Scraping together $40 billion in spending cuts in a country already shaved to the bone is a tall order. But try doing it with the lights off while dodging rocks, gas bombs and tear gas and with impatient foreign officials breathing down your neck. Welcome to the Greek debt crisis 2.0. On June 21, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou narrowly skirted political death in a vote of confidence in the Greek Parliament, after weeks of political infighting and escalating protests against ...

Prairie grass ripples along the shores of North Dakota's Lake Sakakawea, and a fat rainbow shimmers overhead. Here, if Amy Mossett has her way, an $11 million interactive museum will soon welcome visitors to the Lewis and Clark trail. Mossett, tourism director for the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes, is building replica earth lodges and planning sleep-in-a-teepee packages with ethno-botany hikes, buffalo-hide painting and lectures on tribal trade networks--insect repellent included. Her message: "Come and meet the descendants of the ...

"Why are the Christians claiming Allah?" asks businessman Rahim Ismail, 47, his face contorted in rage and disbelief. He shakes his head and raises his voice while waiting for a taxi along Jalan Tun Razak, a main thoroughfare in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's capital. "Everybody in the world knows Allah is the Muslim God and belongs to Muslims. I cannot understand why the Christians want to claim Allah as their God," Rahim says as passersby, mostly Muslims, gather ...

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 ...

Sex forges unlikely alliances and Hugh Hefner, who has been the world's most prominent personification of the unchained heterosexual male libido since his 1953 launch of Playboy magazine, forges unlikelier alliances than most. It's not only that the 85-year-old is looking forward to marriage later this month to Crystal Harris, a psychology major-turned-Playboy Playmate and aspiring pop singer 60 years his junior. For more than half a century, Hefner has succeeded in uniting social conservatives of the ...

It's a ritual that boils the blood of whale-watchers everywhere. On Nov. 18, a fleet of four Japanese vessels left Shimonoseki harbor in Western Japan to begin its five-month whale hunt in the Antarctic Ocean. This time, however, the whalers are planning what's expected to be its largest hunt in decades; along with about 850 minke and 50 finback whales, the fleet says it plans to harpoon as many as 50 humpback whales for the first time ...

The outcome of Malaysia's general election on Saturday was expected to be the usual landslide for the country's ruling political bloc. After all, for as long as the Southeast Asian nation has been independent, the National Front alliance has been in power. Even opposition leaders admitted they wouldn't win control of the federal government. Instead, most viewed the voting as a referendum on the leadership of Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, whose popularity has been hurt by higher living costs and ...

Judging by the front pages of Persian language newspapers neatly laid out at every Tehran newsstand, political scandal is in the air. President Ahmadinejad's closest aides, including right-hand man Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, are being accused of embezzlement, cronyism, collaboration with opposition forces, and even pagan rituals thrown in for shock value. Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani, recently re-elected by a wide margin to his position by fellow members, asserted in public, "I wish for a strong Parliament" — ...

By lifting its 13-week martial law decree on Wednesday, Bahrain's government meant to signal the end of a violent crackdown against its Shi'ite opposition — and show a nervous international business community that normality had been restored in the embattled island nation. Instead, however, the day was marked by tear gas attacks on peaceful protesters in the Shi'ite enclave of Sitra. They continued on Thursday and Friday with government forces firing tear gas and rubber bullets at ...

Anytime a bunch of politicians go on television to eat cucumbers, you know something is up. On Monday, there was Clara Aguilera, agriculture councilwoman for the region of Andalucia, pointedly biting into a whole cuke. A day later it was the turn of Mariano Rajoy, head of Spain's opposition Popular Party, and Esperanza Aguirre, president of the regional government of Madrid to do the same with a mercifully sliced version. These days, the local media is full ...