Tareq and Michaele Salahi were hoping for reality TV stardom when they strolled uninvited into a Nov. 24 White House state dinner. Legal experts say the party-crashing duo may have to settle for the reality of a courtroom fight instead — and possibly a prison cell. "There's no question the Secret Service is likely to push very hard for a criminal charge," says George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley. "They are famous for lacking a sense of ...

Italy's influential Northern League Party has stood out over the past decade for its particular knack in finding new ways of offending people based on country of origin and color of skin. In 2003, Umberto Bossi, founder of the party, which once espoused separatism, told an interviewer that police should open fire on the boatloads of undocumented Africans arriving on Italian shores, calling the would-be immigrants "bingo-bongos." Other Northern League pols have proposed everything from separate trains ...

Despite the way it feels, loneliness often has nothing to do with being alone. For some people, feelings of isolation are sharpest during times that are in fact defined by togetherness — celebrations or the holidays, for instance. Walk into a bustling shopping mall or a buzzing holiday party this time of year, and even within a crowd — or perhaps especially in a crowd — it's possible to feel unbearably alone. New research from experts in neuroscience and ...

After weeks of calls by the Japanese government to do something about deflation and the fast appreciating yen, the Bank of Japan held an emergency meeting Tuesday — and decided what the world's second largest economy needs is more money. Central bank governor Masaaki Shirakawa announced steps to step up monetary easing by injecting 10 trillion yen into Japan's financial system. Shirakawa told reporters that these steps could be considered "quantitative easing in a broad sense." The eight-member ...

Tareq and Michaele Salahi were hoping for reality-TV stardom when they strolled uninvited into a Nov. 24 White House state dinner. Legal experts say the party-crashing duo may have to settle for the reality of a courtroom fight instead — and possibly a prison cell. "There's no question the Secret Service is likely to push very hard for a criminal charge," says Jonathan Turley, law professor at George Washington University. "They are famous for lacking a sense of ...

On Dec. 1, 1959, representatives from a dozen countries, including the U.S., Japan and the U.K. met in Washington to sign a treaty intended to keep the Cold War out of the coldest place on Earth. Fifty years later, the Antarctic Treaty is still in effect, making it one of the world's most successful international agreements, with its member nations still meeting once a year. The pact calls for keeping Antarctica a continent free of weapons and reserved for ...

If you haven't been listening to pop radio in the past few months, you've missed the rise of two seemingly opposing trends. In a medium in which mediocre singing has never been a bar to entry, a lot of pop vocals suddenly sound great. Better than great: note- and pitch-perfect, as if there's been an unspoken tightening of standards at record labels or an evolutionary leap in the development of vocal cords. At the other extreme are a few ...

There's baking soda and vinegar, gasoline and a match, acid and eyeballs and Oprah and James Frey. Or wait — should we scratch that last pair off the list? Has the notorious and telegenic feud between the two cooled? According to an article in Vanity Fair, which has been confirmed by Oprah's folks, the talk-show host recently reached out to the best-selling author she annihilated on live TV a few years ago for fibbing in his memoir. ...

Barack Obama arrived in Strasbourg on Friday for this weekend's NATO summit enthusing about the military organization, which he described at a joint press conference with French President Nicolas Sarkozy as "the most successful alliance in modern history." That it may have been. But Obama's praise contrasts starkly with the scathing assessment of the state of NATO, now 60 years old, by European military analysts, who say that the gap in military capability between the United ...

The latest U.S. nuclear showdown doesn't involve a foreign enemy. Instead it pits President Barack Obama against his Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, and concerns the question of whether America needs a new generation of nuclear warheads. While serving under former President George W. Bush, Gates had repeatedly called for the Reliable Replacement Warhead program to be put into operation, because the nation's current nukes — mostly produced in the 1970s and '80s — are growing so old that ...