Like white picket fences and perfectly manicured lawns, garden gnomes — those colorful residents of front yards the world over — are icons of the suburban ideal: quaint, cheerful and totally inoffensive. But in Germany, one little gnome is stirring up big trouble. In a case that pits art against the country's anti-Nazi laws, prosecutors in the south German city of Nuremberg launched an investigation last week after a gnome giving the Hitler salute was put on display in ...

Entering the Ben M'Sik caves on the outskirts of Casablanca, a visitor goes through a hole in a crumbling concrete wall and down a flight of stairs covered in a slippery layer of mold. At the bottom lies a dimly lit room that houses roughly 100 people. The walls are splintered, the floor damp, and thick blue tarpaulins, pregnant with leaking water, hang from the ceiling. Every morning, the people who call this place home stuff their mattresses into ...

News anchor Marcos Knapp had been broadcasting reports of narco carnage all week from his western state of Michoacan: the mutilated corpses of 12 federal police officers dumped on a road; police headquarters attacked by dozens of gunmen with grenades; three officers called out to a traffic accident and then murdered in an ambush. But, as violent as the incidents were, Knapp was only truly shocked when a caller phoned his news show and said he was one ...

President Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua's macho and mustachioed Sandinista commandante of the 1970s and '80s, may claim the mantle of revolutionary "new man," but Latin America's feminists insist Ortega is a dirty old man. Throughout the continent, Ortega is being hounded by feminist groups over his alleged sexual abuse of stepdaughter Zoilamerica Narvaez during the 1980s. The allegation first surfaced in 1998, but was eventually dismissed by a Sandinista judge without investigation or trial — despite an investigation ...

Throughout his career as a television anchorman, Walter Cronkite had a few memorable run-ins with other powerful figures at CBS News, one of his producers told CNN. Sanford "Sandy" Socolow, who worked at CBS News for 32 years, more than four of them as Cronkite's producer, said Cronkite ran into trouble soon after he took over for Douglas Edwards in the "CBS Evening News" anchor chair. "The first night up, he ended the show by saying, I'm paraphrasing, 'That's the ...

The Catholic Church were presented with a public relations powder keg last March when news broke that a nine-year-old Brazilian girl underwent an abortion after she'd been raped and impregnated with twins by her stepfather. Catholics from Sao Paolo to Paris were outraged after the swift public declaration by the local archbishop, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, that the girl's family, as well as the doctors who performed the abortion, were automatically excommunicated. Monsignor Rino Fisichella, a solidly traditionalist Rome ...

Given its long history of warfare, the United Kingdom is not squeamish about fatalities in time of war and yet a debate has been ignited by the deaths of 15 British soldiers in Afghanistan over the last few weeks. The question now is whether this profound soul-searching results in a more efficient policy towards the war-torn country. The West became involved in fighting in Afghanistan principally because the Taliban government allowed a non-state actor to carry out acts of ...

Police shot and killed two ethnic Uyghurs and wounded another in a Chinese region that has seen violent ethnic strife in recent weeks, state media reported Monday. The police were trying to stop the three people from attacking a fourth person with clubs and knives in Urumqi, Xinjiang, China Radio International reported, citing the local government. All four people involved in the incident were ethnic Uyghurs, a minority Muslim group distinct from China's majority Han population, CRI said. At least ...

One of the results of the ethnic unrest in China's far-western city of Urumqi last Sunday is how difficult it will be to heal the wounds. On both sides of town you have people who suffered and who are still suffering -- whether they are Han Chinese or Uyghurs. I visited the Xinjiang People's Hospital on Wednesday with about 200 other representatives from the local and international media. From July 5, soon after the outbreak of the unrest, to about ...

President Obama arrived in Ghana on Friday for his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa since taking office, sparking excitement in the west African nation. Obama is expected to address lawmakers in the capital city of Accra on Saturday and tour the Cape Coast Castle, which was used in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The Obamas will also visit a hospital that specializes in maternal and child health, said Michelle Gavin, the White House senior director for African affairs. The president, accompanied ...