Just in case we needed more evidence of the hardship inflicted by the country's devastating economic crisis, earlier this month we got it: more Americans than ever are receiving food stamps. The Department of Agriculture reported that 35.1 million people relied on government help to buy groceries in June — 713,000 more than in the previous month and a 22% jump from the previous year's figure. The odds are better than ever that when a shopper wheels ...

Israeli officials say it so often they've taken to apologizing for using the example, acknowledging it's become a clich: Israel and Hamas can lob shells into and out of the Gaza Strip indefinitely without risking actual war, the explanation begins. Each side wants to appear tough, and over four years the call and response has grown as delicately calibrated as a minuet. But should one of Hamas' hastily fired, unguided rockets happen to land on a kindergarten, ...

Just past noon, Anna Chernova, a 68-year-old retiree, pushed her black metal shopping cart into an Aldi store here. After arriving from Russia 16 years ago, Chernova regularly shopped at conventional supermarkets like Dominick's and Jewel, but no more. "They're too expensive," Chernova says, clutching her shopping list with one hand. Now she visits Aldi once a week, drawn by the deep discounter's $2.69 1-gal. jugs of milk and 33-cent boxes of salt. "I've got to save ...

For 13 chilling days in October 1962, it seemed that John F. Kennedy and Nikita S. Khrushchev might be playing out the opening scenes of World War III. The Cuban missile crisis was a uniquely compact moment of history. For the first time in the nuclear age, the two superpowers found themselves in a sort of moral road test of their apocalyptic powers.The crisis blew up suddenly. The U.S. discovered that the Soviet Union, despite repeated and solemn denials, was installing nuclear missiles in Cuba. An American ...

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration say that very low levels of radiation have turned up in a sample of milk from Washington state. But federal officials say consumers should not worry. The FDA said such findings are to be expected in the coming days because of the nuclear crisis in Japan, and that the levels are expected to drop relatively quickly. Results from a March 25 milk sample taken from Spokane, Wash., show levels ...

Know what's contagious? Fear is contagious. On the day more than 1 million Egyptians took to the streets demanding the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, the monarch governing a desert kingdom right next door saw fit to dismiss his Prime Minister and appoint ... a new government. This was in Jordan, where the statement issued by the Palace of King Abdullah II made clear the first orders to the newly minted Premier, former general Marouf Bakhit: "to ...

Leaders of democracies, like bear wranglers at the circus, must be experts at reading moods. Most of the time, the leaders of our two major parties seem to have much the same sense of the voters' basic concerns. But for the past two years, the parties have been operating under very different understandings of the public temper. Democrats believed that the economic crisis made the electorate yearn for security, thereby creating an openness to large public programs. They enacted a gargantuan stimulus bill, expensive ...

The pregnancy-center clinic, with its new ultrasound machine, has been open only since December, but already the staff can count the women who came in considering an abortion and changed their minds: five women converted, six lives saved, they declare, since one was carrying twins. "They connected," nurse Joyce Wilson says, recalling the reaction of the women who saw the filmy image of their fetus onscreen. "They bonded. You could just see it. One girl got off the table and said, ...

Actress Elizabeth Hurley had one. So did supermodel Claudia Schiffer. Ex-Spice Girl Victoria Beckham and singer Toni Braxton had two each. TV mom Patricia Heaton had four. They're so popular among the upper class in Brazil that the only way you won't get one in Rio de Janeiro, as the joke goes, is if your doctor gets stuck in traffic. What all these women had are C-sections. Not the emergency caesareans that have been performed for hundreds of years to ...

Correction Appended: Friday, March 18, 2011It may soon become much harder to get your hands on the wheel of a Prius. The earthquake and tsunami that have caused over 10,000 deaths, swept away whole towns and plunged Japan into a nuclear crisis will have an impact, albeit a much less dire one, on U.S. car buyers as well: the best-selling hybrid car in America could soon be out of stock. Toyota's Prius, unlike most other vehicles by ...