Perhaps Ryan Seacrest said it best at the top of the "American Idol" Tuesday night when describing Adam Lambert and Kris Allen, the show's final two contestants. "It is the battle of the acoustic rocker verses the glam rocker. Conway (Arkansas) versus California. The guy next door versus the guy-liner." After three performances apiece and plenty of judge feedback, it seems that the Southern California glam-rocker Adam Lambert has the edge -- but it didn't look that way early in ...

Military personnel threw away, and ultimately burned, confiscated Bibles that were printed in the two most common Afghan languages amid concern they would be used to try to convert Afghans, a Defense Department spokesman said Tuesday. The unsolicited Bibles sent by a church in the United States were confiscated about a year ago at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan because military rules forbid troops of any religion from proselytizing while deployed there, Lt. Col. Mark Wright said. Such religious outreach ...

Is John Yettaw crazy, or just eccentric? The answer's not quite clear, as the Missouri man remains in a Burmese prison charged with a head-scratching nighttime swim that's imperiled one of the world's best-known democracy figures. Yettaw, 53, is accused of strapping on homemade flippers and illegally swimming to the Rangoon home of Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader held under house arrest for 13 of the last 19 years. Relatives say he made the same swim last ...

No one should have been surprised that there was no meeting of minds between President Barack Obama and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at their inaugural summit on Monday. Although the two men proclaimed a shared commitment to having Israelis and Palestinians live in peace, their views on how to get there remain substantially at odds. Now, as Obama puts the finishing touches on a new peace plan to be unveiled shortly — perhaps when he addresses the Muslim ...

The conflict in Sri Lanka has long provided lessons for militant groups around the world. The Tamil Tigers taught terrorists everywhere the finer points of suicide bombing, the recruitment of child soldiers, arms trafficking, propaganda and the use of a global diaspora to collect resources. The Tigers "were the pioneers in many of the terrorist tactics we see worldwide today," says Jason Campbell, an Iraq and Afghanistan analyst at the Brookings Institution. But now that the Tigers ...

Police arrested a southwestern Illinois man in connection with the slayings of his 31-year-old wife and their two young sons. Chris Coleman was arrested Tuesday at his parents' home. He is being held without bond at a local jail. Police said Tuesday that they do not have a motive for the killings. Police found the bodies of Sheri Coleman and the children, Garret, 11, and Gavin, 9, in the bedrooms of their two-floor home in the St. Louis suburb of ...

The United Nations is demanding full access to refugee camps that are home to an estimated quarter of a million people fleeing war in Sri Lanka, the United Nations Children's Fund said Tuesday. "People are arriving into camps sick, malnourished and some with untended wounds of war," UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman said in a written statement. "... Water and sanitation needs are critical." Some 65,000 people have fled what had been the fighting zone in northeast Sri Lanka over ...

Prison bars have long inspired infamous inmates from revolutionaries to mass murderers to record their tales and thoughts on rusty typewriters or hidden scraps of paper. So it is perhaps unsurprising that the first published writings of a major Mexican drug trafficker have emerged from one of the nation's top security penitentiaries. Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, arrested in 1989 and convicted of being the most powerful Mexican narcotics trafficker of his time, has written 36 pages that mix memories, ...

The man at the controls of the space shuttle Discovery when it deployed the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990 now appears poised to steer NASA into its post-shuttle orbit. Former astronaut and retired Marine general Charles Bolden Jr. is President Obama's likely nominee to head the space agency; the two are expected to meet at the White House May 19 for a formal interview. Years before his famous Discovery flight, Bolden traveled to space with a payload specialist named ...

As the two Jewish men on stage slip on their Nazi armbands, preparing to take the Siegfried Oath, the portly man sitting next to me seems unsure if he should laugh. Like the rest of the audience at the Berlin opening of the Mel Brooks musical comedy The Producers on Sunday night, the old man waits. But when a caged pigeon named Adolf throws up a wing in a Nazi salute, no one can hold back. ...