Published: Feb 19, 2012
MOSCOW — As the violence in Syria worsened in recent days, amateur video showed the forces of President Bashar al-Assad rolling through the besieged city of Homs in vintage Soviet battle tanks. Other photographs, including satellite images released by the State Department, showed deployments of Soviet-designed truck-mounted rocket launchers
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Published: Feb 14, 2012
It was 1982, and Leonard, a young research fellow, was telling his girlfriend's mother and sister about his work on yeast genetics. He carefully explained the basics, noting that mating yeast cells have a crucial gene that comes in two versions. Then he told them his research goal: ''We're trying to figure out why the progeny of a given cell
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Published: Feb 13, 2012
BERLIN -- European lawmakers, who two years ago capped fees for mobile data roaming within the European Union at 50 a month, want to expand the protection to cover the whole world. The proposal is part of a plan to extend Europe's five-year-old limits on charges for voice, text and data roaming through 2022 and is likely go to a European Parliament
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Published: Feb 12, 2012
GIDDINGS -- On a rainy February day, teenage boys wearing elastic-waisted khaki pants and white T-shirts, many of them heavily tattooed, walked in single-file lines across the Giddings State School campus. A few of them lifted black windbreakers above their heads in a hopeless attempt to stay dry as they made their way from the cafeteria to their
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Published: Feb 11, 2012
SAN FRANCISCO -- When Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a China expert at the Brookings Institution, travels to that country, he follows a routine that seems straight from a spy film. He leaves his cellphone and laptop at home and instead brings ''loaner'' devices, which he erases before he leaves the United States and wipes clean the minute he returns. In
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Published: Feb 04, 2012
WASHINGTON -- The international hackers group known as Anonymous turned the tables on the F.B.I. by listening in on a conference call last month between the bureau, Scotland Yard and other foreign police agencies about their joint investigation of the group and its allies. Anonymous posted a 16-minute recording of the call on the Web on Friday and
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Published: Feb 04, 2012
Six months before the space shuttle Challenger exploded over Florida on Jan. 28, 1986, Roger Boisjoly wrote a portentous memo. He warned that if the weather was too cold, seals connecting sections of the shuttle's huge rocket boosters could fail. ''The result could be a catastrophe of the highest order, loss of human life,'' he wrote. The memo was
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Published: Feb 03, 2012
PURCHASE, N.Y. -- ''American Vanguards,'' the new exhibition at the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, N.Y., reunites the Four Musketeers of New York painting: John Graham, Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis and Willem de Kooning. For a time -- the 1930s, give or take a few years -- these artists linked arms to defend modern American art against the dreariness
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Published: Feb 03, 2012
ATHENS -- For nearly two years, as the debt crisis worsened, Diomidis Spinellis led a team that devised innovative software to help Greece crack down on tax cheats. He sent daily reports to his superiors showing which regional tax offices lagged in closing cases and collecting tax revenue. But last September, Mr. Spinellis, who interrupted a
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Published: Feb 01, 2012
CENTER POINT, Ala. -- The sound of a tornado ripping off Sheila Wright's roof shook her out of a deep sleep early on Jan. 23. She and her three children had gone to bed without knowing that a storm was about to bear down on their neighborhood near Birmingham. The series of 10 tornadoes that night, which killed two people and tore through more than
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