Lebanon's national unity government has collapsed after 11 ministers from Hezbollah and its allies resigned. Energy Minister Gibran Bassil said the decision was prompted by a dispute over the UN tribunal investigating former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri's murder. The announcement came as Prime Minister Saad Hariri, his son, was meeting US President Barack Obama in Washington. Tension has been high in Lebanon, amid indications that Hezbollah members could be indicted by the UN tribunal...

Floodwaters have begun inundating Brisbane homes after the city's river broke its banks this morning. The inner-Brisbane suburb of Fairfield has been cut in half, with dozens of homes breached. At one shopping centre, only the tip of a Telstra phone box was visible with traffic lights just peeking above the surface as the waters continued to rise...

Dick Winters was the leader of a valiant World War II paratrooper company that became famous a half-century later in historian Stephen Ambrose's "Band of Brothers" and a subsequent HBO miniseries. Mr. Winters, who died Jan. 2 at age 92, requested his death not be announced until after his funeral. An intensely private man, he became the subject of widespread adulation after Mr. Ambrose's 1992 book portrayed him as a paragon of military leadership...

Prosecutors accused Jared Lee Loughner, a troubled 22-year-old college dropout, of five serious federal charges on Sunday, including the attempted assassination of a member of Congress, for his role in a shootout that left 20 people wounded, six of them fatally, on Saturday morning...

It’s not every day that a beleaguered, marginalized and persecuted people get a chance to vote for their own freedom. On Sunday, southern Sudan did. Starting in the cool hours of the night, long before the polls even opened, people across this region began lining up at polling stations to cast their votes in a historic referendum on whether to declare independence. Jubilant crowds made clear which was the overwhelmingly popular choice. “I feel like I’m going to a new land,” beamed Susan Duku, a southern Sudanese woman who works for the United Nations...

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin...

A now-retracted British study that linked autism to childhood vaccines was an "elaborate fraud" that has done long-lasting damage to public health, a leading medical publication reported Wednesday. An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study's author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study -- and that there was "no doubt" Wakefield was responsible...

World food prices continued to rise sharply in December, bringing them close to the crisis levels that provoked shortages and riots in poor countries three years ago, according to newly released United Nations data. Prices are expected to remain high this year, prompting concern that the world may be approaching another crisis, although economists cautioned that many factors, like adequate stockpiles of key grains, could prevent a serious problem...

p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }The assassination of an outspoken secular politician by one of his elite police guards on Tuesday plunged the government deeper into political crisis and highlighted the threat of militant infiltration even within the nation’s security forces. The killing of Salman Taseer, the prominent governor of Punjab Province, was another grim reminder of the risks that Pakistani leaders take to oppose religious extremists, at a time when the United States is pushing Pakistan for greater cooperation in the war in Afghanistan by cracking down on militant groups like the Taliban...

North American bees are disappearing at a rapid rate, signaling a dire threat to the production of countless food sources. The Guardian reports that four common species of U.S. bumble bees have declined 96 percent in recent decades, and scientists allege that disease and inbreeding are responsible...