Late Sunday morning, as the Mississippi River was rushing faster and higher past this town than it has in 183 years of record-keeping, Dontaye Buck was sitting perfectly still. He was staring at a calm puddle of water in which his house sat. A man standing beside Mr. Buck’s mailbox was casting a fishing line into a neighbor’s yard...

Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau and lobbyist Lanny Davis are exchanging biting emails and copying POLITICO. The tussle began last Friday when Trudeau skewered Davis in the comic strip for representing Ivory Coast strongman Laurent Gbagbo...

On a trip to Japan three weeks after the devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power plant disaster, I repeatedly ran into the theme of "change." Young people in their 20s and 30s likened the Tohoku catastrophe to 9/11, after which Americans were enveloped by a sense of unity. "That feeling disappeared," I warned. "It won't disappear here," everyone insisted. "Japan is going to change."...

This will be the century of disasters. In the same way that the 20^th century was the century of world wars, genocide, and grinding ideological conflict, the 21^st will be the century of natural disasters and technological crises and unholy combinations of the two. It'll be the century when the things that we count on to go right will, for whatever reason, go wrong...

Cheri Daniels, whose aversion to politics appears to be the reason her husband, Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana, is dithering about running for president, had no shortage of stories during her much-hyped speech in Indianapolis last week. There was the one about her driving a dump truck, the one about how she attended a senior citizen’s prom, about how she took a prize for cow milking at the state fair. But the story Mrs. Daniels did not share is the one that politicos and pundits are dying to hear: the one about how she married her husband — twice...

Marines were on a foot patrol last fall in the Taliban stronghold of Marja, Afghanistan, when they shot and killed a lethal threat: a local dog that made the mistake of attacking the Marines’ Labrador retriever.

Capt. Manuel Zepeda, the commander of Company F, Second Battalion, Sixth Marines, was unapologetic. If the Lab on the patrol had been hurt, the Marines would have lost their best weapon for detecting roadside bombs — and would have called for a medevac helicopter, just as they would for a human. An attack on the Lab was an attack on a fellow warrior. As Captain Zepeda put it that day, “We consider the dog another Marine.”...

Retired U.S. autoworker John Demjanjuk was convicted of thousands of counts of acting as an accessory to murder at a Nazi death camp and sentenced on Thursday to five years in prison, a groundbreaking verdict that closed one chapter in a decades-long legal battle...

Late last month, Mike Huston crouched in a prickly pear patch. His blood-stained quiver—sewn from the hide of a deer he killed—was full of arrows fashioned from turkey feathers, wild plants and sharpened stones...

Microsoft has peered into the future, and placed a bet that people the world over want to stay in touch with someone anytime and anywhere — preferably at no cost...

When depicting their family origins for public consumption, American presidents tend to downplay the importance of Dad while idealizing Mom. Dwight D. Eisenhower described his mother, who was a pacifist and Jehovah's Witness, as "saintly." Richard Nixon called Hannah Milhous Nixon a "Quaker saint." Jimmy Carter wrote one of his many post-presidential books about his "remarkable mother," Miss Lillian, who went to India with the Peace Corps at the age of 68. George W. Bush identified with saber-toothed Barbara as a way of differentiating himself from the male parent he physically resembled...