2010: An incomplete and subjective look at The Year in Crazy...

The US Senate voted yesterday to end America's ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the US military, a historic reversal that ends one of the nation's most controversial social policies and signifies growing political tolerance for gay rights...

Bonus season is fast approaching on Wall Street, but this year the talk does not center just on multimillion-dollar paydays. It's about a new club that no one wants to join: the Zeros. Drawn from a broad swath of back-office employees and middle-level traders, bankers and brokers, the Zeros, as they have come to be called, are facing a once-unthinkable prospect: an annual bonus of...nothing...

The Senate debate over President Barack Obama's nuclear arms control treaty with Russia moves behind closed doors Monday for a briefing that could determine the fate of one of the president's year-end priorities. Prospects for ratifying the New Start treaty this year are in doubt after the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, declared his opposition on Sunday. But several other GOP senators whose support would be needed for ratification have said they are still undecided...

Counter-terrorism detectives today arrested 12 people amid fears of a Christmas bombing attack in the UK. The men, aged between 17 and 28, were held in Birmingham, Cardiff, London and Stoke-on-Trent on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of an act of terrorism in the UK, police said...

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Aasia Bibi, a Christian mother of five, is sitting in a Pakistani jail awaiting a death sentence for blaspheming the prophet Muhammad — and an appeal by the pope hasn't saved her...

One day not long ago, as the sun shone relentlessly, several hundred Muslims gathered here in the Imam al-Adham Mosque to hold a special prayer associated with times of crisis. The prayer, in Arabic, is called Salat al-Istisqaa, and it is rarely held. It seeks neither mercy nor an end to violence, but rather divine intervention in another of the scourges that afflicts this country: the lack of rain...

A new wave of Iraqi Christians has fled to northern Iraq or abroad amid a campaign of violence against them and growing fear that the country’s security forces are unable or, more ominously, unwilling to protect them...

Silvio Berlusconi is fighting for his political life as he faces two no-confidence votes that could bring down his government and pitch Italy into an acute political crisis...

For more than an hour, Gen. David H. Petraeus, U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry and other top Western officials in Kabul urged Karzai to delay implementing a ban on private security firms. Reconstruction projects worth billions of dollars would have to be shuttered, they maintained, if foreign guards were evicted.

Sitting at the head of a glass-topped, U-shaped table in his conference room, Karzai refused to budge, according to two people with direct knowledge of the late October meeting. He insisted that Afghan police and soldiers could protect the reconstruction workers, and he dismissed pleas for a delay.

As he spoke, he grew agitated, then enraged. He told them that he now has three "main enemies" - the Taliban, the United States and the international community.

"If I had to choose sides today, I'd choose the Taliban," he fumed...