The face Macau shows to the world today may be its 29 sparkling casinos, but one of the last links with the city's gambling past can still be found two miles away from the main strip, in a plastic reproduction of Rome's Coliseum that stands out amid the dowdy surroundings of its working-class neighborhood. Inside, six sinewy greyhounds stand shivering on an oval race track, waiting for a mud-stained mechanical rabbit to give them something to chase. ...

The post office is gone. The school is gone. City Hall is gone. Most of the churches are gone. Nearly every building in Smithville, Mississippi is gone — or so heavily damaged they will have to be demolished. The devastation from last week's F5 tornado is so widespread, so absolute, that it's easier to tally what remains: The telephone company. Coker's Han-D-Mart. And an unshakeable sense of faith. Sunday morning, amid the droning of chainsaws, an estimated 500 ...

The summer of 1822 Fort Mackinac, Michigan Army and fur-trading post, was a rough, brawling, drunken community of about 5,000 Indians, French-Canadians and half-breeds spending the proceeds of their winter fur catches. Only doctor within a 300-mi. radius was William Beaumont, an Army surgeon who meticulously recorded in a diary every medical tittle and jot he performed. For June 6, 1822, the entry, now a precious incunabulum in the history of U. S. Medicine, reads: "St. Martin, a Canadian lad, ...

Ralph Nader was there, and so was the executive vice president of American Motors. The founder of Rolling Stone and the managing editor of the Washington Post took part, as did two of the most conservative newspaper columnists in the U.S. Gloria Steinem and the Knicks' Bill Bradley were there, and so were a former Heisman Trophy winner, a Nobel Laureate, a Navajo tribal leader, nine college presidents, 15 mayors and Governors, 14 Congressmen and Senators, and scores of businessmen, ...

On the streets of Guangzhou and nearby Shenzhen, Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo is turning heads. Since holding a press conference for his semiautobiographical Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Novel of Love in the East on Nov. 4, Ndesandjo, a half brother of U.S. President Barack Obama, has appeared on television in Hong Kong, and his picture has been splashed on the front pages of China Daily, the South China Morning Post and other regional newspapers. Ndesandjo had ...

Correction appended: Jan. 20, 2011 An editorial cartoon in the Jan. 13 edition of Hong Kong's English daily the South China Morning Post shows a family — a father, mother and frowning boy — together in the kitchen. On the table sits an untouched breakfast — the sodden castoffs, we infer, of the insolent child. "If you don't eat it," the father threatens, "we're going to have you adopted by Amy Chua." The child looks horrified. Amy Chua ...

While no one yet knows what ignited Major Nidal Malik Hasan's murderous rage Thursday afternoon, Nov. 5, at Fort Hood, the kindling was hiding in plain sight. The Army had ordered Hasan, wrestling with the conflicting demands of being a soldier, a psychiatrist and a Muslim, to the post with the highest toll of Army suicides. Fort Hood is one of the Army's most stressed posts because of its units' revolving-door deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. Finally, the Army made clear that Hasan couldn't escape ...

For all the encouragement that Republicans took from the angry health-care town halls of August, the fall has not been kind to the GOP. A Washington Post-ABC poll found that only 1 in 5 voters now identifies as Republican. And the "Party of No" label might be starting to stick: a recent CNN poll found that GOP favorability has slipped to its lowest point in a decade — just 36% . Former Republican heavyweights such as Bob Dole and ...

"China is not on the Internet, it's basically an intranet. Everything is banned by the Great Firewall," says Sherman So, co-author of "Red Wired: China's Internet Revolution." With 338 million Internet users in June 2009, according to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), China is no longer a niche market of the online industry. Chinese is the second most common language on the Internet, according to The Economist, and quickly gaining ground on English. As the former technology writer ...

When Iraq war veteran Angela Peacock is in the shower, she sometimes closes her eyes and can't help reliving the day in Baghdad in 2003 that pushed her closer to the edge. While pulling security detail for an Army convoy stuck in gridlocked traffic, Peacock's vehicle came alongside a van full of Iraqi men who "began shouting that they were going to kill us," she said. One man in the vehicle was particularly threatening. "I can remember his eyes looking ...