For the most part, I've stuck to the comic-book-related panels here at Comic-Con. They are the raison d'être of the festival. Comic books are still the topic that seems to fuel the most passionate, thoughtful conversations—as witnessed at the 30th anniversary tribute to Love and Rockets, or the seminar on progressive politics in comics. It's beautiful to watch the insular passion of the comic book obsessives—they are the warm, beating heart of the whole Con.

We received more than 200 submissions for our Golden Gate Bridge photo contest, which we held in honor of our favorite International Orange icon's 75th birthday in May.

And after hours of deliberation, we're proud to announce that the winning image was shot by Sausalito resident Jason Braun...

President Obama has a Harvard law degree. Former President George W. Bush has a Harvard M.B.A. Will the next president have both?

One of the most exclusive clubs in academe is a Harvard University dual-degree program allowing graduate students to attend its law and business schools simultaneously, cramming five years of education into four. On average, about 12 people per year have completed the program — the overachievers of the overachievers — including a striking number of big names in finance, industry, law and government...

The rise and incredible fall of a vicious extortion ring that preyed on prominent gay men in the 1960s:

On a sleepy Sunday morning in late July 1965, Detective 3^rd Grade James McDonnell received a call in the upstairs squad room of midtown Manhattan’s 17^th Precinct. There was a man at the Western Union office in Grand Central Station who might be impersonating a police detective, he was told. The man was in the company of a 14-year-old runaway and had contacted the boy’s father in Texas to wire plane fare so the son could fly home. The father had grown suspicious when the man had asked for $150—twice the needed amount. McDonnell quickly drove the 10 blocks to Grand Central, parking his unmarked black sedan on Lexington Avenue and hurrying down to the terminal’s lower level. Criminal impersonation of a police officer was an E felony—a “good collar,” as cops like to say, and if the perp had a gun, even better. There’d also been chatter on the detective grapevine about a number of recent cases of phony policemen, so McDonnell was eager to see what was up...

On Feb. 24, Ukrainian authorities made an alarming discovery: bones and other human tissues crammed into coolers in a grimy white minibus.

Investigators grew even more intrigued when they found, amid the body parts, envelopes stuffed with cash and autopsy results written in English.

What the security service had disrupted was not the work of a serial killer but part of an international pipeline of ingredients for medical and dental products that are routinely implanted into people around the world.

The seized documents suggested that the remains of dead Ukrainians were destined for a factory in Germany belonging to the subsidiary of a U.S. medical products company, Florida-based RTI Biologics...

...

Since the “Black Hawk Down” deaths in Somalia almost 20 years ago, we’ve heard little, if anything, about American military casualties in Africa (other than a strange report last week about three special operations commandos killed, along with three women identified by U.S. military sources as “Moroccan prostitutes,” in a mysterious car accident in Mali). The growing number of patients arriving at Ramstein from Africa pulls back a curtain on a significant transformation in twenty-first-century U.S. military strategy.

These casualties are likely to be the vanguard of growing numbers of wounded troops coming from places far removed from Afghanistan or Iraq. They reflect the increased use of relatively small bases like Camp Lemonnier, which military planners see as a model for future U.S. bases “scattered,” as one academic explains, “across regions in which the United States has previously not maintained a military presence.”...

American target shooter Josh Lakatos faced a conundrum. Halfway through the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, he and his rifle-toting teammates were finished with their events, and the U.S. Olympic Committee and team officials had ordered them to turn in the keys to their three-story house and head back to the States. But Lakatos didn't want to leave. He knew from his experience four years earlier in Atlanta, where he'd won silver, that the Olympic Village was just about to erupt into a raucous party, and there was no way he was going to miss it. So he asked the maid at the emptied-out dwelling if she'd kindly look the other way as he jimmied the lock. "I don't care what you do," she replied...

The fastest way to reduce solid waste volumes is to have a recession," writes World Bank urban specialist Dan Hoornweg in a report on the state of trash in cities. Hoornweg elegantly sums up why garbage is and will remain a vexing problem. Here in America, we hear "zero waste" and think sanctimonious yuppies. Yet much of the world's population is too poor to buy—and throw away—much stuff in the first place. But as developing countries become wealthier and adopt higher standards of living, they're also following our wasteful lead.

Here are three key takeaways from the report...

The clouds never lifted at the Comic-Con International fan convention on opening day on Thursday. Inside the meeting halls, neither did the gloom.

Once a year for the last four decades, comic-book and fantasy fans dressed in Batman suits or carrying light sabers have descended on San Diego to trade collectibles, see trailers for new Hollywood movies and maybe speak a little Klingonese. But as fantasy has become big business — 7 of last year’s 10 top-grossing movies were either science fiction or comic-book-inspired, or fanciful enough to rate a spot at Comic-Con — a new anxiety has settled over the convention about the future of the business and over comics themselves...