Defiance with a Smile: Mladic Faces Genocide Survivors in Court

Defiant and unrepentant, former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic made his first appearance at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia on Friday, in a preliminary hearing during which he refused to enter a plea to the 11 counts against him — including genocide, extermination, and murder.

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New Particle Detector Is Poised to Solve Cosmic Mysteries

For years, scientists have ridiculed NASA’s claim that the International Space Station is a grand platform for groundbreaking research — and plenty of the science done there has just reinforced that attitude. Who can forget, for example, this classic opening sentence from a landmark 2006 paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology: “During space flights, tadpoles of the clawed toad Xenopus laevis occasionally develop upward bended tails “?

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O’Bama Come Home: An Irish Village Welcomes its Prodigal Son

As the residents of Moneygall ready themselves to play host to Barack Obama on May 23, many hope the visit will bring the Irish village exactly what the President’s great-great-great-grandfather sought when he left there 150 years ago: prosperity. It takes less than a minute to drive through Obama’s ancestral hometown, a sleepy and typical rural village whose main attractions are a single pub, a corner shop, a post office and a football field.

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The Trouble with Democracy: Albania’s Worrisome Vote

While much of the world can only dream of democracy, other places have trouble making it work. Tiny Albania emerged from communist dictatorship in 1990 only to tumble into a rough world of gangsters, fraudulent financial machinations and incompetent governance, exacerbated by lawless capitalism and devil-may-care politics

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