National News

Landslides and congested roadways are hindering rescuers' progress as they make their way to rural communities in Sichuan Province. The earthquake Saturday, which killed at least 186, is a test of the new leadership's response to natural disaster.

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When the only known poem Winston Churchill wrote as an adult went up for auction in London recently, it was expected to fetch a pretty penny. But the poem failed to fetch a buyer, and now its fate is unknown. New Yorker Poetry Editor Paul Muldoon takes a critical look at "Our Modern Watchwords."

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Joysticks in hand, participants played what was perhaps the world's biggest video game on the side of the 29-story Cira Centre in Philadelphia. The interactive light display kicked off a week of events for the annual celebration of the local tech scene.

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The Antares rocket launch is back on Sunday afternoon, as engineers and spectators look for the rocket to lift off from a launch pad at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility. The mission had been postponed twice this week, due to high winds in one case and a loose cable in another.

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Towns in Missouri, central Illinois and at least four other Midwestern states are under a flood warning, as heavy spring rains swell the Mississippi and other rivers to dangerously high crests.

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"What has changed?" That is the question echoing through Delhi on Sunday. Public frustration over sexual crimes against women is erupting again, this time over a gruesome sexual assault of a child.

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Residents of the Boston area gathered Sunday to pray, to sing and to pay tribute to the victims of bombs and other violence in the city this week. They also proclaimed themselves free from the anxiety that gripped the area during an intense manhunt for two brothers that ended Friday night.

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Artist Brendan O'Connell's paintings find beauty in a cathedral of American consumerism. His thoughtful, unironic paintings of life inside Wal-Mart stores reflect on our relationship to brands and the search for "transcendence" in a shopping cart.

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In the coming decade, another 1 billion women will enter the global workforce, with most moving from farms to service jobs. The workplace is changing women — and they are changing the world.

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John Ashcroft, who helped create the legal framework during the most recent Bush administration for prosecuting those accused of terrorism. He says U.S. officials are correct to invoke a public safety exception and not read Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights.

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The Boston Marathon bombings. The fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas. The defeat of gun control legislation. We absorbed these past six days in an instantaneous, nonstop, firsthand-but-once-removed way that now defines our communal experiences.

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The London Marathon observed 30 seconds of silence before the race got underway Sunday, in a show of solidarity with the victims of Monday's Boston Marathon blasts. Many runners and spectators wore black ribbons to honor the three people killed and the more than 170 injured.

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As investigators wait to interview wounded Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the site of the two blasts is still being processed for evidence. Nearby, mourners and well-wishers have left a pile of flowers, notes and mementos in the days since the attack.

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The Boston bombings rocked the nation, making it hard to remember that the country has been largely terror-free at home for more than a decade. In comparison, Israel endured the equivalent of a Boston Marathon bombing every week in 2002.

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The Obama administration is doubling its non-lethal assistance to the Syrian opposition, Secretary of State John Kerry announced at an 11-nation "Friends of Syria" meeting in Turkey this weekend. The aid comes amid concern about the rising presence of Islamist fighters among the opposition.

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Israel's three airlines went on strike Sunday over a proposed "Open Skies" deal with the European Union that workers say jeopardizes their jobs and could even cause the local airline industry to collapse.

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The Lyrid shower is caused by Earth passing through the orbit of a comet known as Thatcher. The best time to watch should be in the early hours of Monday morning, just before dawn.

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Texas and Oklahoma are fighting over access to the Red River. Fast-growing Texas is eager to fuel its expansion in a time of drought, while the poorer state of Oklahoma is water-rich. The court's decision could impact interstate water-sharing agreements across the country.

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Gunfire injured two people and scattered a crowd of thousands in Denver Saturday. The annual pot celebration is the first since recent laws in Colorado and Washington made marijuana legal for recreational use.

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In West, Texas, some of the town's citizens whose homes were damaged by Wednesday's massive fertilizer plant explosion are returning to their homes Saturday, after authorities declared parts of the area safe. But a curfew will be in place, and other areas remain off-limits.

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