As a hearse bearing the body of Ral Cancapa made its way through the dark streets of Juliaca, a city in the Andes in southern Peru, on Saturday evening, June 25, the mourners tailing the procession solemnly chanted for justice. Cancapa's widow walked with her relatives and gave a quick interview to local media before bursting into tears and being escorted into a car. "She's in too much pain to talk," said the brother of the dead ...

The white-haired, 61-year old exile has come to the hospital to see the refugees from Syria. He used to be a diehard Ba'athist Party member back in that country. But when some Baathists split in the 1980s, he joined the faction associated with the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Eventually, he abandoned it in disgust and chose to live in southern Turkey. For the past 20 years, he has lived away from politics. But now, the trim, mustachioed ...

The U.S. is not yet at war with Saddam Hussein. Not officially. But quietly, over the past few months, some of its savviest warriors have sneaked into his country. They have been secretly prowling the Kurdish-controlled enclave in northern Iraq, trying to organize a guerrilla force that could guide American soldiers invading from the north, hunting for targets that U.S. warplanes might bomb, setting up networks to hide U.S. pilots who might be shot down and mapping out escape routes ...

Helen Clark of Kennebunk, Maine, is a smuggler of sorts. At 77, the retired registered nurse doesn't look the part. She still does volunteer work--administering flu shots, cutting toenails and organizing blood drives--at the Southern Maine Medical Center, where she worked for more than four decades, first in the maternity ward and later in the operating room. Clark is a model of frugality as well. She and her husband Dorrance raised 10 children on modest salaries. When he developed lung ...

Xenophobes in homogenous European countries often complain that immigrants will erase their most precious cultural norms. The race riots in southern Italy last weekend may be one indicator that change is inevitable, as African immigrants who don't live by the country's infamous omert code of silence violently protested against the powerful Mafia clans that control their lives, says Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah, an anti-Mob book that earned him both critical praise and a 24-hour police guard. ...

It is the early days of January 2010 and the Company forms to the front of the memorial display at the chapel of the forward operating base in Afghanistan, the backdrop for the small shrine the crossed staffs of an American flag and the regimental colors. An M4 rifle stands upright, its bayonet lodged into a felt covered wooden desk in front of the flags; the pistol grip facing the audience. The fallen soldier's helmet rests on ...

I never smoked pot in junior high because I was convinced it would shrivel my incipient manhood. This was the 1980s, and those stark this-is-your-brain-on-drugs ads already had me vaguely worried about memory loss and psychosis. But when other boys said pot might affect our southern regions, I was truly terrified. I didn't smoke a joint for the first time until I was 21. By 12th grade, about half of young Americans have tried marijuana, which put me in the ...

It rained on southern Louisiana Thursday night, May 12 — and that made fears along the lower Mississippi River rise as high as the Big Muddy's already dangerously swollen levels. The Mississippi grew to 43.4 ft., almost 20 ft. above its normal mark at Louisiana's capital, Baton Rouge, and even more rain is forecast for today. Heading into the weekend, state officials are faced with an ugly reality: the river keeps rising even though they've opened more than half the bays on a ...

Water shortages plague a fifth of southern Europe. And with temperatures in the region forecast to rise several degrees this century — reducing rainfall another 30% — things will only get worse. Several thousand miles to the northwest, however, global warming is increasing the number of icebergs calving off Greenland; they now number about 15,000 a year. "An iceberg is a floating reservoir. And water from icebergs is the purest water ... It was formed some 10,000 years ago," explains ...

In southern Italy, the Mafia wars are heating up. On Monday, Italy will deploy an expected 80 soldiers into the city of Reggio Calabria, on the toe of Italy's boot, to provide security for anti-Mafia prosecutors who have been repeatedly threatened by the powerful 'Ndrangheta criminal organization. The ramped-up precautions come after a campaign of escalating intimidation of public officials, which has included death threats, envelopes with bullets in them, a homemade bomb that blew up in ...