The post office is gone. The school is gone. City Hall is gone. Most of the churches are gone. Nearly every building in Smithville, Mississippi is gone — or so heavily damaged they will have to be demolished. The devastation from last week's F5 tornado is so widespread, so absolute, that it's easier to tally what remains: The telephone company. Coker's Han-D-Mart. And an unshakeable sense of faith. Sunday morning, amid the droning of chainsaws, an estimated 500 ...

In July, 64-year-old Patrice Fike sold her home in Coral Gables, Fla., and her Mercedes, stored most of her furniture and moved into a one-room studio where many of her meals are provided. If she sounds like a retiree relocating to an assisted-living facility, guess again. Fike is living in dormitory housing for the Episcopal Church's General Theological Seminary in New York City, where she will spend three years and $100,000 of her savings and retirement income to prepare ...

Shopping last week in her local New York City grocery store, Elise Mackin, 32, filled her cart with items she knows to be good for her family — whole grains, fruits and veggies — and shied away from products that contained less wholesome ingredients. "Trans fats are out," she said, "and anything with high-fructose corn syrup." The evils of trans fats are well known, but what's wrong with high-fructose corn syrup? "It's bad for you," said Mackin, ...

On May 17, 1980, all hell broke loose in Liberty City, Fla. A Tampa jury acquitted four white policemen in the beating death of a black insurance agent, and the heart of Miami's black community burst into violence. Three days later, 18 people were dead, 1,100 arrested, and some $100 million in property destroyed. The riots left Liberty City among the least redeemable pieces of real estate in the nation. No private investor in his right mind would risk opening ...

If human rights workers and journalists are ever allowed into the besieged southern Syrian city of Dara'a near the Jordanian border, what horrors will they find? Syrians always had good reason to avoid rebelling against their authoritarian regime, ignoring early calls to join the Arab Spring. The stakes — as the world can now see through the spotty news from social media and smuggled amateur video — were always going to be extremely high. On Monday, the government ...

A gang film called The Warriors attracts off-screen rumblesStaring from the poster, they looked like a nightmare of what might be, that terrifying day when the street gangs take over the city, any city. Some of them wore leather vests over bare chests. Others had on Arab headdresses. A few, their faces painted harlequin colors, wore baseball uniforms and carried bats. Massed as far as the eye could see, all looked menacing, and the threat was underscored by the text above the picture: "These are the ...

As the U.S. Open gets under way Monday in New York City, the state of U.S. tennis couldn't be much worse. Earlier this month, for the first time since computerized world rankings began in 1973, no American man was ranked in the top 10 — though Andy Roddick has since slipped back into the ninth spot, as of Aug. 29. There are only four Americans among the 32 seeded players at the U.S. Open, and the ...

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 Italian daily La Stampa. VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI isn't alone in his apartment at the Vatican. Four "guardian angels" help him, and recently there has been an addition to the personnel at his service. For the past six years, the pontiff's Vatican apartment has been run ...

In the central square of Crystal City stands a statue of Popeye, a symbol of the town's claim that it is "the spinach capital of the world." Otherwise, Crystal City is like a lot of other farm towns in South Texas. Mexican-Americans outnumber Anglo-Americans four to one, but the Anglos run the place.Last week, with Texas Rangers standing by to keep order, hundreds of Crystal City Mexicans gathered round the statue of Popeye. It was election day in Crystal City, and a revolt was ...

Rodrigo Rosenberg became a household name in Guatemala after he posthumously accused the President and First Lady of ordering his Mother's Day murder last year. His words, left behind in a video taped days before he was shot to death on a tree-lined boulevard, sent tens of thousands of protesters into the streets and sparked youth-led reform movements. But the case that once seemed powerful enough to topple a presidency came to a bizarre end on Jan. ...