All that glitters may not be gold, but for Colombia's narco-molls the most important thing is that it glitters. Beauty queens, fashion models, actresses or regular girls made good are lovers of drug capos and above all lovers of the finest luxuries cocaine money can buy. Few are prepared to speak publicly and even less to appear on camera. Those who date mob bosses don't want to blow their cover. That could expose their boyfriends to arrest and themselves to ...

At least eight people were killed Thursday morning when a suicide car bomber rammed a police station in northwest Pakistan, authorities said. Beauty queens, fashion models, actresses or regular girls made good are lovers of drug capos and above all lovers of the finest luxuries cocaine money can buy. Few are prepared to speak publicly and even less to appear on camera. Those who date mob bosses don't want to blow their cover. That could expose their boyfriends to ...

To development experts who have long called for a shift in strategy in the Muslim world, it would seem like cause for celebration. After years of devoting the bulk of U.S. aid to Pakistan to military assistance, Washington is about to shift that equation. Under legislation approved by the Senate last week and by the House on Wednesday, Pakistan can expect to receive $1.5 billion of non-military aid for each of the next five years, which triples previous ...

Oliver Yeh is the kind of guy who cooks up ideas so kooky, so out-of-this-world, that even his fellow MIT students tend to roll their eyes when they hear them. But that never stops him. His latest concept -- to launch a camera into near-space using a weather balloon, a cell phone, hand warmers and a drink cooler -- fell flat when he sent out an e-mail message to dozens of his classmates, asking for help. Unfazed, Yeh managed to ...

Doctors had to amputate the leg of a 13-year-old snack vendor who was thrown off a moving train after he reportedly did not have money to bribe a guard, authorities said Sunday.

Former Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian and his wife, former first lady Wu Shu-chen, were convicted Friday on corruption and money laundering charges and sentenced to life in prison, according to officials at Taipei City Court. They also were fined 200 million New Taiwan dollars (U.S.$6.1 million). Last week a court sentenced Wu to a year in prison for lying to prosecutors in her husband's corruption case. She was convicted on charges that she helped her son, daughter and son-in-law provide ...

Now comes the hard part. Handed a sweeping mandate for change, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) begins the formidable task of delivering on a laundry list of promises intended to lift the country after its worst recession since World War II. Voters -- skeptical, pessimistic and impatient -- are unlikely to give the party, which has never held office, much time to make good. Japan is witnessing historic highs in unemployment and experiencing ramifications like homelessness for the first ...

In the closing days of Cash for Clunkers, car dealers were turning buyers away, the government website crashed trying to keep up with the paperwork, and even the purple cars were selling. So, what does it tell us about our national character when the most popular government program in years is an economically dubious, environmentally negligible, politically lazy handout from 99% of the population to the other 1%, all aimed at reviving the economy from its vegetative state? ...

The U.S.-led war against the Taliban in Afghanistan has been a tough slog, a nearly eight-year conflict replete with gloom. Lately a lot of the news from Afghanistan seems particularly grim for the United States and its allies. More U.S. troops have been killed there in August than in any month since the war began. There are indications that more U.S. troops could be deployed to the country. The Afghan presidential elections this month were rife with charges of fraud. ...

Some 30 years ago, the field of microfinance was born from a radical concept: poor people, when lent small amounts of money, will pay it back in a timely manner. In the meantime, that money can be put to use in ways that help boost income—goat farming, say, or carpet weaving—and, ostensibly, raise a family's standard of living. Now another radical concept is starting to take hold: that the thing people really need, more than business loans, is a ...