CAN a nation with a trillion-dollar economy be running out of money? That startling question is forcing itself upon every government official who must shape a budget, from President Nixon down to the head of the smallest local mosquito-abatement district. By most measures of private wealth, the U.S. is the world's richest country. But in terms of its ability to pay for the public services—health care, education, welfare, garbage pickup, pollution control, police and fire protection—that make the life of ...

On a bright September afternoon last week, the mothers of Chicago's South Side brought their children to a vigil for a dead boy they had never met. They wanted their kids to see the scrawny corpse in the loose tan suit lying in a coffin, next to his stuffed animals, finally harmless. The big kids dragged the little kids up to look at the stitches on his face where the bullets fired into the back of his head had torn ...

This Saturday, April 16, is the fourth annual Record Store Day, when around 700 independent record shops across the country celebrate their continued existence as a cultural institution. Some will have sales, giveaways, performances and signings; upwards of 200 different limited-edition vinyl records and CDs will be appearing on their racks, too. Though most of the big music chains have shuttered their doors in recent years, many smaller, quirkier stores have stayed afloat by cultivating loyal customers ...

The headquarters of Peru's Interbank are hard to miss. While the building is not the tallest in the capital, Lima, it is the most entertaining on the city's otherwise drab main drag. A slight tilt has earned it the nickname the "Leaning Power of Lima," and multicolored lights ripple along the façade as night falls, providing eye candy for commuters stuck in rush-hour traffic. What's going on inside the building is also attracting attention, but much further afield. Interbank, like ...

For all its reputation as the city of tomorrow, a place that will marry capitalism and cool as effortlessly as New York City or London, the city of Shanghai, truth be told, is not a particularly pleasant place during the summer. It's a steambath, and when the occasional typhoon blows through, it will rain for three days nonstop. Many of the streets simply reek as garbage rots in the oppressive heat. Most people, if they have a choice, try to ...

An old grain warehouse collapsed in southwest China on Saturday, killing 10 people and wounding nine, local media reported.

A man wearing an explosives-laden belt blew himself up during a conference between Shia and Sunni groups in southwestern Iran on Sunday, killing or wounding at least 60 people, local media said.

Hundreds remained missing Sunday beneath mud and debris in Indonesian villages from a pair of devastating earthquakes that struck the country at its center. Some 800 people are missing, and another 602 are dead, said Priyodo Kardono of Indonesia's national disaster management agency. A 7.6-magnitude quake struck Sumatra on Wednesday, and a 6.6-magnitude earthquake hit Thursday morning in the same region. Wednesday's quake reduced buildings to rubble in the city of Padang, the capital of West Sumatra. As many as ...

An Australian man has been arrested for allegedly fathering four children with a daughter he repeatedly raped for more than 30 years, local media reported Thursday.

The Obama administration has unveiled a government "app store" designed to push the federal bureaucracy into the era of cloud computing. The change means some federal employees will begin using services like YouTube, Gmail and WordPress, which store data on private Internet servers instead of on those paid for with public money. The process will start small but will ramp up quickly, Vivek Kundra, the U.S. chief information officer, said in a blog post on Tuesday. "Our policies ...