Americans Abroad

Jerry Royster isn't sure whether to laugh or cry: The umps just don't speak his language. Every time he races out of the dugout to argue a play, he has to bring along an interpreter. Last year, the former Dodgers infielder took the helm of this city's wildly popular Lotte Giants, becoming Korea's first foreign manager. From opening day, he was a stranger in a strange baseball land.

The government does not need a search warrant when it taps the phones or checks the e-mails of suspected terrorists who are outside the U.S., even if Americans may be overheard on the calls, a special intelligence court ruled in an opinion released Thursday. The decision confirms what Bush administration officials and some legal experts have long argued. Although the Constitution protects the privacy rights of Americans against "unreasonable searches and seizures," this principle does not bar U.

Teresa Malof knew she wasn't in Kentucky anymore when a cleric issued a fatwa against her secret Santa gift exchange. Malof proposed the idea at the King Fahad National Guard Hospital, where she has worked for more than a decade.

The phone rings and Jo Rosano jumps to answer, thinking of the sound of her son's voice: Hi, Mom, it's me, Marc. But it isn't him. Rosano hangs up to resume scouring the Internet for news, brewing espresso, pacing, praying, crying and waiting -- as she has for the last five years. "Day and night," she says, "this is my life." Colombian rebels have held Marc Gonsalves and two other Americans hostage since February 2003, when their plane crashed during a drug surveillance mission for a U.S.

A Southern California human rights activist trapped in an African hotel room in the midst of a gunfight between soldiers and rebels crawls across the carpet, feels something hot under his fingers and flinches. "I touched a bullet," he says, voice and hands shaking. Gabriel Stauring, 41, posted the video footage on his website last week after traveling to the Central African country of Chad to document Darfur refugees for his Redondo Beach-based group, Stop Genocide Now.

The Supreme Court heard arguments in two war-on-terrorism cases Tuesday -- one that tests whether American civilians can seek the help of American courts if they are held in Iraq, and the other to determine whether the man who plotted to bomb Los Angeles International Airport will serve his full 22-year prison term. In both cases, the justices sounded as though they would rule on the side of the Bush administration. The first case, Munaf vs.

A convicted hotel bomber from California who modeled himself on a fictional vampire has died after becoming ill in prison, officials said Tuesday. Triston Jay Amero, 26, was serving a 30-year sentence for the 2006 bombing of two low-rent hotels in this capital city. Two Bolivians died in one of the attacks. Juan Carlos Limpias, a senior official in the national prison service, said Amero complained of stomach pains Monday night and was taken to a hospital, where he died.

Robbers with machetes hacked a U.S. tourist to death and seriously wounded his wife aboard the couple's sailboat in northeastern Guatemala, the woman said Sunday. In a telephone interview from her hospital bed, Nancy Dryden, 67, said her husband, Daniel Perry Dryden, 66, was killed by four men who boarded their boat late Saturday while it was anchored in Lake Izabal.

U.S. intelligence analysts eavesdropped on personal calls between Americans overseas and their families back home and monitored the communications of workers with the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations, according to two military linguists involved in U.S. surveillance programs. The accounts are the most detailed to date to challenge the assertions of President Bush, CIA Director Michael V.

An American woman working for a U.S. nonprofit organization in Iraq to help strengthen the fledgling government was among four people killed Wednesday in a roadside ambush. The woman, whose name was withheld pending notification of her family, worked for the National Democratic Institute, a Washington organization that advises political parties around the world.