Does the Second Amendment prevent Congress from passing gun-control laws? The question, which is suddenly pressing, in light of the reaction to the school massacre in Newtown, is rooted in politics as much as law.

For more than a hundred years, the answer was clear, even if the words of the amendment itself were not. The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The courts had found that the first part, the “militia clause,” trumped the second part, the “bear arms” clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon...

Three days before 20 year-old Adam Lanza killed his mother, then opened fire on a classroom full of Connecticut kindergartners, my 13-year old son Michael (name changed) missed his bus because he was wearing the wrong color pants.

“I can wear these pants,” he said, his tone increasingly belligerent, the black-hole pupils of his eyes swallowing the blue irises.

“They are navy blue,” I told him. “Your school’s dress code says black or khaki pants only.”

“They told me I could wear these,” he insisted. “You’re a stupid bitch. I can wear whatever pants I want to. This is America. I have rights!”

“You can’t wear whatever pants you want to,” I said, my tone affable, reasonable. “And you definitely cannot call me a stupid bitch. You’re grounded from electronics for the rest of the day. Now get in the car, and I will take you to school.”

I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me...

At 31, lifetime Yellow Springs resident Ann Miles never knew Wheeling Gaunt or his legacy. But when she suddenly became a widow, the man who died more than 100 years ago became a comfort in her life.

“You can’t plan a tragedy. It was really rough. I was a housewife (with two kids) when my husband passed,” Miles said.

When she got a call that the village’s utility department would deliver flour and sugar to her door, she didn’t know what to think. But she understood what it meant to receive kindness from a stranger — one who’s been offering it for the past 118 years.

The tradition dates back to a deal struck between Gaunt, a former slave, and the village in 1894...

Back in 2004, Justice Antonin Scalia was participating in a panel discussion at NYU Law School when the subject of his famously scathing dissent in Lawrence v. Texas came up. One year earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled in Lawrence that the Constitution prohibits criminalizing sodomy between consenting adults, overturning recent precedent and saying, effectively, that gay men and lesbians couldn’t have their sex lives treated as criminal activity.

As he often is when the subject relates to gay rights, Scalia was furious, writing: “so imbued is the Court with the law profession’s anti-anti-homosexual culture, that it is seemingly unaware that the attitudes of that culture are not obviously ‘mainstream’; that in most States what the Court calls ‘discrimination’ against those who engage in homosexual acts is perfectly legal.”...

Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitarist and composer whose collaborations with Western classical musicians as well as rock stars helped foster a worldwide appreciation of India’s traditional music, died Tuesday in a hospital near his home in Southern California. He was 92.

Mr. Shankar had suffered from upper respiratory and heart ailments in the last year and underwent heart-valve replacement surgery last Thursday, his family said in a statement. Mr. Shankar, a soft-spoken, eloquent man whose performance style embodied a virtuosity that transcended musical languages, was trained in both Eastern and Western musical traditions. Although Western audiences were often mystified by the odd sounds and shapes of the instruments when he began touring in Europe and the United States in the early 1950s, Mr. Shankar and his ensemble gradually built a large following for Indian music.

His instrument, the sitar, has a small rounded body and a long neck with a resonating gourd at the top. It has 6 melody strings and 25 sympathetic strings (which are not played but resonate freely as the other strings are plucked). Sitar performances are partly improvised, but the improvisations are strictly governed by a repertory of ragas (melodic patterns representing specific moods, times of day, seasons of the year or events) and talas (intricate rhythmic patterns) that date back several millenniums...

On Wednesday, the Multnomah County Sheriff’s office reached an official determination that David Oliver Relin took his life on Nov. 15 by stepping in front of a freight train outside Portland, Ore. The 49-year-old coauthor of the bestseller-turned-controversy Three Cups of Tea is said to have driven to the Corbett Hill Road exit of Interstate 84 and left his car in a parking area beside the railroad tracks that run along the Columbia River. Nearby is a forested area where he had once read to his wife, schoolteacher Dawn Relin, the earliest pages of the book that would become a blessing before it became a blindsiding curse. “The look on her lovely fire lit face that evening in the Salmon-Huckleberry-Wilderness when I read her the first few completed chapters,” David Relin recalled in the book’s acknowledgments.

When a hurricane forced the Nautilus to dive in Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” Captain Nemo took the submarine down to a depth of 25 fathoms, or 150 feet. There, to the amazement of the novel’s protagonist, Prof. Pierre Aronnax, no whisper of the howling turmoil could be heard.

“What quiet, what silence, what peace!” he exclaimed.

That was 1870.

Today — to the dismay of whale lovers and friends of marine mammals, if not divers and submarine captains — the ocean depths have become a noisy place. The causes are human: the sonar blasts of military exercises, the booms from air guns used in oil and gas exploration, and the whine from fleets of commercial ships that relentlessly crisscross the global seas. Nature has its own undersea noises. But the new ones are loud and ubiquitous...

She was a real-life heroine of the CIA hunt for Osama bin Laden, a headstrong young operative whose work tracking the al-Qaeda leader serves as the dramatic core of a Hollywood film set to premiere next week. Her CIA career has followed a more problematic script, however, since bin Laden was killed. The operative, who remains undercover, was passed over for a promotion that many in the CIA thought would be impossible to withhold from someone who played such a key role in one of the most successful operations in agency history.

She has sparred with CIA colleagues over credit for the bin Laden mission. After being given a prestigious award for her work, she sent an e-mail to dozens of other recipients saying they didn’t deserve to share her accolades, current and former officials said. The woman has also come under scrutiny for her contacts with filmmakers and others...

Jenni Rivera may not be a household name in the United States, but in our southern neighbor, the singer was a superstar. Not only had Rivera sold an astronomical 20 million albums, but the Mexican-American singer-songwriter was the star of a hit reality show that’s in its third season, and had a comedy in the works. The 43-year-old musical powerhouse recently had been named one of People en Español’s 25 most powerful women, not to mention one of the “50 Most Beautiful” people two years in a row...

After three years of declining sales, shipments of domestically sold beer are up by more than 1% in the United States this year. Sales of light beer and specialty beer, such as Budweiser Light Platinum, Shock Top, and Blue Moon, have been the driving force in the resurgence of U.S. breweries. While sales of specialty, craft, and small-market beers have improved dramatically, many of the traditional, full-calorie beers that were once the staples of most breweries have fallen behind. In the five years ending in 2011, sales of Budweiser, which was once the top-selling beer in the country for years, have fallen by 7 million barrels. Sales of Michelob are down more than 70%. Based on data provided by Beer Marketer’s INSIGHTS, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the nine large — or once-large — beer brands with a five-year decline in sales of 30% or more...