The British Government is said to have compiled a secret list of twelve paintings, now in private British collections, which authorities consider too precious to let England lose at any price. If such a list exists it could hardly fail to include Titian's Diana, and Actaeon, Reynolds' Master Crewe, Romney's Gower Children, Raeburn's The MacNab, Gainsborough's-portrait of Anne, Duchess of Cumberland , Lawrence's Lord Lyndoch, two of Lord Ellesmere's Raphaels, or Rembrandt's Rabbi in a Chair. One picture which might ...

Spare a thought for Jordan's King Abdullah as he visits Washington this week, complaining of the dire consequences of the failure of his Israeli neighbor to make peace with the Palestinians: it's not easy being a monarch in a Middle East buffeted by the democratic winds of the Arab Spring, and even less so when your country is wracked with rising tensions between its indigenous Bedouins and Palestinians who comprise as much as half of the population. ...

The death toll from the battle between Jamaican security forces and supporters of alleged drug lord Christopher Coke that erupted over the weekend reached 30 on Tuesday with no end yet in sight. But whether or not Jamaican authorities succeed in apprehending Coke, who faces extradition to the U.S., the mayhem threatens to bring down Prime Minister Bruce Golding — a shake-up that would be welcomed by many crime-weary Jamaicans. As a front-page editorial Tuesday in the daily ...

All happy families are alike, wrote Tolstoy, but unhappy ones are unhappy in their own way. Perhaps none was unhappier last Thursday than the family of Eileen Franklin-Lipsker, who took the stand in municipal court in Redwood City, Calif., to accuse her father, George Franklin Sr., of sexually molesting and then beating to death her best friend, Susan Nason, in her presence more than 20 years ago. When Franklin-Lipsker, now 29, first made that stunning disclosure last November, it broke ...

After first sending Spain's agricultural industry into a tailspin by falsely accusing that country's cucumbers, German authorities on June 5 pointed a finger of blame at local beansprouts — specifically the produce of an organic farm in the village of Bienenbttel, around 70 kilometers south of Hamburg — as the source of an outbreak of deadly E. Coli infections. But the next day, the Ministry of Agriculture of Lower Saxony, which includes Hamburg and Bienenbttel, declared that ...

German authorities are urging consumers not to panic as an outbreak of a virulent strain of enterohemorrhagic E. coli known as EHEC has killed at least 14 people, with no sign of abating. The bacterial outbreak — which was first reported on May 20 in northern Germany — is believed to have infected around 1,200 people, but officials fear it hasn't yet reached its peak. After scientists in the north German port city of Hamburg traced the ...

After Andy Williams, 15, was arrested for opening fire on his classmates in Santee, Calif., last week, his mother Linda Williams wept before a TV crew and said, "He's lost. His future's gone." No grownup in his life seems to have been looking out for that future before the shooting. Charles Andrew Williams had been a lost boy for some time--hopelessly adrift in a dysfunctional, anonymous suburban landscape, craving acceptance but too often meeting rejection instead. His schoolmates bullied him. His ...

When the authorities at the Rafah border terminal closed down their offices on Saturday, they were wrapping up the first day of a new era in Egyptian foreign policy. In a move hailed by many Palestinians and Egyptians as a break from years of unpopular Mubarak-era diplomacy — the joint enforcement, with Israel, of a four-year blockade on the Gaza Strip — Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces launched a new set of border rules that ...

This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in the leading German daily Die Welt. "Dear Raymond," begins a letter written to Roman Polanski by his sister Annette on Jan. 10, 1957. Polanski was 23 years old at the time, a French-born Polish citizen and was studying film in Lodz, Poland; his sister was in Paris. The ...

On Nov. 27, 2005, a man in Faribault, Minn., received an e-mail with a subject line that read, "Melissa goodbye to Li Dao." It was a suicide note, scribbled digitally, sent by a woman to her online pen pal who had actively encouraged her to embrace death. The only catch: Li Dao was not a real person, and, according to authorities, the virtual advice was not an act of empathy but an attempt to manipulate Melissa into ...