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, ...

MORE THAN 60 YEARS ago, a Polish Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin fled Nazi-occupied Europe, arrived in the U.S. and invented a word that he thought would change the world. Lemkin believed that genocide-- from the Greek geno and the Latin cide --would carry such stigma that states would be loath to commit the crime--or to allow it. Lemkin, a haunted refugee and relentless lobbyist, managed to construct a lasting norm, as Webster's and the Oxford English Dictionary granted ...

The afternoon was sultry, and along the deserted block of neat brick row houses in the Cobbs Creek section of West Philadelphia, an ominous calm had descended. Suddenly the thwack of rotors broke the silence. A blue-and-white Pennsylvania State Police helicopter arced in low over the roof-line. It made several passes over the street, then hovered 60 ft. above the two-story home at 6221 Osage Avenue. In the helicopter cabin, Lieut. Frank Powell, chief of Philadelphia's bomb- disposal unit, hefted ...

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday that he has been the victim of racial profiling but believes Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. could have been more patient with the police officer who arrested him. At the same time, Powell also faulted the Cambridge (Massachusetts) Police Department for escalating the situation beyond a reasonable level. "I think Skip [Gates], perhaps in this instance, might have waited a while, come outside, talked to the officer and ...