Alycia Williamson-Smith and her family didn't have anywhere else to turn. It had been days since a devastating tornado ravaged Joplin, Mo., home to her second cousin James Williamson. With cell-phone service largely unavailable and a distance of several thousand miles between her house in Amsterdam, N.Y., and Joplin, Williamson-Smith posted photos of James on several Facebook pages that were created in the aftermath of the tornado. Less than 24 hours later, she saw a comment on ...

Darting around a windowless command center in southwestern Germany, Maggie Woodward flashed orders to pilots and skippers from the Great Plains to the Dolomites. She scrambled U.S. warplanes from Italy's Aviano air base and ordered them to attack targets deep inside Libya. She dispatched secret orders to Marine amphibious ships in the Mediterranean, instructing their chopper crews when and where to stage for pilot search and rescue. She ordered electronic-countermeasures aircraft to broadcast radio messages encouraging Muammar Gaddafi's troops to ...

Coleen Rowley became enamored with the FBI's fictionalized ideal long before she heard of the real thing. Her favorite show was The Man from U.N.C.L.E., a spy spoof about two debonair agents who work to save the world from evil. In the fifth grade, Rowley wrote to the show's producers, asking to join the cadre of supersecret spies. She got a rejection letter. "They said it didn't exist," Rowley remembers. "But they told me that in the United States, we ...

It was a lengthy, set-back laden struggle watched by a city of increasingly curious people. But on Sunday, Hanoi's legendary urban turtle, Cu Rua, was finally captured in the capital's central Hoan Kiem Lake. The 440-pound creature, widely considered to be a deity that has protected the city for hundreds of years, was caught by dozens of Vietnamese soldiers after a first attempt to take the turtle in for medical treatment last month failed. Since last year, ...

Flooding and resulting landslides killed 137 people Thursday and Friday in this nation's northern provinces, including Baguio City, Benguet Province and Mountain Province, the Office of Civil Defense in Cordillera said Friday. Another 43 people were missing and 45 were injured, it said. Landslides blocked traffic along the Marchos Highway, Naguilian Road, Kennon Road and Ambuklao Road, cutting access to Baguio City, Benguet Province and Mountain Province, it said. The floods were unleased by tropical depression Parma, which had been ...

A blanket of water hides the devastation underneath it. Miles and miles of villages, small cities, and farmland are spoiled by standing flood water. First the waters raged for days, then they seemed to pull back almost as fast as they came but the damage had been done with such fury that more than 1.5 million were left homeless. "Everything was drowned," flood victim Mohammed Farooq Basha said. "The water came to the second floor we called for help. No ...

The number of dead in devastating floods triggered by torrential rains in India has risen to at least 271, and about a million people have fled their homes, officials said Monday. At least 192 people have died in the southern state of Karnataka, its disaster-management secretary H.V. Parshwanath told CNN. More than 450,000 people there have been housed in 1,330 relief camps as authorities completed rescue operations in most of the flooded zones in the state, he said. ...

An area that now looks like a flattened mess of destruction was, just days ago, a group of three villages. Officials believe 90 percent of the residents -- as many as a few hundred people -- were buried, just one piece of the devastation from two large earthquakes that struck Indonesia in as many days. The stench of dead bodies fills the air. At least 1,100 people are dead in the disaster, said John Holmes, United Nations humanitarian ...

The death toll from flooding in the Philippines caused by Tropical Storm Ketsana climbed to at least 100 on Monday, disaster officials said. Flood water began to subside after a weekend that saw the capital, Manila, hit with its heaviest rainfall in more than 40 years. More than 80 percent of the capital was under water at one point Sunday. The deluge swallowed whole houses and buses. Manila, in the island of Luzon, and the nearby province of Rizal bore ...

Downpours subsided temporarily in the Philippines on Sunday, a day after Tropical Storm Ketsana pummeled the capital Manila with its heaviest rainfall in more than 40 years. Flood spawned by the rainfall killed at least 51 people with at least 21 others missing, the government said. More than 80 percent of the capital was under water that swallowed whole houses and buses. Manila, in the island of Luzon, and the nearby province of Rizal bore the brunt of the storm. ...