With their nation under high security alert, South Koreans mourned a former leader at a funeral ceremony Friday morning. Officials and dignitaries gathered in Seoul's Kyungbok Palace to honor former President Roh Moo-Hyun, who committed suicide last week. South Koreans poured into the streets to catch a glimpse of the black Cadillac making a five-and-a-half hour journey from Roh's home in the village of Bongha to the capital. Some bowed their heads or wept openly. Others, still stunned from the ...

Ask Steve "Lips" Kudlow how his band, Anvil, overcame bad management, a dead colleague, cruddy jobs, unpaid tour bills, raging arguments and now mockery as a Spinal Tap clone, and he has one word: "kismet." He may be right. When Sacha Gervasi, a former teenage Anvil fan-roadie turned Steven Spielberg scriptwriter ("The Terminal"), decided to pursue a documentary about his old heroes, guitarist Kudlow was working part-time in his native Toronto, Ontario, delivering meals to schools. Drummer Robb Reiner was ...

The Cannes Film Festival's highest honor, the Palme d'Or, went on Sunday to Michael Haneke for his film The White Ribbon — both establishing it as the best movie of the festival and triggering the annual debate among critics and fans over whether the award was a revelation or a gross miscarriage of justice on the part of the Cannes jury. 'Twas ever thus. Between 1939-1954, Cannes' highest accolade was called the Grand Prix du Festival International ...

Just over three years and two months ago, Steven Green raped 14-year-old Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi and murdered her, her parents and her six-year-old sister in the family's isolated farm house 20 miles south of Baghdad. On Thursday afternoon, after deliberating on a death sentence for 10 hours over two days, a jury of nine women and three men in Paducah, Kentucky's U.S. District Court declared they could not come to a unanimous decision. As a result, Green will ...

Even "American Idol" winner Kris Allen couldn't believe it. When Allen, the clean-cut guy from Arkansas, triumphed over the spiky-haired rocker Adam Lambert to win season eight of the competition, he seemed positively astounded. So shocked was he that Allen's first words culminated into something that has never been heard in the history of the hit show before -- an acknowledgment that the runner-up "deserved to win." Allen's surprise couldn't begin to match that of viewers. By trouncing the guy-liner ...

It was just two days after the Inauguration when an e-mail went around to Michelle Obama's staff, instructing everyone to be in the East Room of the White House at 3 that afternoon. The First Lady's advisers arrived to find the room filled with ushers and plumbers, electricians and maids and kitchen crew gathered in a huge circle, and Michelle in a T shirt and ponytail, very casual and very much in charge. "This is my team that ...

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 ...

He arrives in the early morning hours, when the downtown streets here are empty and quiet. An electric gate jerks to life as the black sedan with tinted windows pulls into a parking lot protected by an iron fence. It's five blocks from the local county jail to the U.S. Federal Courthouse of Western Kentucky. Not even a five-minute drive. This is the only freedom Steven Green knows. He's ushered from the car by a contingent of U.S. marshals. It's ...

For more than a quarter-century, the Tamil Tigers have waged a guerilla war against the Sri Lankan government in their attempt to establish an independent state — which they call Eelam — for minority Hindu Tamils in the north and east of the island nation. Suicide bombings and assassinations have been the group's calling cards, all orchestrated by Velupillai Prabhakaran, who founded the insurgent group in the mid-70s. Now, a months-long push by the Sri Lankan military appears to have ...

Facing the crushing defeat of their 26-year insurgency as Sri Lankan military closes in on the last sliver of territory under their control, the embattled separatist fighters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam are not expected to allow themselves to be taken alive. "LTTE terrorists are preparing for a mass suicide after being effectively cut-off of escape routes, both land and sea and now encircled in a mere 3.5 square kilometer [1.4 square miles] of land ...