All Bets Are Off: Russia and Ukraine Ban Gambling

The neon lights are no longer flashing; the roulette wheels have spun their last turn. Casinos across Russia closed their doors Wednesday as a sweeping ban on gambling went into effect, less than a week after a similar ban hit neighboring Ukraine. Lawmakers in both countries say the actions were necessary to bring under control spiraling addiction and a notoriously shady business.

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Mekong River dolphins at risk of extinction, WWF says

Pollution in the Mekong River in Southeast Asia has pushed the local population of Irrawaddy dolphins to the brink of extinction, the World Wildlife Fund warned Wednesday. The small freshwater dolphins, distinguished by their round heads and short dorsal fins, are already listed as a threatened species, the WWF said in a report

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A Year After the Flood, Cedar Rapids Struggles

“Survivors BBQ. Everyone Welcome,” read the handwritten sign tacked onto a recently rebuilt home last weekend in a Cedar Rapids neighborhood still ravaged a year after the city’s worst flooding disaster. “We’ve become stronger — more of a family,” says Toni Grimm, the home’s owner, talking about her neighborhood, Czech Village, a historic ethnic area bordering the now tranquil Cedar River

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N. Korea: U.S. journalists were creating ‘smear campaign’

North Korea’s state media released a "detailed report" Tuesday claiming that American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee entered the country illegally in order to record material for a "smear campaign" against the reclusive communist state. It added that the two women “admitted that what they did were criminal acts … prompted by the political motive to isolate and stifle the socialist system of the DPRK by faking up moving images aimed at falsifying its human rights performance and hurling slanders and calumnies at it.” Ling and Lee were sentenced this month to 12 years of hard labor in North Korea

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Thousands flee life made ‘worse than hell’ by violence in Pakistan

Young and old, poor and prosperous, sick and healthy — residents of Pakistan’s Swat Valley continue to flee the violence that has erupted there as the military clashes with the Taliban. Those who have fled tell of the whole valley being turned into a battlefield as citizens run away, many of them with no shoes and some elderly. They fall ill from sun and heat exposure — particularly infants and those already weak and sick — as they flee.

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Terminator Salvation Review: Sensory Overload

From the beginning, when cyborg Arnold Schwarzenegger first arrived in our present — nude, greasy and heralded by what now seems like a very quaint series of lightning strikes — it was a bad idea to dwell on the time-traveling twist that has him pursuing a target, John Connor, who is still unconceived yet also alive in the future.

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