After 26 years as a nun, Jesme Raphael gave up her robes and walked out of the Congregation of the Mother of Carmel, the Catholic order in Kerala, India, that had been her home for three decades. Two years later, Raphael, now 53, has come out with her memoirs, Amen: An Autobiography of A Nun, cataloging lurid details of bullying, sexual abuse and homosexuality in the oldest Catholic women's order in the idyllic coastal state in southern India. Shocking as ...

Once a quarter, the FDIC does something which seems to have little purpose. It releases its list of "problem" banks. These are institutions which face a high risk of failure because of their balance sheets and business prospects. The agency keeps a particularly watchful eye on them because it could be called on at any moment to take them over. The list for the final quarter of 2008 had 252 banks on it. This figure was up nearly 50% from ...

As President Barack Obama prepares to green-light a plan to withdraw most U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 18 months, he'll face skepticism from some military commanders who fear the withdrawal may be too hasty to maintain the country's recent security gains. But the President ought to be reassured by the assessment of Marine Major General John Kelly, who just completed a 13-month tour as the top U.S. commander in Anbar province. Late in the summer of ...

Sirens breaking the silence of the night, cars engulfed by meter-high flames. This is not a scene from the banlieues of Paris, but from the trendy Eastern Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg, where in recent weeks an ongoing battle against gentrification has intensified. In the past two months alone, 29 cars — mostly luxury brands like Mercedes, BMW and Porsche — have been set ablaze in Berlin . In a letter published online in January, a leftist radical group called ...

Dangerous. Misguided. Untenable. Those were just some of the criticisms leveled at amateur psychologist Judith Rich Harris and the conclusions in her controversial book The Nurture Assumption when it was first published a decade ago. In it, Harris argues it's not what parents do or say that determines who their children become — what really matters is the influence of peers. Ten years on, however, with parents seeming to worry more than ever about what it takes to raising a smart, decent kid, Harris's message ...

"Smile, you're in Swat," reads a billboard on the main road into the lush green honeymooners' valley once dubbed the "Switzerland of Asia". But over the past two years, Swat has been turned into a playground for the Taliban. And it may be the Taliban, and their fellow Islamists, who have most reason to smile as a result of the government's decision, last week, to end its floundering military campaign and instead ...

Hundreds of thousands of workers filled the streets of Dublin on Saturday to protest the government response to Ireland's economic downturn. But these days, visitors to California's most famous ZIP code are more likely to take note of the empty storefronts and deep-discount signs. Call it recession, 90210 style. Fewer sales have meant fewer tax dollars even for this well-funded city. City officials say they expect tax revenues to drop by about $24 million over the next 16 months. They ...

The Lamborghinis and Bentleys still cruise Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. But these days, visitors to California's most famous ZIP code are more likely to take note of the empty storefronts and deep-discount signs. Call it recession, 90210 style. Fewer sales have meant fewer tax dollars even for this well-funded city. City officials say they expect tax revenues to drop by about $24 million over the next 16 months. They say, as far as they know, that's the biggest single ...

Tang Hui and his family prospered as migrant workers during China's economic boom, earning $10,000 a year: enough to build a house, send a cousin to school and pay for his grandmother's medical bills. But those good days are over. The family's cash earnings have evaporated, snatched away by a manufacturing crash cascading across China caused by falling global demand for its goods. The nine people in the Tang family are facing an income of zero; their best ...

Masked teenagers lob bricks at police shields, middle-aged women wave banners and chant slogans against repression, while police tanks fire water cannons into rowdy crowds. These images may evoke anti-globalization protests at some high-powered economic summit, but in northern Mexico, they're the latest flash point in the nation's incessant drug war. Daily demonstrations demanding that the army leave Mexico's streets have erupted in towns and cities along Mexico's border with Texas and down the coast of the Gulf of ...