A new short film by Petrina TV puts some faces to the rooftop farming movement in New York City. Patrick Connolly of Bobo in Greenwich Village explains, "it's great to say your produce came 50 miles from here, but to say that it came from the roof above your apartment building, that's even better."...

The strongman of Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo, was captured and taken into custody by his rival on Monday, ending a four-month standoff that left hundreds dead in this once-prosperous West African nation, put international diplomacy to a severe test and ultimately dragged the country back into civil war...

The Japanese government's nuclear safety agency has decided to raise the crisis level of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant accident from 5 to 7, the worst on the international scale...

More than once during the Civil War, newspapers reported a strange phenomenon. From only a few miles away, a battle sometimes made no sound — despite the flash and smoke of cannon and the fact that more distant observers could hear it clearly. These eerie silences were called “acoustic shadows.” Tuesday, the 150th anniversary of the first engagement of the Civil War, the Confederacy’s attack on Fort Sumter, we ask again whether in our supposedly post-racial, globalized, 21st-century world those now seemingly distant battles of the mid-19th century still have any relevance...

An "upside-down forest" of small trees with deep roots, Brazil's wildlife-rich outback is home to a 20th of the world's species, including the spectacular blue and yellow macaw and giant armadillos. Yet this vast wilderness – as big the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain put together – is being rapidly lost to feed the heavily carnivorous appetites of Britons and others. What was, only a generation ago, an almost unbroken two million square kilometre mass of trees and bushes in central Brazil is now covered with fields of soy beans, waiting to be fed to pigs and chickens in Europe and China...

Sixteen years ago Tom Klein was staring at a Woody Woodpecker cartoon, “The Loose Nut,” when he started seeing things. Specifically, Mr. Klein watched that maniacal red-topped bird smash a steamroller through the door of a shed. The screen then exploded into images that looked less like the stuff of a Walter Lantz cartoon than like something Willem de Kooning might have hung on a wall...

Gore Vidal tells of an apocryphal pilgrimage each April 12, the anniversary of Franklin D. Roosevelt's death at Warm Springs, Ga. The trek, organized by the Dutchess County New York Republican Central Committee, supposedly wends its way up the old Albany Post Road from Poughkeepsie to Springwood, FDR's beloved Hyde Park home. According to Vidal, the mythic mission is meant to reassure twitchy Republicans that the 32nd president still rests in something approaching peace at the Hyde Park Presidential Library -- that he has not risen for some new 21st century "rendezvous with destiny."...

Greg Jeloudov was 35 and new to America when he decided to join the Army. Like most soldiers, he was driven by both patriotism for his adopted homeland and the pragmatic notion that the military could be a first step in a career that would enable him to provide for his new family. Instead, Jeloudov arrived at Fort Benning, Georgia, for basic training in May 2009, in the middle of the economic crisis and rising xenophobia. The soldiers in his unit, responding to his Russian accent and New York City address, called him a "champagne socialist" and a "commie faggot." He was, he told Newsweek, "in the middle of the viper's pit." Less than two weeks after arriving on base, he was gang-raped in the barracks by men who said they were showing him who was in charge of the United States...

Meeting with his Republican caucus Wednesday, House Speaker John Boehner laid out his strategy for budget talks with the White House. As rank-and-file members expressed their support, Mr. Boehner teared up, and the room erupted in a standing ovation. That moment, three days before the government was scheduled to shut down, helped turn the tide toward a deal after a tumultuous three weeks of drama...

IN the fall of 2008, when I heard that Oprah Winfrey would be making a guest appearance on Tina Fey’s NBC sitcom, “30 Rock,” I experienced the unique joy that arises when two entities you love equally but don’t think of as having much in common unexpectedly intersect — as if your iPhone suddenly started making pizza...