Hours from a government shutdown, the leaders of the House and Senate offered dramatically different reasons for a budget stalemate and expressed little hope that the two sides will reach an agreement by midnight.  In a terse statement to reporters, House Speaker John Boehner said there is “only one reason we do not have an agreement yet and that is spending,” and asked “when will the White House and when will Senate Demorats get serious about cutting spending?” Moments later, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, offered a lengthier, scathing criticism of Mr. Boehner and House Republicans, accusing them of wanting to shut down the federal government by insisting on cutting funds for women’s heath services...

Recent fieldwork in upstate New York has uncovered an ancient creation myth that should be of interest to baseball fans. Ethnologists translate it, literally, as follows: In the beginning, the entire world was only a spherical nugget of cork and rubber. One day as it bounced around the formless void, this nugget was discovered by the Great Spirit World-Father, who performed upon it a magic incantation. He plucked his longest beard hair and wound it tightly around the nugget, many times, until it formed a fist-size ball. This beard-ball he wrapped with the strongest and most precious material in the cosmos: the dried palm-calluses of his own Father, which he pulled taut and stitched closed with the strong red cord of his own umbilicus. This was the mystic Fatherball, sacred orb of the patriarchy...

Libyan rebels retreating from their positions outside the oil town of Brega and facing heavy fighting elsewhere in the country have accused NATO forces of not providing enough air support and failing to protect civilians. The complaint comes as international players involved in Libya increase their efforts to resolve the situation through diplomatic means. Many rebels say the coalition's shift to negotiations has led to a decline in NATO’s military campaign, a move that rebels say is costing lives...

“The rumors are true,” said Vice President for Student Affairs Mike Whaley with a playful emphasis on “rumors.” Following a series of meetings with West College (WestCo) presidents for the past several years and members of the administration and Residential Life (ResLife), the administration has approved the rechristening of Zonker Harris Day, the arts and music festival that takes place in the WestCo courtyard during WesFest each year...

Biologists have found a new way to peer back 130 million years in time, illuminating the catastrophic period in which the dinosaurs perished and birds and mammals arose. The new approach rests on reconstructing the family tree of lice. Vincent S. Smith, a louse taxonomist at the Natural History Museum in London, has found that the tree stretches so far back in time that the host of the first louse would have been a dinosaur, probably one of the theropod dinosaurs that were the ancestors of birds...

The requests to see her perform had dwindled over the years. But when the earthquake struck at 2:46 p.m. on March 11, this city’s last geisha was, fittingly, at home getting ready to sing that night at Kamaishi’s 117-year-old ryotei, an exclusive restaurant featuring fine food and entertainment where she began working as a 14-year-old seven decades ago...

The French government said Tuesday that it was negotiating the surrender of Ivory Coast’s strongman, Laurent Gbagbo, a day after the United Nations and France struck targets at his residence, his offices and two of his military bases in a significant escalation of the international intervention into the political crisis engulfing the nation...

Sally Kern's office in the Oklahoma state house is busy, with more trinkets than a cheer coach's trophy room. Here's an award from Americans United for Life. Here's a photo of George W. Bush throwing out the first ball at the 2002 World Series. Here's Theodore Roosevelt, hand on his hip, standing in front of a globe. "I've put that photo of Roosevelt there because of the inscription," says Kern. She reads it: "We can have no 50/50 allegiance in this country. Either a man is an American, and nothing else, or he is not an American at all."...

At least two sons of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi are proposing a resolution to the Libyan conflict that would entail pushing their father aside to make way for a transition to a constitutional democracy under the direction of his son Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, a diplomat and a Libyan official briefed on the plan said Sunday...

France and Germany are leading calls for the release of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who remains missing more than 36 hours after his detention...