On Nov. 13, Burmese democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi walked free from seven years of house arrest in Rangoon. She called her son Kim Aris. She greeted supporters outside her lakeside home. Then she got on a plane to Bangkok where, on a stage erected in a parking lot on the city's outskirts, she appeared in a film made by a bearded Frenchman called Luc Something. That's what some of the 2,000 Thai extras on the set of Luc Besson's ...

I'm walking up to a starbucks with Howard Schultz when we spot a barista standing in the parking lot, passing 11 cups of coffee through a car window. "I've never seen that," says Schultz, who took over Starbucks in 1987 and transformed it from a six-shop seller of beans into a thread that runs through our social tapestry. He asks the barista what she's doing. She says the drive-through order was so large she decided to bring it out. Schultz ...

For Muslims immigrants in America, the days following 9/11 were a harrowing encounter with fear-fueled American hate. IPod bearing, second-generation techies faced insults in Silicon Valley parking lots; schoolgirls wearing head scarves were attacked; and mosques across the country were vandalized or set ablaze. For many months, it seemed altogether unclear whether America's Muslims — from the cocktail-swilling secular to the mosque-attending pious — would ever live in their communities without apprehension again. That tense period, the Harvard ...

Juanita Bynum's story may read like soap opera, but her travails are a reminder of the longtime magnetism between celebrity Pentecostal preachers and scandal. The 48-year-old regular on the Trinity Broadcasting Network made her reputation with a sermon renouncing pre-marital sex to search for a holy partner. She appeared to find one in a minister named Thomas Weeks III, wed him in a $1 million on-air ceremony, and together they went ...

Arizona police are looking for a man who they allege ran down his daughter and her friend because he believed his daughter had become "too Westernized." Peoria, Arizona, police said Wednesday that Faleh Hassan Almaleki, 48, struck his 20-year-old daughter, Noor Faleh Almaleki, and her friend Amal Edan Khalaf with a vehicle he was driving in a parking lot Tuesday afternoon. Faleh Hassan Almaleki was angry with his daughter "as she had become too 'Westernized' and was not living according ...

Jennifer Schuett's search for the man who snatched her from her bed when she was 8, sexually assaulted her and left her for dead on top of an ant hill ended Tuesday with the arrest of a suspect. Now begins another chapter in Schuett's 19-year quest for justice. Standing in front of the television cameras, Jennifer Schuett blinked back tears. "This is a huge day for me," she later told CNN over the phone. "And I want to see this ...

Amritsar lives in many centuries at once. This holiest city of the Sikhs is home to their most revered shrine, the mystical and awe-inspiring Golden Temple, where nihangs — members of an armed Sikh order — live on in traditions dating back centuries, sporting distinctive electric blue tunics and a panoply of weapons, even speaking a unique martial dialect of the Punjabi language. Other parts of this prosperous merchant city wears Levi's, hanging out at cafes or following the ...

A former California police officer accused of sexually assaulting a motorist during a traffic stop pleaded guilty in federal court, the Central District of California U.S. Attorney said Friday. Feliciano Sanchez, 34, admitted in court Thursday that while on duty on May 16, 2007, he pulled over a female driver in a traffic stop and forced her to perform oral sex on him, according to a news release from U.S. Attorney Thomas O'Brien. Sanchez, then of Los Angeles County's Bell ...

When Canadian cocaine smuggler Charles Lai was being sentenced in a Seattle federal courtroom last month, the judge sending him to prison for 13 years offered a small item of good news. At least behind bars, Judge James Robart said, drug smuggler Lai would not become another fatality in Vancouver's gang wars. Authorities in Vancouver, just 30 miles from the border, are struggling to deal with the boom in the drug trade between the United States and Canada, along with ...

The death toll from a suicide attack on a five-star hotel in the northwest Pakistani city of Peshawar rose to at least 15 people Wednesday, including two U.N. employees, authorities said. Three suicide attackers shot their way onto the grounds of the Pearl Continental Hotel, which is often frequented by foreigners and diplomats and set off a car bomb Tuesday night. At least 64 were wounded, according to Qhazi Jamil, senior superintendent of Peshawar police. The dead U.N. employees were ...