On his second yearlong deployment to Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis traveled 9,000 miles, patrolled with American troops in eight provinces and returned in October of last year with a fervent conviction that the war was going disastrously and that senior military leaders had not leveled with the American public...

In a meeting room at the Palazzo hotel here over the past week, Newt Gingrich mapped out a detailed strategy that would keep him in the presidential race all the way to the Republican convention in August.

The crux of the former House speaker’s new plan is math: a complex analysis of each state’s delegates, how they’re awarded and how many, reasonably, Gingrich can expect to win...

The United States proposed an international coalition to support Syria's opposition Sunday after Russia and China blocked a U.N. attempt to end nearly 11 months of bloodshed, raising fears that violence will escalate. Rebel soldiers said force was now the only way to oust President Bashar Assad, while the regime vowed to press its military crackdown...

"World music" is a category that does nobody any favors. Entirely disparate performers, like the dapper Brazilian singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso and the African blues guitarist Ali Farka Toure, get lumped together in American record stores simply because they don’t sing exclusively in English. Also, European and American pop have saturated the world to such an extent that Kylie Minogue and Tupac are now more world music than, say, the Malian singer Oumou Sangare. Finally, most of what you find in the world-music section tends toward the gentle, melodious, and uplifting, as if the world were that way...

Last Friday, the Chicago Tribune chose — for the second time since last September — not to run a “Doonesbury” strip. The reason this time, according to the Tribune: The comic “broke from its satirical mission” so it could ”deliver a direct fundraising appeal for a specific charity” — DonorsChoose.org. A note that ran in the paper explains: “The Tribune’s editorial practices do not allow individuals to promote their self-interests.” Reached over the weekend by Comic Riffs, Trudeau raises two issues with this explanation...

It was 50 years ago Wednesday that Ken Kesey’s wildly acclaimed novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” burst onto the published page, but his widow, Faye Kesey McMurtry, knows exactly how long the writing took.

“It took the same length of time that it took for my pregnancy with Zane,” one of Ken and Faye’s three children, said McMurtry, who last year married another acclaimed author and longtime family friend, Larry McMurtry of “Lonesome Dove” fame. “Ken was collating the pages (to send to the publisher) while I was in labor.”...

It's been a rough half-decade for Bill Belichick. In 2007, a video-taping scandal tarnished the silver on his three Lombardi trophies. In 2008, a devastating Super Bowl loss to the New York Giants robbed him of a perfect season. His two most recent campaigns have ended with playoff losses at Gillette Stadium, where his Patriots had once been virtually unbeatable. 

Despite these setbacks, however, Belichick enters Super Bowl XLVI with one distinction unchallenged: He is the National Football League's best-dressed coach...

Nearly 46 million pounds of potato chips, 1.25 billion chicken wings, and 10 million slices of pizza will be part of this year’s Super Bowl Sunday festivities. But just as we have proven before, not all goodies are the same when it comes to a calories-and-fat-per-bite ratio...

The big game was on the horizon, and, as was customary, the governor of the Eastern Seaboard state put up a crate of the local delicacy, a seafood, and his West Coast counterpart responded by staking a case of his state’s finest wine. The wager between the two governors was reported widely in the papers, and the men even scheduled a joint appearance on a morning television program to discuss it...

Philippine military officials said Thursday that an early-morning raid had killed one of the top leaders of a regional terrorist network with links to Al Qaeda, as well as other senior terrorism suspects wanted by the United States...