THE bitter war in Biafra is a symbol of the continent's divided soul, and the most discouraging example so far of a profound impasse that is crippling many of Black Africa's 30 newly independent states. It is an impasse between tribe and nation, which is also a clash between tradition and change, fact and aspiration. On one side is tribalism: the tenacious loyalty of 140 million Africans to primitive subgroups that represent certainty amid bewildering social and economic upheavals. ...

Updated: June 16, 2011, 3 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time The police in Vancouver did little at first, when drunken and angry sports fans took to making sport of the streets of the city. It all started with the flipping of a car on Georgia Street, inside one of the outdoor spectator zones set up to watch the seventh and deciding game of the National Hockey League's Stanley Cup championship between the Vancouver Canucks and the Boston Bruins. The ...

Some 150 miles North of Phoenix, on the edge of Arizona's Tonto National Forest — a stark high-desert landscape of burnt-orange mesas, saguaro cacti and ponderosa pines — sits the state's first commercial-scale wind farm. The giant turbines of the Dry Lake Wind Power Project resemble the creatures that literary hero Don Quixote jousted against in La Mancha. Which is fitting, since this wind farm is owned by Iberdrola Renovables, the world's biggest producer of wind power, based in Valencia, ...

Height: 6 ft. 2 inches. Age: 25. Eyes: Blue. Cheeks: Pink. Hair: Sandy. Feet: Large. When he arrived at the Embassy in France no shoes big enough were handy. Habits: Smokes not; drinks not. Does not gamble. Eats a thoroughgoing breakfast. Prefers light luncheon and dinner when permitted. Avoids rich dishes. Likes sweets. Calligraphy: From examination of his handwriting Dr. Camille Streletski, Secretary of the French Graphological Society, concluded: Superiority, intellectualism, cerebration, idealism, even mysticism. Characteristics: Modesty, taciturnity, diffidence , ...

With banks reluctant to loosen purse strings and credit-card companies aggressively slashing credit lines, a growing number of consumers are turning to the once murky world of pawnshops for quick cash. "Loans are up 20% to 25%," estimates David Crume, president of the National Pawnbrokers Association. The trade group's executive director, Dana Meineke, says the weak economy and turmoil in the credit markets are expanding the customer base. "We're seeing some new faces," says Daniel ...

Is it the best of times or end times for public charter schools? 4,000 charter school leaders, teachers, advocates, and policymakers will gather in Atlanta later this month at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools' annual conference. The gathering of upstarts is now larger than many long-standing traditional education groups can muster, but in states and cities across the country, charter schools are facing increased political pressure and scrutiny. In Georgia, the state's ...

President Barack Obama is about to announce his new strategy for Afghanistan, but the success of whatever option he chooses will depend heavily on Pakistan acting to stop its territory being used to attack Western forces next door. And that's bad news, because the demands of its own domestic counterinsurgency campaign, doubts about the duration of U.S. commitment in Afghanistan and looming political instability in Islamabad have left Pakistan in no hurry to help out. Obama's National ...

"I have to close my restaurant when it gets dark," complains Ahmad al-Dursi, 43, the owner of a small hamburger joint in Benghazi, the capital of what is called Free Libya. But it is not completely free yet. "It is not safe here with the revolutionary committees still active," says al-Dursi, referring to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's loyalists who have terrorized the population for most of Gaddafi's 42 years in power. Though Gaddafi's troops withdrew from eastern Libya ...

It was another routine night for Shawn Carpenter. After a long day analyzing computer-network security for Sandia National Laboratories, where much of the U.S. nuclear arsenal is designed, Carpenter, 36, retreated to his ranch house in the hills overlooking Albuquerque, N.M., for a quick dinner and an early bedtime. He set his alarm for 2 a.m. Waking in the dark, he took a thermos of coffee and a pack of Nicorette gum to the cluster of computer terminals in his home ...

It's only natural, I suppose, for a $625 five-volume, epochal publishing event like Nathan Myhrvold's Modernist Cuisine to polarize the food world. After all, this is the book the whole culinary world has been waiting for: "the cookbook to end all cookbooks," as David Chang called it. I witnessed Myhrvold's impatience with old-fashioned ways of thinking when I visited the eccentric millionaire last fall, and so last week's dustup with superstar food writer Michael Ruhlman wasn't unexpected. ...