Phillip Garrido was registered as a sex offender, required to meet with parole officers and fitted with an ankle bracelet to track his movements -- but nothing prevented him from being around children, according to a victim's advocacy group. Garrido, who is charged with kidnapping and raping Jaycee Lee Dugard -- a young woman police say lived with her two daughters in a huddle of tents and outbuildings hidden behind Garrido's home - was arrested last week along with his ...

Crouching in a verdant pasture in the early summer sun, Eduardo Sousa plucks a few blades of grass and extends them toward a flock of geese. "Hello, my darlings," he coos. "Hello, hello, hello." It is the Spanish farmer's first visit to the Stone Barns Center, a farm and education center dedicated to sustainable agriculture in Pocantico Hills, some 30 miles north of New York City, and Sousa is impressed with what he sees. "If I ...

By 2010, Seoul's women should officially be happy — at least the ones with driver's licenses. In May, the city government started to paint 4,929 public and private parking places pink throughout the city, with thousands more slated to go under the brush next year. The pink parking spots, reserved for women drivers so they don't have to walk so far to work or the mall, are part of the South Korean capital's Women Friendly Seoul Project, an effort ...

With local economies flailing, communities across the U.S. are trying to drum up more action on Main Street. "Buy Local" campaigns are one way to go. But many towns--from Ojai, Calif., to Greensboro, N.C.--are considering going a step further and printing money that can only be spent locally. Issuing an alternative currency is perfectly legal, as long as it is treated as taxable income and consists of paper bills rather than coins. In the U.S., where local currencies ...

Sri Lanka's 26 years of civil war effectively ended on May 19, 2009 with a single image. Televisions across the globe broadcast a government-issue photo of slain Tamil Tiger head, Velupillai Prabhakaran, lying on a muddy patch of ground with wide eyes and a fractured skull. His life's end terminated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's decades-long fight for an independent homeland for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority — about ten percent of the population — and a cycle of ...

It's probably been a while since you bought new software. That's because so many tech firms — buoyed by ads placed in Web-based applications like the Google Docs word processor and the thousands of apps on Facebook — can now afford to give their programs away for free. But don't expect the same deal when you're shopping for add-ons to bling out your iPhone. On July 11, Apple will launch its hotly anticipated iPhone App Store — and it'll ...

"Buy Local"—you see the decal in the store window, the sign at the farmer's market, the bright, cheerful logos for Local First Arizona, Think Boise First, Our Milwaukee, and homegrown versions across the states. The apparent message is "let's-support-local-business", a kind of community boosterism. But buying close to home may be more than a feel-good, it's-worth-paying-more-for-local matter. A number of researchers and organizations are taking a closer look at how money flows, and what they're finding shows the profound ...

The economy is losing between 600,000 and 750,000 jobs every month by every measure that the government and analysts use. This rate of job losses may go on for a relatively long period. This trend can cause people to believe that trying to find a job is hopeless and that the tidal wave of the recession will overflow the financial mooring of every person who has ever worked or may want to work again. But, job ...

Jay Leno plans "something really unusual and different" when he hands over "The Tonight Show" to Conan O'Brien on May 29, 17 years after Johnny Carson left the hosting duties to him. But don't expect an emotional final show, since Leno and most of his staff are just moving across the NBC lot to produce a nightly prime time show debuting in September. The traditional desk, chair and guest sofa probably won't follow Leno to his 10 p.m. show, but ...

In a country whose Economics Minister is named Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Freiherr zu Guttenberg, the verdict seems illogical. But on Tuesday, Germany's Federal Constitutional Court rejected a woman's appeal to go by her new married name, Frieda Rosemarie Thalheim-Kunz-Hallstein, arguing that the name is too long. The court was upholding a law introduced in 1993, which banned multiple surnames in Germany. Before this legislation, triple- or quadruple-barreled names were rare, but they existed: there is an ...