So who would you like to hack today? A bank, a website, a corporation or perhaps a government agency that's rubbing you the wrong way? The hacktivist group LulzSec is taking requests. Or maybe you'd like to get your hands on some stolen credit-card accounts to boost your personal spending level or purchase some malware that will divert a business's payments from its vendors to you. A malware seller called Zeus not only can do that but ...

Crisis, drama, Herculean, Sisyphean, hubris and catharsis: the Greek language offers some apt words to describe Europe's current dilemma. But classical references are of limited value when it comes to unpicking the modern-day Gordian Knot that Greece represents for the euro zone. Although European leaders cheered Wednesday's confidence vote confirming a new Greek unity government, they were well aware that the political tensions in Athens are but one part of a broader drama that could yet shatter the ...

The British Government is said to have compiled a secret list of twelve paintings, now in private British collections, which authorities consider too precious to let England lose at any price. If such a list exists it could hardly fail to include Titian's Diana, and Actaeon, Reynolds' Master Crewe, Romney's Gower Children, Raeburn's The MacNab, Gainsborough's-portrait of Anne, Duchess of Cumberland , Lawrence's Lord Lyndoch, two of Lord Ellesmere's Raphaels, or Rembrandt's Rabbi in a Chair. One picture which might ...

Work in environmental journalism for very long and you can eventually become inured to catastrophe. Every ecosystem is on the brink of collapse; every endangered species is just a few steps from extinction; every government decision to authorize an oil well or a coal mine is the one that will push carbon emissions over the edge. The language of environmentalism is the language of scarcity and loss, a constantly repeated message that we cannot continue living the way we are...or else. Sometimes the sheer, ...

Of all the things that have changed in China over the past 30 years, transportation has undergone one of the most obvious of transformations. Where city streets once swarmed with bicycles, they are now full of automobiles. Cars clog intersection and expressways. Their exhaust clouds the sky and the air is full of the sound of horns. But zipping through the congestion is the vanguard of another transportation revolution: vehicles that use no gas, emit no exhaust and are ...

More than once, the world has pledged never again: after the Holocaust in World War II, after Rwanda in 1994, then Bosnia, and then most recently after the slaughter in Darfur. So it is no surprise that when reports of alleged ethnic cleansing begin bleeding out, Western policy makers start to squirm. This raw nerve was on exhibit once again this past week, when on Wednesday President Obama devoted a special two minute radio address to an ...

The streets of central Kabul's bustling open-air Mandavi market was cleared of shopkeepers and shoppers early this afternoon after Taliban suicide bombers and gunmen attacked a large police station on the area's main street. The three attackers killed five civilians, three policemen and an intelligence officer when they breached the gate of the compound and opened fire, the Interior Ministry confirmed in a statement, according to Afghan news sources agencies. The insurgents were killed when the police ...

Tunnel Sous La Manche? Last week the dream of a 3,000-mile sub-Atlantic railway seemed to grow ever so slightly less mad, as Britons and Frenchmen got down again to dealing seriously with their half-century-old project of driving a double-track tunnel under the English Channel, 21 miles across. In London the French Ambassador, popular M. Aimé Joseph de Fleuriau, officially declared at a dinner tendered him in the House of Commons, "When the British Government and the British Nation are ready ...

Charles Overby is not optimistic about his future. The bearded American works in a so-called smart-shop, selling hallucinogenic mushrooms in Amsterdam's touristy Rembrantsplein area. When he first arrived in the Netherlands in 1998, paddos, as they are locally known, were legal, and the country seemed like an enlightened sanctuary of mind expansion. "I consider myself as the facilitator of a shamanic journey, and I take that very seriously," he says. But now that Overby is planning to ...

"Conservatism is true." That's what George Will told me when I interviewed him as an eager student many years ago. His formulation might have been a touch arrogant, but Will's basic point was intelligent. Conservatism, he explained, was rooted in reality. Unlike the abstract theories of Marxism and socialism, it started not from an imagined society but from the world as it actually exists. From Aristotle to Edmund Burke, the greatest conservative thinkers have said that to ...