Shenyang -- once a key in Mao Zedong's push to industrialie China -- has begun to emerge from its smoggy past, cleaning up its factories and expanding its green spaces...

Amazon.com has taught readers that they do not need bookstores. Now it is encouraging writers to cast aside their publishers. Amazon will publish 122 books this fall in an array of genres, in both physical and e-book form. It is a striking acceleration of the retailer’s fledging publishing program that will place Amazon squarely in competition with the New York houses that are also its most prominent suppliers...

MY son, Ronan, looks at me and raises one eyebrow. His eyes are bright and focused. Ronan means “little seal” in Irish and it suits him.

I want to stop here, before the dreadful hitch: my son is 18 months old and will likely die before his third birthday. Ronan was born with Tay-Sachs, a rare genetic disorder. He is slowly regressing into a vegetative state.  He’ll become paralyzed, experience seizures, lose all of his senses before he dies. There is no treatment and no cure...

Eight days ago, I received a call from the monologist Mike Daisey, whom I’ve been speaking with lately out of an interest in his work. The call was unexpected, and Daisey sounded weary and out-of-sorts. I wasn’t surprised by his mood. Since July of 2010, in cities from Hyderabad to Vancouver to Washington, Daisey has been performing an ambitious and heartfelt work titled The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, and 45 minutes earlier the news had arrived that Jobs was dead...

Former FBI agents say the agency's bin Laden unit misled them about two hijackers...

When it comes to demonstrations, Koreans are second to none. The country’s vociferous civic groups and militant labour unions plan to join the “Occupy Wall Street” movement in the US and hold a massive rally this weekend in Yoido, central Seoul, where most major financial institutions and regulators are based...

On the 20th anniversay of the Soviet Union's collapse, former President Mikhail Gorbachev says the U.S. should have backed his promotion of perestroika, or political and economic reforms. He says that Vladimir Putin is dragging Russia backward...

651,000 miles of highway. 8,000 parks. The Triborough Bridge. Do conservatives who attack the New Deal actually know what America gained from it?...

After his dramatic rescue from a mine last year, Jimmy Sánchez traveled the world, cruising the Greek islands, visiting Britain, Israel, Los Angeles, Disney World — all paid for by people who were moved by the Chilean miners’ story of courage and perseverance. But today Mr. Sánchez, like many of the 33 miners who survived 69 days nearly a half-mile underground, is jobless and at wits’ end...