So, what exactly is NATO's purpose? That question hangs like a cloud of existential angst over the Atlantic Alliance's 60th birthday celebration this weekend. The festivities, which will span the Franco-German border, are suffused with the symbolism of a Cold War that brought NATO into being but whose end left the Alliance with no clear mission or identity. Hence the title of this anniversary summit: "NATO in 2020: What Lies Ahead?" Today's ...

The esoteric world of theoretical physics went into spasms of enthusiasm last week when Brookhaven National Laboratory announced the identification of a new elementary particle. It is not the biggest particle known or the smallest, and it lives only one ten-billionth of a second. But physicists all over the world were stirred up because it has almost precisely the mass that was predicted for it by long-range theory. It was rather as if Columbus, sailing across the Atlantic, had really found ...

There were a couple of strange things about the Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 that taxied out along one of London Heathrow's two main runways and took off into the bright sky late Sunday morning. First, there were only five people on board, while more than 100 watched intently from a nearby hangar. Second, the plane was the first commercial jet ever to fly on biofuel, a fuel produced from plant matter instead of petroleum or other fossil ...

On May 4, 2000, Lucie Blackman, wearing high heels and a silver and black ensemble coordinated to match her Samsonite luggage, disembarked from a 13-hour Virgin Atlantic flight from London to Tokyo and stepped into Japan's national nightmare. A former British Airways stewardess who prided herself on being, "chic, sophisticated and smart," Lucie sometimes did her hair even before going to the gym for a workout. So it made sense she would have her hair freshly coiffed now, the natural ...

Vigor was the byword of the Kennedy years. After the wrinkled decorum of Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy's America would feature people like him, the kind whose hair waved in the wind as they scrimmaged on the lawn at Hyannis Port, Mass. But for more than a decade now, as biographers have burrowed under the New Frontier, another J.F.K. has come into the picture. That would be the one with a multitude of serious illnesses whose life was ...

Vigor was the byword of the Kennedy years. After the wrinkled decorum of Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy's America would feature people like him, the kind whose hair waved in the wind as they scrimmaged on the lawn at Hyannis Port, Mass. But for more than a decade now, as biographers have burrowed under the New Frontier, another J.F.K. has come into the picture. That would be the one with a multitude ...

We'll never know what it was like to be aboard Air France Flight 447 as it plunged into the Atlantic Ocean on May 31, apparently killing all 228 aboard. For now, the closest we may get is listening to the passengers on a similar Airbus 330 jet whose flight computer put it into an uncommanded dive over northwestern Australia last October. Qantas Flight 72 had been airborne for three hours, flying uneventfully on autopilot from Singapore to Perth, ...

Nokia's Stephen Elop certainly has a way with words. In February, in what might have been the most brutally honest corporate memo in decades, the recently installed CEO compared his company to an oil worker trapped on a burning drilling rig, facing a terrible choice. "He was surrounded by flames," Elop wrote. "Through the smoke and heat, he barely made his way out of the chaos to the platform's edge. When he looked down ... all he could see were ...

A memorial cruise is scheduled to set sail 100 years after the sinking of the Titantic, following the same trans-Atlantic route as the ill-fated ship, according to organizers. The Titanic Memorial Cruise is to set sail in April 2012, departing from Southampton, England, on April 8, just as the Titanic did. On April 15, the ship -- the Balmoral -- will arrive at the spot in the North Atlantic where the Titanic sank after it collided with an iceberg. Passengers ...

Dozens of trans-Atlantic flights from the United Kingdom have been delayed after a glitch in an air traffic control system in Scotland, officials said Saturday.