Are weeds a category of plants or of human reflex? Are they a cultural creation more than a biological one? We might, as house-proud gardeners or municipal jobsworths or agri-businesspeople, dream of a world without them, but we don’t often pause to think why they are there, or what our planet might be like without them. Rather brown, probably. Rather damaged and impoverished, certainly. Take out all weeds and we’d not have the wild grass that was developed into wheat and led to the birth of civilisation. We’d have no Velcro, inspired by the hooked fruits of burdock and their obstinate clinginess to dog’s fur. Gardens would have no sweet violets, or Shirley poppies, or variegated ivies. At least half the world’s medicinal substances, from gripe-water to morphine, would never have been discovered. And gone would be the child’s lingua franca of daisy chains, dandelion clocks, Chinese-burn grasses...

Congratulations are in order again for “Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau, Universal Press Syndicate Managing Editor Sue Roush announced in an e-mail to newspaper editors recently.

Trudeau’s “Alpha House,” a streaming video program (like a TV show except not on TV but available through the online Amazon Prime streaming service) was picked by viewers from 14 series pilots for development into a full series. The show, starring John Goodman as one of four Republican congressmen sharing a house in Washington, D.C., is expected to be out in November.

That means Trudeau will need to devote his summer to the show, Roush said. And that means no new “Doonesbury” strips in the News Tribune — or anywhere else — until at least about Labor Day...

Here at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a black mouse lies on a miniature exam table, his tail dangling off the end. A plastic tube carries anesthetic to his nose and mouth. He is asleep.

Before he was born, the mouse was injected with two mutated genes often found in human prostate cancer. As he lies on the table, a technician is measuring his two-millimeter prostate tumor with a petite ultrasound machine — the very exam a man would undergo, only on a dollhouse scale...

By publicly identifying himself as the leaker behind last week's NSA revelations, Edward Snowden has secured his place in media and political history.

ABC News called the leak "one of the greatest national security leaks in recent American history," and in publishing his identity, the Guardian compared Snowden, a 29-year-old contractor with the NSA, to Daniel Ellsberg, perhaps the most famous leaker in history. It was almost exactly 42 years earlier, on June 13th, 1971, that the first batch of the Pentagon Papers were published in the New York Times...

Rafael Leonardo Black, hermit and artist in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, keeps all his tools in elbow’s reach in the studio where he lives. A coffee mug with nine No. 2 pencils, each razor-whetted to the sharpness of a spear. A single brand of tracing paper. Shelves of art books, surrealists mostly.

In a shoe box of clippings is a photograph of three beautiful women that he cut out of a Vogue magazine in 1968 and used for a drawing in 2005. The drawing was sold last month.

For more than three decades, Mr. Black, 64, has made a portal to the world in dense, miniature renderings of ancient myth and modern figures...

"...Our experience, even with brilliant students, has been that married women find it difficult to carry out worthwhile careers in planning, and hence tend to have some feeling of waste about the time and effort spent in professional education. (This is, of course, true of almost all graduate professional studies.)

Therefore, for your own benefit, and to aid us in coming to a final decision, could you kindly write us a page or two at your earliest convenience indicating specifically how you might plan to combine a professional life in city planning with your responsibilities to your husband and a possible future family?"...

After writing intensely, even obsessively, for years about government surveillance and the prosecution of journalists, Glenn Greenwald has suddenly put himself directly at the intersection of those two issues, and perhaps in the cross hairs of federal prosecutors.

Late Wednesday, Mr. Greenwald, a lawyer and longtime blogger, published an article in the British newspaper The Guardian about the existence of a top-secret court order allowing the National Security Agency to monitor millions of telephone logs...

When Steve Bolyard checked out a report of black paint on some of the park’s majestic saguaros — cactuses whose towering bodies and upraised arms are as emblematic of the American West as red-rock buttes and skittering tumbleweeds — he did not expect to see ganglike calligraphy covering more of them than he could easily count.

“It was too much,” said Mr. Bolyard, a park ranger. The same sort of symbols one might see on a subway train were scattered along the spiny forest last month. Rangers eventually found at least 45 graffiti tags in the park, including 16 on the slow-growing and fragile saguaro, the paint obscuring part of the green skins where the plants store the chlorophyll to draw nourishment from the sun...

The Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944. Here American troops hiat the water from one of the landing craft. Soldiers on shore are lying flat under German machine gun fire...

Freed from prison, a member of the feminist collective sets the record straight.

It was sloppy and lasted under a minute, but it sowed the seeds of discontent for future generations.

On February 21, 2012, five members of the Russian feminist punk-rock collective Pussy Riot staged a guerrilla performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, an Orthodox church in Moscow. Masked by their trademark multicolored balaclavas, the women mock-prayed, verbally swiped at Putin, and shouted epithets. The protest was cut short when security guards dragged the women offstage. A video of the performance, currently with more than 2.5 million views, was uploaded to YouTube with the title “Punk Prayer—Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!”...