USA TODAY takes an in-depth look at every NCAA tournament game on Thursday's schedule, broken down by region...

Amid widening alarm in the United States and elsewhere about Japan’s nuclear crisis, military fire trucks began spraying cooling water on spent fuel rods at the country’s stricken nuclear power station late Thursday after earlier efforts to cool the rods failed, Japanese officials said...

With a new film version of Jane Eyre now in theaters and an adaptation of Wuthering Heights coming later this year, fans of authors Charlotte and Emily Bronte are choosing sides. Jennie Yabroff examines which sister was the better author...

Efforts to extinguish smoldering spent fuel were thwarted Wednesday, after high radiation levels above forced the cancellation of a plan to dump water from a helicopter on the power plant at the center of Japan's escalating nuclear crisis. And suggesting the spreading of problems at the reactor, officials said the waste fuel kept at a storage pool at one of the reactors appeared to be heating up...

Looking back, Emiko Chiba has no idea how long her silver Suzuki rode the waves of a giant tsunami or even whether she had trouble breathing inside of it. What's clear is that she ranks among the very lucky in what may be Japan's most unfortunate town...

Outside the public gymnasium here, on a hillock about a mile from the Pacific Ocean, survivors of the tsunami came and went all day on Monday, searching for the dead. Two hundred and sixteen sheets of printer paper were stuck on a wall, one for every body brought to the gymnasium so far, some with names, most bearing only physical descriptions. Hands anxiously clutched to mouths, people pored over them until, finding nothing, most turned away in relief. Syunsuke Doi, 22, did not. At noon, Mr. Doi heaved great sobs on the gymnasium’s concrete steps, head in hands...

Japanese officials and safety workers struggled to reassert control over badly damaged nuclear reactors on Tuesday after the situation at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi plant appeared to verge toward catastrophe, with a huge spike in radiation levels after a new explosion and fire...

The king of Bahrain declared a state of emergency Tuesday afternoon, a day after Saudi troops entered the country to help prop up the tiny nation’s Sunni monarchy. The state of emergency, which is one level below martial law, was announced by the Bahrain Information Affairs Authority and broadcast on state TV. It will last three months, according to the state television channel, the Associated Press reported. The government did not explain what the state of emergency entailed...

Japanese officials struggled on Sunday to contain a widening nuclear crisis in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake and tsunami, saying they presumed that partial meltdowns had occurred at two crippled reactors and that they were facing serious cooling problems at three more...

Just east of the still-seething volcano that is Charlie Sheen a visitor finds The Great Mall of China, so-dubbed, 12 acres of new-century America in the midst of an ethnic makeover far more compelling than the Twitter bursts of a raging celebrity. Its formal name is San Gabriel Square, a crowd of restaurants, bubble tea shops and high-fashion footwear boutiques in a prosperous middle-aged suburb with a majority-Asian population. You can walk around for an afternoon, as I did, and hear nothing but Cantonese and Mandarin. But what stands out about the Great Mall, in this part of the West, is that it no longer stands out at all...