town of Brega and facing heavy fighting elsewhere in the country have accused NATO forces of not providing enough air support and failing to protect civilians. The complaint comes as international players involved in Libya increase their efforts to resolve the situation through diplomatic means. Many rebels say the coalition's shift to negotiations has led to a decline in NATO’s military campaign, a move that rebels say is costing lives...

Sally Kern's office in the Oklahoma state house is busy, with more trinkets than a cheer coach's trophy room. Here's an award from Americans United for Life. Here's a photo of George W. Bush throwing out the first ball at the 2002 World Series. Here's Theodore Roosevelt, hand on his hip, standing in front of a globe. "I've put that photo of Roosevelt there because of the inscription," says Kern. She reads it: "We can have no 50/50 allegiance in this country. Either a man is an American, and nothing else, or he is not an American at all."...

The French government said Tuesday that it was negotiating the surrender of Ivory Coast’s strongman, Laurent Gbagbo, a day after the United Nations and France struck targets at his residence, his offices and two of his military bases in a significant escalation of the international intervention into the political crisis engulfing the nation...

The requests to see her perform had dwindled over the years. But when the earthquake struck at 2:46 p.m. on March 11, this city’s last geisha was, fittingly, at home getting ready to sing that night at Kamaishi’s 117-year-old ryotei, an exclusive restaurant featuring fine food and entertainment where she began working as a 14-year-old seven decades ago...

The loudspeakers in every journalist’s hotel room burst into life with a “ding-dong” presaging the announcement of a news conference, or perhaps a bus trip to the scene of an airstrike or a school where children erupt with chants of support for Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi...

France and Germany are leading calls for the release of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who remains missing more than 36 hours after his detention...