After Hurricane Katrina flattened New Orleans exactly four years ago, on Aug. 29, 2005, the city emerged as an inadvertent symbol of global warming, the first American victim of climate change. Over 200,000 homes were destroyed during the Category 5 hurricane. But in the years since, the Crescent City has quietly embraced a new and unexpected role as a laboratory for green building. Sustainable development groups that range from the international nonprofit Global Green to earth-friendly celebrities like Brad ...

There was a poignant footnote to President Obama's historic July 10 meeting with Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican. Behind closed doors in the papal library, Obama handed Benedict a letter that Senator Edward Kennedy had asked him to personally deliver to the pontiff. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs later told reporters that nobody — not even the President — knew the contents of the sealed missive. Obama himself asked Benedict to pray for Kennedy, and called the ailing ...

In one of the funniest scenes in the film "The Big Lebowski," the hot-headed Vietnam veteran Walter Sobchak, played by John Goodman, explains to the Dude, played by Jeff Bridges, how much he hates nihilists because they don't believe in anything, they have no "ethos." PRINCETON, New Jersey (CNN) -- In one of the funniest scenes in the film "The Big Lebowski," the hot-headed Vietnam veteran Walter Sobchak, played by John Goodman, explains to the Dude, played by Jeff Bridges, ...

"My One and Only" begins with Renee Zellweger, playing a woman based on George Hamilton's mother Anne, discovering her husband with another woman. Despite the initial heartbreak, Anne puts on a happy face, and Zellweger gives life to a character who's determined to make the rest of her years comfortable and adventurous. Her husband's indiscretion is the catalyst that sends Anne on a cross-country quest to find a new husband in 1953 America. She pulls her two sons out ...

China's President Hu Jintao called Tuesday for a "prosperous and harmonious" Xinjiang province during his first visit to the country's western Uyghur region since last month's deadly riots, state-run media reported. "The key to our work in Xinjiang is to properly handle development and stability," said Hu. Hu, calling for reform, development, ethnic unity and stability in the region, expressed gratitude to the armed forces, militia and police for their work in quelling the July 5 ethnic riots in Urumqi, ...

Three years ago many would have dismissed the notion that a significant supply of the world's automotive fuel could come from algae. But today the idea, while still an adventurous one, is getting much harder to ignore. Back then there were only a handful of companies seriously focused on producing algae fuel. Now there are well over 50, according to Samhitha Udupa, a research associate with Lux Research. The number should double within the next year or two, ...

The wounds of partition festered again this week in India, resulting in the banning of a book and the expulsion of a respected politician. The home state of the father of Indian independence, Mahatma Gandhi, forbade the sale and circulation of a new book it says spews revisionist history about the birth of secular but predominantly Hindu India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Written by Jaswant Singh, a former federal minister and senior member of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya ...

Correction Appended: Aug. 20, 2009 Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring ...

The last thing the CIA needs right now is another scandal, let alone two. Allegations that the CIA chief in Algiers drugged and raped two women is going to hurt badly. The accusations that Harold Nicholson, a former CIA operative in federal prison convicted of spying for the KGB, continued his work from behind bars isn't nearly as serious, but it won't exactly help the agency's reputation. Nicholson, who allegedly enlisted his Nathaniel son to collect his ...

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the former Libyan intelligence officer convicted of murdering 270 people when a bomb he planted on Pan-Am Flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988, has been released from prison after serving eight years of a life sentence. Making the announcement on Thursday, Justice Secretary of Scotland Kenny MacAskill said that Al-Megrahi was released on compassionate grounds because he has terminal prostate cancer and is unlikely to live past the next three ...