When an Amsterdam court acquitted far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders of all charges of discrimination and inciting hatred against Muslims on June 23, it seemed a fitting climax to a week that saw the end of the decade-long Dutch experiment with integration. Judges ruled that although the comments the politician made in the Dutch press and on the internet between October 2006 and March 2008 comparing Islam to Nazism may be offensive, they are nonetheless legal and part of a legitimate government ...

Our marriages often provoke us to throw the china and utter the unforgivables. The context is usually personal, not political, but either way, passions run high. In May, barring some unforeseen procedural hindrance, gay couples will wed for the first time ever in the U.S. They will have that opportunity by order of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which ruled last week that it is unconstitutional to deny them marriage licenses. Gays and lesbians across the country celebrated. Hundreds of ...

Do students have a First Amendment right to make fun of their principals and teachers on Facebook and other social-media sites? Or can schools discipline them for talking out of school? In a pair of free-speech rulings, a federal appeals court in Pennsylvania last week came down on the side of the students. In both cases, the court said that schools were wrong to suspend students for posting parodies of ...

Correction Appended: November 27, 2006 It would be a lot easier to enjoy your life if there weren't so many things trying to kill you every day. The problems start even before you're fully awake. There's the fall out of bed that kills 600 Americans each year. There's the early-morning heart attack, which is 40% more common than those that strike later in the day. There's the fatal plunge down the stairs, the bite of sausage that gets ...

"Why are the Christians claiming Allah?" asks businessman Rahim Ismail, 47, his face contorted in rage and disbelief. He shakes his head and raises his voice while waiting for a taxi along Jalan Tun Razak, a main thoroughfare in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's capital. "Everybody in the world knows Allah is the Muslim God and belongs to Muslims. I cannot understand why the Christians want to claim Allah as their God," Rahim says as passersby, mostly Muslims, gather ...

Muammar Gaddafi's options for a peaceful exit may have finally run out. For the second time in seven weeks, South African President Jacob Zuma on Monday failed to persuade the Libyan leader to abandon his 42-year rule. Gaddafi's refusal to heed the advice of longtime friends in the African Union raises the likelihood that his reign will end either with his indictment by the International Criminal Court in The Hague or with his death in ...

Luke Perkins has been living "two disparate lives," court documents say: one at school in Berthoud, Colo., where the autistic boy was making some progress, and the other outside school, where the 9-year-old was so unruly he could not take part in such basic activities as going to church or eating in a restaurant. He became so destructive at night that his family resorted to locking him in his bedroom, which had been stripped of furniture because he kept smearing ...

France is having its Anita Hill moment. When the law professor testified before a Senate committee in 1991 that her former boss Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her, he denied everything and was elevated to the Supreme Court. But the hearings were a turning point. Women suddenly said that the Mad Men style of behavior they had put up with for so long at work — the leering, the inappropriate touching, the sexual banter — was not ...

Legless women excited Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch to pity. In 1860 he gave $5,000 to the Massachusetts General Hospital for the purchase of wooden legs. Meticulous, he specified: "I should desire that female patients should be preferred to males." For 69 years the hospital has been obeying his instructions, but the need has been dwindling. Rare is it now that amputations must be made. Hence the hospital recently asked a Massachusetts probate court, and last week was granted, permission to ...

The hunt for a monster can warp the pursuers. The wanted man was one of the most loathsome creatures of modern times: "Ivan the Terrible," who hacked at his naked victims with a sword as he herded them by the thousands into the gas chambers he operated at the Nazi death camp Treblinka. American and Israeli officials were certain they had found him in John, formerly Ivan, Demjanjuk, a retired suburban Cleveland autoworker of Ukrainian descent. He was extradited to ...