When an Amsterdam court acquitted far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders of all charges of discrimination and inciting hatred against Muslims on June 23, it seemed a fitting climax to a week that saw the end of the decade-long Dutch experiment with integration. Judges ruled that although the comments the politician made in the Dutch press and on the internet between October 2006 and March 2008 comparing Islam to Nazism may be offensive, they are nonetheless legal and part of a legitimate government ...

The scene was Allied press headquarters in Paris on a rainy summer day. Facing the half-dozing correspondents, Lieut. Colonel John A. Keck, onetime Pittsburgh engineer and now chief of Allied technical intelligence on German weapons, began quietly: "This will make Buck Rogers seem as if he lived in the Gay '90s." He proceeded to unfold the improbable story of what German scientists were up to when V-E day interrupted them. At a research center in Hillersleben a group of them ...

On Wednesday morning, residents of Joplin are as uncertain about the fate of their loved ones as officials are about just how many people are dead after the 8th deadliest tornado in U.S. history ripped through this Missouri town. In the media, the record of the missing and dead in this town of roughly 50,000 has been shifting by the hour. In a Tuesday morning press conference, Joplin fire chief Mitch Randles announced that 116 had been ...

JOHN KEATS by Walter Jackson Bate. 732 pages. Harvard University Press. $10. JOHN KEATS by Aileen Ward. 450 pages. Viking. $7.50. Romantic poets, the legend went, all died young and full of melancholy. Eloquent escape artists in flight from reality, they contrived, if possible, to be afflicted alike with consumption and unrequited love—both, it was firmly understood, great heighteners of poetic sensibility. Then, like dying nightingales singing their hearts out while impaled upon the thorn of the everyday world, they ...

Michael Fertik may be running a business, but by the time new customers are knocking on his door, things have turned decidedly personal. "People send us letters that say, 'You saved my life,'" says the CEO of Reputation.com, pointing to the dramatic ways in which a person's virtual reputation can shape their day-to-day routine. "They literally say, 'I'm now able to live my life.'" When most Web surfers Google themselves, the self-search begins and ends with social ...

For the longest time, Sarah Palin was leery of Facebook. Some of the comments left on her page during the 2008 vice-presidential campaign were so withering and unpleasant that it took months of coaxing by her staff and her daughters Bristol and Willow to convince Palin that she should give it another try. So she waded back into the digital fray just after she resigned the Alaska governorship and as her aides were compiling a new press list. Her first Facebook post, in ...

Three runners died Sunday during the Detroit Free Press/Flagstar Marathon in Detroit, Michigan, police told CNN. All three deaths occurred between 9 and 9:20 a.m. ET, Second Deputy Chief John Roach said. A man in his 60s fell and hit his head, Roach said. The cause of the fall was unknown. The man was transported to Detroit Receiving Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Two other men, ages 36 and 26, also collapsed during the race and were pronounced dead ...

As tensions mount over the best way forward in Afghanistan, top aides say President Obama is adamant about coming up with a new plan before deciding on troop levels. Rising violence and the resurgence of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan have put the Obama administration on defense as the war enters its ninth year. "Until the president's review of this early in the administration, there hadn't been a strategy, a coordinated strategy to deal with both Afghanistan ...

President Obama is under increasing pressure to decide whether the United States will commit more troops and resources to the conflict in Afghanistan. On Tuesday, the head of NATO met with the president and endorsed Obama's plan to fine-tune the strategy for Afghanistan before deciding on whether to deploy more troops. "I agree with President Obama in his approach: strategy first, then resources," Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said after meeting with Obama at the White House. The ...

Vera Lynn, who made her name entertaining troops in World War II after recording her first song 70 years ago, has become the oldest living artist to have a number one album. The 92-year-old's album "We'll Meet Again -- The Very Best of Vera Lynn" took the top spot in the British charts on Sunday, even outselling much-hyped re-mastered versions of the Beatles' back catalogue, according to the UK's Official Charts Company. The previous oldest living artist to top the ...