A new documentary captures how China's most famous artist has also become the country's most well-known dissient.

Known for their smug brutality, police in China do not, as a matter of course, get interrogated—especially not by the people whom they beat and harass. Yet there’s a remarkable scene in Alison Klayman’s new documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry in which Ai, the Chinese artist-turned-dissident walks into a Chengdu police station, trailed by his camera-wielding entourage and demands an investigation into his assault months earlier by the city’s police force. Surprised, the officers respond by taking out their own cameras, as the scene turns into a tense face-off that serves as a metaphor for the artist’s harrowing four-year battle against the Chinese state. The film, which opens in the U.S. on Friday, is a riveting look at Chinese tyranny and the people who fight back...

Maine Republican Party Chairman Charlie Webster says he doesn't know "who" Doonesbury is. However, Doonesbury, or at least its author, Garry Trudeau, knows about Webster and his attempt to tighten voter registration laws.

Trudeau, who has recently waded into the ongoing debate over voter ID laws, mentioned Webster Friday in the second frame of his national comic strip, along with the chairman's infamous quote that Democrats had long used Maine's 39-year-old election day voter registration law to "steal elections." ...

Roadside bombs in Afghanistan are taking a growing toll on American troops this summer as blasts from improvised explosive devices tear off arms and legs of soldiers and Marines, including one who survived the traumatic amputation of both arms and both legs.

They are the latest of almost 50,000 Americans wounded during 11 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, including some 16,000 catastrophically wounded. IEDs and other blasts have shorn off 1,653 limbs during the two wars, according to Pentagon records. Among the wounded are five who lost all four limbs...

A dramatic gash in the surface of the Earth that could rival the majesty of the Grand Canyon has been discovered secreted beneath Antarctica's vast, featureless ice sheet.

Dubbed the Ferrigno Rift for the glacier that fills it, the chasm's steep walls plunge nearly a mile down (1.5 kilometers) at its deepest. It is roughly 6 miles (10 km) across and at least 62 miles (100 km) long, possibly far longer if it extends into the sea.

The rift was discovered during a grueling 1,500-mile (2,400 km) trek that, save for a few modern conveniences, hearkens back to the days of early Antarctic exploration. And it came as a total surprise, according to the man who first sensed that something incredible was literally underfoot, hidden by more than a half-mile (1 km) of ice...

Voting rights groups are struggling to hold back a tide of new laws that are likely to make it harder for millions of Americans to vote in the presidential election in November and could distort the outcome of the race for the White House.

Since January 2011, 19 states have passed a total of 24 laws that create hurdles between voters and the ballot box. Some states are newly requiring people to show government-issued photo cards at polling stations. Others have whittled down early voting hours, imposed restrictions on registration of new voters, banned people with criminal records from voting or attempted to purge eligible voters from the electoral roll...

Unprecedented melting of Greenland's ice sheet this month has stunned NASA scientists and has highlighted broader concerns that the region is losing a remarkable amount of ice overall.

According to a NASA press release, about half of Greenland's surface ice sheet naturally melts during an average summer. But the data from three independent satellites this July, analyzed by NASA and university scientists, showed that in less than a week, the amount of thawed ice sheet surface skyrocketed from 40 percent to 97 percent.

In over 30 years of observations, satellites have never measured this amount of melting, which reaches nearly all of Greenland's surface ice cover...

It is one of the fiercest contests at the Olympics, but it is not on any list of events. Every two years, the International Olympic Committee and the host city battle companies that want to bask in the Games’ prestige and global exposure but have not paid the small fortune required to be an official sponsor.

Ambush marketing, as it is called, has been around for decades, and no company has practiced this dark art with more verve and success than Nike. The triumphs of the sportswear giant, and other ambushers, have compelled the I.O.C. to impose ever more stringent rules to keep corporate crashers away from the party...

The post office in Syria, Va., is pretty easy to miss, but then so is the village of Syria itself. Lying in the eastern foothills of the Shenandoah mountains, about 90 miles from Washington, D.C., Syria has just a few hundred residents, mostly natives and recent retirees. The village has no stop lights and one general store, the Syria Mercantile Company, which serves as a grocer, a hunting-and-fishing outfitter and a meeting ground for town gossip.

Inside, near the cash register up front, a single employee of the U.S. Postal Service helms a tiny, wood-paneled office about the size of a generous walk-in closet.

Except for when it was briefly displaced after a pair of long-ago fires, the post office has occupied this same spot inside the general store since 1898...