After decades of civil war, peace has finally settled in southern Sudan. The south will soon declare independence from the north, and with this newfound freedom, the southern Sudanese are beginning to rediscover themselves, reacquaint themselves with all that has been stunted or twisted or buried under the weight of war.Crazy for basketball is part of who they are, or were...

It may have looked like chaos at times, but House Speaker John Boehner got what he wanted from a five-day debate on a bill that would cut $61 billion from this year’s budget and set up a showdown with President Barack Obama and Majority Leader Harry Reid in the two weeks before the government runs out of money March 4...

Thousands gathered Friday for a third day of violent demonstrations in Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, in an unprecedented challenge to the mercurial 41-year reign of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Human rights groups said 24 people had been killed across the North African country, though activists say the count may be far higher...

After early reports of CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan's attack in Egypt, a number of writers and pundits came under fire for inappropriate comments. Journalist Nir Rosen was among them. A short burst of Twitter responses from Rosen earned him the ire of many, and caused him to resign his fellowship at New York University's Center on Law and Security. Salon asked Rosen to explain what happened...

The army took control of this city on Thursday, except at the main hospital, where thousands of people gathered screaming, crying, collapsing in grief, just hours after police opened fired with birdshot, rubber bullets and tear gas on pro-democracy demonstrators camped in Pearl Square...

The Iraqi defector whose claims that Saddam Hussein’s government had biological weapons became part of the Bush administration’s justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq has admitted that he fabricated his story. The defector, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, who was code-named “Curveball” by the Central Intelligence Agency and German intelligence officials, told the British newspaper The Guardian on Tuesday that he had concocted his tale that Iraq was hiding mobile bioweapons laboratories. He did so, he said, in hopes that his lies would lead to the eventual overthrow of the Iraqi ruler...

A federal lawsuit filed Tuesday accuses the Department of Defense of allowing a military culture that fails to prevent rape and sexual assault, and of mishandling cases that were brought to its attention, thus violating the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights...

This page will update automatically every minute...

It’s not the match of the century, it’s more like the letdown of a lifetime. The first round on Monday in this week’s “Jeopardy!” competition between two former champions and Watson, the I.B.M. computer, was supposed to be a man vs. machine, guys against gadget, brain vs. Braun showdown. It was closer to “Bambi vs Godzilla.”...

WikiLeaks said it is taking “legal action” over a tell-all book to be released Friday by a former staffer that is critical of its founder, Julian Assange, and says the Web site was disabled by a spate of defections last year. In Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website, the former staffer, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a German computer scientist who was WikiLeaks’ second-in-command before falling out with Mr. Assange last summer, writes of tensions between WikiLeaks’ core members and Mr. Assange. They disagreed, he writes, over Mr. Assange’s leadership style, his paranoia — he asserts that Mr. Assange began to travel with bodyguards in late 2010 — and the way he managed WikiLeaks’ finances...