In Dublin to receive an honorary doctorate for four decades’ work on his Doonesbury cartoon strip, Garry Trudeau tells FRANK McNALLY about his family’s link to old Irish bank notes and that despite the doom and gloom, he remains an optimist...

The worst nightmare for Vancouver is coming true.

Not only did the city's beloved Canucks lose in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final, it was shut out 4-0. Now a scene reminiscent of 1994 has emerged, when the city rioted under similar circumstances, with random fires, flipped cars, pole climbing, and riot police...

Pakistan’s top military spy agency has arrested some of the Pakistani informants who fed information to the Central Intelligence Agency in the months leading up to the raid that led to the death of Osama bin Laden, according to American officials...

When first exposed to the art of Ben Wilson, or to Mr. Wilson in the act of creating it, people tend to respond with some degree of puzzlement. “When I first saw one, I thought it was a fruit sticker,” said Matt Brasier, who was walking through this north London suburb the other day...

As I'm old enough to recall the stereotypes that formed around Vietnam veterans, I'm well aware of this danger. The purpose of my stories has been to participate in the national conversation about the costs of war...

On the evening of March 12, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant’s oldest reactor had suffered a hydrogen explosion and risked a complete meltdown. Prime Minister Naoto Kan asked aides to weigh the risks of injecting seawater into the reactor to cool it down. At this crucial moment, it became clear that a prime minister who had built his career on suspicion of the collusive ties between Japan’s industry and bureaucracy was acting nearly in the dark. He had received a confusing risk analysis from the chief nuclear regulator, a fervently pro-nuclear academic whom aides said Mr. Kan did not trust. He was also wary of the company that operated the plant, given its history of trying to cover up troubles...

Hard books are on their way to extinction.

Biologists maintain a concept call a "type specimen." Every species of living organism has many individuals of noticeable variety. There are millions of Robins in America, for instance, all of them each express the Robin-ness found in the type of bird we have named Turdus migratorius. But if we need to scientifically describe another bird as being "like a Robin" or maybe "just a Robin" which of those millions of Robins should we compare it to?

Biologists solve this problem by arbitrarily designating one found individual to be representative and archetypical of the entire species. It is the archetype, or the "type specimen," of that form. There is nothing special about that chosen specimen; in fact that's the whole idea: it should be typical. But once chosen this average specimen becomes the canonical example that is used to compare other forms. Every species in botany and zoology has a physical type specimen preserved in a museum somewhere.

Books and other media creations are now getting their type specimen archive.

It's now possible to imagine a world in which every person creates his own mental fortress and apprehends the outside world through digital arrow-slits...

Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, Al Qaeda’s leader in East Africa and the mastermind of the American Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, was killed in a late-night shootout at a security checkpoint in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, Somali and American officials said Saturday...

The International Monetary Fund, still struggling to find a new leader after the arrest of its managing director last month in New York, was hit recently by what computer experts describe as a large and sophisticated cyberattack whose dimensions are still unknown...