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Talks at the World Trade Organization collapsed earlier this week, ending a 7-year effort to create a new global trade pact. Some experts say the end of these negotiations could mean an end to decades of continuous expansion of global free-trade deals. Simon Cox is economics correspondent for

Find out which issues matters most to voters in the Peace Garden State and how rising prices for food are affecting the nation’s leading producer of hard red spring wheat. Also: whether the presence of oil in the Western half of the state is generating more interest as oil prices ...

The situation in Zimbabwe continues to deteriorate; now the US has just expanded its sanctions against the country. Former Africa Bureau Chief for Newsweek Joshua Hammer gives us the latest news from Zimbabwe, and explains why he calls South African President Mbeki "Mugabe's chief protector." His article for ...

Filmmaker Courtney Hunt's Frozen River is a testament to why sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

Virginia circuit court judge Martin Clark moonlights as an author of legal thrillers. His latest, The Legal Limit, is about a successful district attorney whose youthful crime comes back to haunt him.

Americans spend almost as much time driving as they do eating. Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic, explains why we drive the way we do – from road rage, to the psychology of traffic jams - and tells us what our driving habits reveal about us.

How do you think ...

The Rev. Al Sharpton rejected a non-jail plea offer today and instead will go to trial in September on a disorderly conduct charge related to protest demonstrations over the fatal shooting of an unarmed man on his wedding day.

Sharpton turned down an offer to plead guilty to the violation - ...

New York's Public Integrity Commission says four members of former governor Eliot Spitzer's administration broke the law when they compiled travel records on former State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno. Karen DeWitt has more.

REPORTER: Commission spokesman Walter Aires says the probe took a full year to complete because Spitzer's aids ...

The Marcellus Shale is what industry people call an unconventional play. It’s loaded with natural gas, from Eastern Ohio to the Catskill Mountains. But the gas is very hard to extract. It’s packed tight 7,000 feet deep.

Today, with energy prices at record highs, extracting that gas looks to be affordable, ...

Howard Zinn, the popular Boston University historian and political activist who had been an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam, passed away at the age of 87. Leonard interviewed him in March of 2001 for his book on war...

Robert S. McNamara served as the eighth United States Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. The architect of the ill-fated escalation of American forces during the Vietnam War, McNamara spent his later years publicly disavowing his decisions as "wrong, terribly ...