Even before Osama bin Laden's death a month ago, a young generation of would-be terrorists had turned away from the al-Qaida leader toward a new breed of brash, charismatic ideologues...

The Venice Biennale – aside from being the single most significant international gathering for the visual arts – is a theatrical event. With 89 national exhibitions competing for attention, spectacle is part of the point. This year, the spectacle that is wowing the crowds is the huge upturned tank outside the American pavilion in the Giardini di Castello, which has been "repurposed" into a treadmill...

North China is dying. A chronic drought is ravaging farmland. The Gobi Desert is inching south. The Yellow River, the so-called birthplace of Chinese civilization, is so polluted it can no longer supply drinking water. The rapid growth of megacities — 22 million people in Beijing and 12 million in Tianjin alone — has drained underground aquifers that took millenniums to fill. Not atypically, the Chinese government has a grand and expensive solution: Divert at least six trillion gallons of water each year hundreds of miles from the other great Chinese river, the Yangtze, to slake the thirst of the north China plain and its 440 million people...

When Chris Corsten describes his job, he starts from space and zooms into the eastern hemisphere of the world, down into Central Asia, and then into Afghanistan, using Google Earth. In one of the country's rural districts, nestled in mountains and riverbeds, are hundreds of colored dots representing construction sites. If Corsten moves his cursor over one of these dots, a geo-tagged photograph showing Afghan men building walls or mixing cement appears. If he displays all the construction sites he's managed in Afghanistan, there are thousands of colored dots spread across the country...

The lady's hotter than ever, but not because of her music: She's become an evangelist of self-acceptance, preaching to an audience of outcasts...

Courageous Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad, who had scored major scoops on al Qaeda and the Taliban, was abducted and brutally murdered this week. Was the ISI, the country's shady intelligence agency, to blame?...

The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force...

The onetime Nixon operative has created the most profitable propaganda machine in history. Inside America's Unfair and Imbalanced Network...

The inside story of Bradley Manning, Julian Asange and the largest intelligence breach in U.S. history...

If Noah had run into the modern nanny state, or nimby, or a few of the other obstacles that Johan Huibers has been facing, the animal kingdom might look a lot different today. Mr. Huibers, 60, the successful owner of a big construction company, has spent the last few years building an ark, identical in size to the one Noah is said in the book of Genesis to have built..