Japanese officials began quietly encouraging people to evacuate a larger swath of territory around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on Friday, a sign that they hold little hope that the crippled facility will soon be brought under control...

Allied forces pounded several targets in the Libyan capital Tripoli overnight and in the early hours of Thursday, in what was the most intense night of bombing since the start of the campaign to cripple Col. Moammar Gadhafi's military capabilities...

When news broke that Elizabeth Taylor had died at 79, we immediately reached out to founding Salon contributor and lifelong Taylor obsessive Camille Paglia for her thoughts. We found her in a Philadelphia research library researching her new visual arts book for Pantheon, but she diligently trekked outside in the rain to speak to Salon editor-in-chief Kerry Lauerman by telephone under a portico, as the wind howled around her.

Tatsuhiro Karino paused at the top of the muddy hill, took his wife, Masako, by the hand and led her slowly down to the ruins of the elementary school that entombed the body of their daughter, Misaki. Dwarfed by four mammoth cranes digging into the wreckage, the 40ish construction worker gently pulled a veil over his wife's face to shield her from the dust and whiff of death. But he couldn't protect her from this: the grim task of locating the body of their 8-year-old child, among the 94 students and teachers killed when their school was leveled March 11 in nature's twin strike of shaking ground and torrential wave...

The age of atomic energy could be said to have begun, literally, with the wave of a wand. On September 6, 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was vacationing in Denver, passed a pole with a gleaming tip over a cabinet full of electronic equipment. This “neutron wand” supposedly sent a signal that was then conveyed to an unmanned power shovel, twelve hundred miles away, in Shippingport, Pennsylvania. The shovel lurched forward and scooped up three tons of dirt, breaking ground for the country’s first commercial nuclear power plant...

To the list of recent upheavals, let’s add a new entry: The tide is finally turning against cats. The New York Times made it official Monday with an article headlined “Tweety Was Right: Cats Are a Bird’s No. 1 Enemy.” The article ran beneath a photograph of a gray-and-white kitty munching on the head of a songbird. The cat narrowed its eyes directly at the camera, as if to say, “So?”  ...

For years, officials at Ursinus College had been trying to figure out how to capitalize on the fact that J. D. Salinger had spent one semester there in the fall of 1938...

As my coworkers flee quake-stricken Sendai, I've made a tough decision -- to trust the government over here...

An oily substance of unknown origin is washing ashore in parts of Louisiana that were among the hardest hit by BP PLC's Deepwater Horizon oil spill last year, the U.S. Coast Guard and local government officials said Monday...

The Libyan government freed four New York Times journalists on Monday, six days after they were captured while covering the conflict between government and rebel forces in the eastern city of Ajdabiya. They were released into the custody of Turkish diplomats and crossed safely into Tunisia in the late afternoon, from where they provided a harrowing account of their captivity...