When the novelist Murong Xuecun showed up at a ceremony here late last year to collect his first literary prize, he clutched a sheet of paper with some of the most incendiary words he had ever written. It was a meditation on the malaise brought on by censorship. “Chinese writing exhibits symptoms of a mental disorder,” he planned to say. “This is castrated writing. I am a proactive eunuch, I castrate myself even before the surgeon raises his scalpel.”...

Intelligence provided to U.N. nuclear officials shows that Iran’s government has mastered the critical steps needed to build a nuclear weapon, receiving assistance from foreign scientists to overcome key technical hurdles, according to Western diplomats and nuclear experts briefed on the findings.

Documents and other records provide new details on the role played by a former Soviet weapons scientist who allegedly tutored Iranians over several years on building high-precision detonators of the kind used to trigger a nuclear chain reaction...

Tens of thousands of Muslim men knelt shoulder-to-shoulder in prayer on the freezing streets of Moscow on Sunday to celebrate the religious holiday of Eid al-Adha. Estimates of the number of Muslims living or working in the Russian capital run from 2 million to as high as 5 million, but the city only has a few mosques...

Last summer, as Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton celebrated the former president’s 65th birthday with a party at their rented Hamptons home, talk among their guests turned to President Obama’s travails over the debt crisis and doubts about his re-election. “I’m really trying to help him,” the white-haired former president said, shaking his head, “but he seems to have lost his narrative.” Starting Tuesday, that help will take its most public form yet, in the form of a new book by Mr. Clinton, titled “Back to Work,” that makes a case for confidence in government and Mr. Obama’s jobs bill...

It doesn’t seem likely now, but the Greeks, the Europeans, and even bemused Americans may well end up thanking George Papandreou, the perhaps soon-to-be-former Greek Prime Minister, for his self-destructive antics of earlier this week. In bringing the global financial markets to the brink of chaos with his call for a referendum on the latest Greek bailout plan, Papandreou, who faces a parliamentary vote of confidence later today, inadvertently provided a much-needed moment of clarity...

A Buddhist nun in southwest Sichuan Province died Thursday after setting herself on fire, becoming the 11th Tibetan to embrace a grisly protest against Chinese rule and at least the sixth to die doing so...

Human beings evolved to thrive in natural environments and in bonded social groups. Few of us today can enjoy such a life and the emotional equilibrium it engenders, but our genetic predisposition for it has not changed. The term “nature-deficit disorder” has recently entered the popular vocabulary, though it has not yet made it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or been accepted by the medical community. It was coined by the author Richard Louv to explain a wide range of behavior problems in children who spend less time outdoors but now is invoked as the root cause of an even wider range of both physical and emotional ailments in people of all ages who are disconnected from nature...

Somebody from Norton should pass out copies of Nicholas Wapshott’s Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics at Occupy Wall Street and other similarly occupied financial hubs. It will, at the very least, help the protesters frame the debate, which is really about the relative merits of economic intervention or of sucking up the economic pain and letting the system heal itself...

As Herman Cain struggled this week to remember, deny, and explain away allegations that he may have sexually harassed two employees as the head of the National Restaurant Association, one question has come up again and again—where is his wife?  And for that matter, who is his wife?...

In an essay composed in a Cairo prison cell two days after he was detained for refusing to recognize the authority of a military prosecutor, a prominent Egyptian blogger and activist accused the country’s military rulers of “insolence.”...