In a three-room cabin clinging to the side of Powell Mountain in Cracker's Neck, Va., Bessie Dickenson sat at her quilting one night last week while her husband, Van Buren Dickenson, gaunt and sick at 72, listened to the radio. Suddenly Dave called out: "Bessie, listen to this. It says one of those boys has changed his mind and is coming home. I just know it's Ed." Said Bessie: "I just know it's Ed too, Dave." Later she mused, ...

This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global-news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in Die Welt. Stale dry air, narrow seats, jammed overhead compartments: today's air passenger has to be a real flying nut to think plane travel is any fun. But engineers at European manufacturer Airbus say they're working on ways to improve things. Implementing the changes will probably take up to four ...

Daedalus warned his son Icarus not to fly too high, or the sun would melt his waxen wings. But the boy, intoxicated with flight, soared above his cautious father. In the clear blue sky, the warmth of the sun dissolved his delicate wings, causing him to plunge to his death in the green sea below. The myth of Icarus is used to illustrate the ancient Greek word hubris, a term for the overweening human pride and vanity that often result ...

The echoes of the cries of joy could be heard throughout the Yemeni capital on Sunday morning. As news of President Ali Abdullah Saleh's departure for what was termed as "medical treatment" in Saudi Arabia finally made its way to the stage at Sana'a's Change Square, thousands of protesters roared with complete jubilation. "The people have brought down the regime," they chanted in unison, slaughtering cows to feast on and spraying confetti into the thin mountain air ...

AP Bia Mountain anchors the northwest corner of South Viet Nam's A Shau Valley, since 1966 a major infiltration route for Communist forces from the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos to the coastal cities of northern I Corps. It is a mountain much like any other in that part of the Highlands, green, triple-canopied and spiked with thick stands of bamboo. On military maps it is listed as Hill 937, the number representing its height in meters. Last week it acquired another name: Hamburger Hill. It ...

When Michael Dukakis was asked about news stories casting doubt on George Bush's World War II heroism, he said, "I don't think that kind of thing has any place in the campaign . . . You don't fly 58 missions without enormous courage and tremendous patriotism." Not long afterward, Bush said of Dukakis, "What is it about the Pledge of Allegiance that upsets him so much?" There is no mistaking Bush's point. It has nothing to do with the constitutional ...

Brother C. Thomas Patten had little contact with religion as a youngster in Tennessee. "My Daddy was baptized a Baptist in a mountain stream," he explains, "but a crawfish bit him on his big toe and he never went back." Tom got to be a carouser, "drank like a fish," even got himself a suspended two-year prison sentence for driving a stolen car across a state line. But he saw the light after he met Evangelist Bebe Harrison, "the only woman I ever saw that ...

The White House refused to indicate Monday whether President Obama will issue a posthumous pardon for Jack Johnson, the African-American boxing champion convicted in 1913 for dating a white woman. The House of Representatives on July 29 unanimously passed a resolution urging Obama to grant a pardon; the Senate passed a similar measure by a voice vote on June 24. The push for a rare posthumous pardon has been spearheaded for years by Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, and Rep. Peter ...

Hours after Colorado authorities said they expect to file charges in the "balloon boy" case, sheriff's deputies and detectives were seen entering and leaving the house of Richard Heene early Sunday. Heene is the storm-chasing father whose giant Mylar balloon ascended into the sky late last week, sparking fears that his 6-year-old son Falcon was aboard. A dispatcher with the Larimer County Sheriff's Department declined to release any information about the search, but said the office will hold a news ...

A wiry, slightly hunched man presses in a few numbers, the electronic lock gives way with a beep and the group presses into the crowded laboratory, plastered with ominous warnings about toxins and biohazards. Guiding the visitors at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center is Mark Roth, a 50-year-old biologist with a tall forehead, thinning red hair and a perpetual wry smile. He asks his assistant, Jennifer Blackwood, if the rat is ready. It is. She turns a dial, ...