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The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday cautioned consumers against using quinine for leg cramps, warning that the drug could cause severe side effects, including death. Quinine, sold in this country under the brand name Qualaquin, is approved for treatment of uncomplicated malaria, but has a long history of use as a remedy for leg cramps, especially at night. In many countries, it is sold over the counter. Studies have shown that it can reduce the incidence of cramps by one-third to one-half but that as many as one in every 25 users can suffer serious side effects.

As the United States finally begins to wind down its military presence in Afghanistan, is the Obama administration poised to replicate that intervention in Yemen? The administration insists it has no such plans, but it has been evident for months that it regards the Yemen-based group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as the most dangerous incubator of terrorist plots directed at America. And it is acting on that conviction. This week The Times reported that U.S. special operations troops, which were withdrawn from Yemen last year amid political turmoil in that country, have returned and are providing technical assistance to Yemeni forces.

When Pink Floyd first took its concept album "The Wall" to the concert stage more than three decades ago, even lead singer and chief songwriter Roger Waters couldn't imagine a day when rock music might get any bigger. But 32 years later, his magnum opus about the battle between individual freedoms and authoritarian oppression has magnified beyond Waters' own expectations of yore. Now the man who once excoriated the voluminous expansion of the rock concert experience has helped institutionalize it. "I famously hated playing to large numbers of people and playing in stadiums," Waters, 68, said from a tour stop in Austin, Texas, earlier this month.

Riviera Country Club, which has been the course for the regular Los Angeles stop on the PGA Tour 37 of the last 39 years, has been selected by the United States Golf Assn. as the host course for the 2017 U.S. Amateur championship. The 1948 U.S. Open, won by Ben Hogan , and 1998 U.S. Senior Open, won by Hale Irwin , were played at Riviera. The PGA Championships of 1983, won by Hal Sutton , and 1995, won by Steve Elkington , were also held at Riviera, a course that became known as Hogan's Alley after Hogan won the L.A. Open three times there, in addition to his Open championship.

washington -- Mitt Romney twice emphasized his unique business background when he and eight other Republican presidential candidates faced off in a debate last week in Iowa. "I've spent the last, as I've told you, 25 years in the private sector," former Massachusetts Gov. Romney declared at one point. "I understand why jobs come and why jobs go. I've done business in 20 countries."

The alarm over potential bank runs in Greece and Spain this week has highlighted an often-overlooked fact: Europe's debt crisis is also, in many ways, a major banking crisis. In capitals such as Athens, Madrid and Rome, large portions of the sovereign debt racked up by spendthrift governments are owed to the countries' own banks, locking governments and the banks in an embrace so tight that disaster for one would almost certainly spell doom for the other. International bailouts for Greece, Ireland and Portugal have helped to keep not just their governments but also their banks afloat, as well as financial institutions in other parts of Europe with large exposure to those nations' debts.

When the White House sent a last-minute invitation for Asif Ali Zardari to attend the two-day NATO summit, they were taking a highly public gamble. Would sharing the spotlight with President Obama and other global leaders induce the Pakistani president to allow vital supplies to reach alliance troops fighting in Afghanistan? But long before the summit ended Monday, the answer was clear: No deal. Zardari's refusal to reopen the supply routes left a diplomatic blot on a summit that NATO sought to cast as the beginning of the end of the conflict in Afghanistan.

Life expectancy has risen in the United States over the last 25 years, but it's not rising as fast as it once was. And, compared with other developed nations, U.S. life expectancy doesn't measure up. In a report released Tuesday by the National Research Council , experts describe U.S. life expectancy as a "poor performance" compared with many other countries given the fact that the U.S. spends far more on healthcare than any other nation....

Somalia, Afghanistan and Haiti rank as the hungriest countries in the world, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. In its annual food security report, the FAO unveiled a "depth of hunger" measurement, according to which hungry Somalis, for example, are missing 27% of the minimum calories required to maintain body weight under light activity. The three countries also rank highest in terms of undernourished populations, with Somalia at 75%.

Switzerland is the world's richest country in terms of per-capita income, and the United States has moved up a notch to the eighth-richest, the World Bank said in its annual atlas of global statistics. Scandinavians are among the richest people in the world, with Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland all in the Top 10. Mozambique remained the world's poorest economy, with its per-capita gross national product income dropping 25% in 1992 to $60.

WASHINGTON - Eduardo Saverin fled Brazil as a boy and lived the American dream by helping found Facebook Inc. Now two U.S. senators want to make sure he never sets foot in the U.S. again unless he pays tens of millions of dollars in taxes he will owe after the company's initial public offering Friday. Saverin renounced his U.S. citizenship this year and is living in Singapore, a country with no capital gains tax. Sens. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Bob Casey (D-Pa.) denounced him Thursday as a tax dodger and introduced legislation to punish anyone who gives up citizenship to duck big tax bills.

NEW DELHI - When Gavin Martin and his family moved here from southern India in the early '70s, the country's capital city offered the gifted young pianist exactly one option for continuing his music education: the Delhi School of Music. It was the only place in town - perhaps in the whole of northern India - that taught Western classical music with any degree of competence. Even so, life wasn't easy for the serious student born in a country where the sitar is king. "Growing up in India playing the piano was kind of like [being]

LONDON - Posthumus, the protagonist of Shakespeare's "Cymbeline," marched through the Herculean columns of the Globe theater, stopped abruptly at the front of the stage and looked up at an audience of hundreds - most of whom didn't speak a whisper of the language they were about to hear. His voice boomed, and he raised his arms and curled his hands into fists. "All these people have come from the newest country in the world," shouted actor Francis Paulino Lugali in Juba Arabic, "and this country is South Sudan!"

TRIVANDRUM, India - R. Padmanathan Nair sits on a plastic chair in the entryway of the Heritage senior home talking about the fellow residents who treat him like family, which is helpful seeing as his own rarely visits. His wife tried to abscond with their valuables, he said, so he gave the house to a niece, who ignored him after she got the property. Now his daughter is the only one who visits the 76-year-old retired teacher here in the capital of the southern state of Kerala, and that's just a few times a year.

WASHINGTON - Even as Americans debate whether to scrap President Obama's healthcare law and its promise of guaranteed health coverage, many far less affluent nations are moving in the opposite direction - to provide medical insurance to all citizens. China, after years of underfunding healthcare, is on track to complete a three-year, $124-billion initiative projected to cover more than 90% of the nation's residents. Mexico, which a decade ago covered less than half its population, just completed an eight-year drive for universal coverage that has dramatically expanded Mexicans' access to life-saving treatments for diseases such as leukemia and breast cancer.

SAN FRANCISCO — Dressed in his trademark hoodie and jeans, Facebook Inc. co-founder Mark Zuckerberg kicked off a cross-country roadshow to pitch his company's initial public stock offering. Hundreds of institutional investors stood in long lines Monday to pile into a ballroom at New York's Sheraton Hotel to hear the billion-dollar pitch from the 27-year-old chief executive before his company's hotly anticipated IPO. The meeting was closed to the media. Facebook is trying to build excitement for the IPO that in a few weeks could value the company at more than $96 billion.

The United States and 33 other countries signed a convention aimed at eradicating bribery in international business. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, speaking at the signing ceremony in Paris, called the accord "a victory for good government, fair competition and open trade." Washington has been a driving force behind the agreement reached by members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and five additional countries.

The House Agriculture Committee voted Thursday night to require country-of-origin labels on meats beginning next year, striking a compromise as reports of tainted food from China raise consumer awareness about the safety of imported food. After days of negotiations, the committee agreed on a plan to allow the mandatory labels but soften penalties and burdensome record-keeping requirements that had concerned many food retailers and meatpackers who opposed the legislation.

"Chinatown" writer Robert Towne has listed his estate on the Westside at $12.995 million. Built in 1926 and designed for grand entertaining, the restored English country-style mansion and guesthouse have seven bedrooms, nine bathrooms and 10,000 square feet of living space. The nearly three-quarter-acre property is wooded and includes a swimming pool, a rose garden and a spice garden. Towne, 77, won an Oscar for original screenplay in 1975 for the Jack Nicholson-starring film about land and water rights disputes.

PITTSBURGH - Jon Rubin had an important question, and he knew where to find the answer: at the North Korean Embassy in Cuba, which he was visiting in March on a business trip. A man in jogging clothes and flip-flops came to the embassy gate after Rubin and his small entourage of fellow Americans rang the doorbell at the ornate diplomatic mission on a tree-lined street in Havana's Vedado neighborhood. The Americans posed the question: What exactly do they eat in North Korea?