It seemed to be a victory for everybody. Iran regained its main source of revenue; Britain salvaged a handsome reward from what once seemed a total loss; the U.S. found itself participating for the first time in one of the world's richest oilfields. More than that, a strategic chunk of the globe's surface was made safer from Communist penetration. Last week, in the cool garden of Elah-yeh Palace outside Teheran, Iran's Finance Minister and a U.S. oil negotiator put their initials on a settlement of the ...

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 ...

At first you might think you are in the office of a Silicon Valley tech company. There are flip cameras everywhere. Smart phones lie strewn about among computers and 3G dongles. A Wii game console has been abandoned on a shelf. But the sweet tea and thick cigarette smoke suggest otherwise. Tucked away in a popular neighborhood of Damascus in the shadow of Mount Qassioun, the parched ridge overlooking Syria's capital, this is the makeshift headquarters ...

Man and society are born out of both: violence and gentle cooperation." That is how Psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim defines a paradoxical but inescapable fact touching the whole history of "the children of Cain." How the two forces are balanced in an individual helps determine his behavior, even his sanity. How they are balanced in society helps determine its political organization, the degree and condition of its civilization. In the U.S. today, it seems to many that violence is in the ...

Fast food chains are notoriously cagey about telling consumers how their food gets from the field to the feedlot to the drive-thru window. Hope Jahren, a researcher at the University of Hawaii, believes consumers have a right to know how their food is made. She is the co-author of a new study that sampled almost 500 fast food items from McDonald's, Wendy's and Burger King and proved what many Americans may already suspect: On a chemical level, ...

Your official commencement speaker tackles the big themes, tells you to abjure greed, to play fair, to serve your community, to know thyself. Your more personally devoted commencement speaker agrees with all that. But he has special wishes for you too -- idiosyncratic, of course, what an educated daughter may have come to expect from an oddball. People always said that you resemble him. What he wishes you first is a love of travel. Travel will hold you back from ...

The last weeks of Kurt Cobain's life were filled with turmoil and anguish -- and gossip. Rumors floated through the music industry that the singer- songwriter's band, Nirvana, was breaking up; that Cobain, who had survived a tranquilizer-induced coma just six weeks earlier, had suffered another overdose. The stories seemed to be justified when the group unexpectedly backed out of headlining the Lollapalooza tour this summer. The truth, it turns out, was that Cobain, who claimed to have overcome an ...

Much like this week's splashy action picture Source Code, Trust features a story line about people at the mercy of technology. But there's no science-fiction component to director David Schwimmer's grim story of Internet-based pedophilia, and there's no aspect of it that doesn't feel painfully plausible. We're in the here and now, watching pretty 14-year-old Annie sink deeper and deeper into electronic quicksand. She has a new online boyfriend, Charlie, and while she takes breaks for meals, ...

Heavy gun battles raged around the last bastions of Ivory Coast strongman Laurent Gbagbo as the United Nations warned both sides to rein in their soldiers; the countdown to Gbagbo's exit began. The boom of large weapons rang across the city as forces loyal to President-elect Alassane Ouattara targeted the two official presidential residences and the state broadcaster. The state broadcaster changed hands between the pro-Ouattara Republican Forces and Gbagbo's Republican Guards at least twice overnight, while ...

Sweden's Tommy Tuvuynger and his team of professional hunters don't have to go far to find their prey. Tuvuynger is employed to keep down rabbit numbers in the Swedish capital, Stockholm. The rabbit population there has exploded over the past few years thanks to owners setting free their pets. Last year the eradication squad killed 6,000 of the furry critters, which are not native to Sweden. When the city started killing the rabbits in 2006, officials realized they would ...