As times get tough, people look for change. Not just new presidents and prime ministers, but change they can count on -- or, at least, count. And they're willing to turn over couch covers and seat cushions to find it. As the financial crisis thrust billion-dollar figures onto the front pages, it also has cast a spotlight on how we perceive and use the smallest of currencies -- namely, metal coins. In Thailand, the Treasury Department has found that coin ...

Over this past week, I had some interesting conversations with colleagues who are also health care professionals. These conversations usually start with, "You know what I hate about the media ... ?" Now, over the past eight years, I have grown accustomed to being engaged in these sort of discussions where I am asked about everything the "media" have reported over the past few months, and asked to defend things point by point. It can be a challenging task. ...

Relatives of three American hikers detained in Iran are still waiting for news about their loved ones. More than a month has passed since Iranian authorities detained Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Josh Fattal after they strayed into Iran -- by accident, a friend and relatives say -- while hiking in northern Iraq. Their relatives in the United States have heard nothing about their fate, they said Tuesday on CNN's "American Morning." "We know they're being detained in Iran. Beyond ...

Hours after Turkey and Armenia announced a tentative, Swiss-mediated peace deal, opposition politicians in Turkey were blasting the proposal. The plan would normalize relations and open the common border between the two neighbors. Political analysts warn that there are still immense hurdles left, before Armenians and Turks can overcome nearly a century of bad blood and re-open a border that has been sealed shut for more then fifteen years. In a joint press statement released late Monday night, Switzerland, Armenia ...

Fiji has been suspended from the Commonwealth after its military rulers failed to respond to a demand to restore democracy in the Pacific island nation, the organization said Tuesday. "This is an announcement I make with deep regret -- it is a step the Commonwealth is now obliged to take, and one that it takes in sorrow," Commonwealth Secretary-General, Kamalesh Sharma, said in a statement. The 53-nation group gave Fiji's leadership a September 1 deadline to announce democratic elections for ...

An online petition demanding a formal apology from the British government for its treatment of World War II code-breaker Alan Turing is gaining momentum. Turing was subjected to chemical castration in 1952 after being found guilty of the charge of gross indecency for having a homosexual relationship, an illegal act at the time. He committed suicide two years later. More than 17,000 people have added their signatures to the petition since it opened three weeks ago, urging the government to ...

At least 1,000 prisoners are on death row in Iraq, which now has one of the highest rates of execution in the world, the human rights group Amnesty International says in a report being released Tuesday. The courts that sentence people to death do not meet international standards, the report charged, and Iraqi authorities "provide very little information on executions, and some have been carried out secretly." It criticizes the Central Criminal Court of Iraq and the Supreme Iraqi Criminal ...

Switzerland's top private bankers are convinced they can avoid a damaging witch-hunt over their activities by U.S. authorities, in the wake of UBS's tax row. In interviews with the Financial Times, senior executives of Credit Suisse and Julius Baer, the country's number two and number three private bank businesses after UBS, both said they were sanguine. The comments came shortly before Éric Woerth, France's budget minister, claimed in media interviews on Sunday that the authorities there had gained access to ...

Now comes the hard part. Handed a sweeping mandate for change, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) begins the formidable task of delivering on a laundry list of promises intended to lift the country after its worst recession since World War II. Voters -- skeptical, pessimistic and impatient -- are unlikely to give the party, which has never held office, much time to make good. Japan is witnessing historic highs in unemployment and experiencing ramifications like homelessness for the first ...

If you happened on Friday morning to walk into the Temple of Earth in Beijing — the nearly 500-year-old monument where Chinese emperors once prayed for good harvests — you would have noticed a steady drip. The environmental group Greenpeace placed ice sculptures of 100 children — made of the glacial meltwater that feeds China's great rivers — inside the temple, to symbolize the risk that climate change and disappearing ice poses to the more than 1 billion people ...