Outpost

The morning talk on Wildcat Canyon Road has turned from rattlesnakes to tarantulas. Neighbors stand in the shade of the oaks and sycamores that arch over the cul-de-sac. It's an impromptu gathering on a summer day when there is no great rush to be at work. Summer, they say, is snake season, which overlaps tarantula season in the fall. Already, tarantula hawks - the orange-winged wasps that capture the spiders to feed their larva - are out hunting. One resident, Steve Kerrigan, has lived on this road for 14 years; another, Chay Peterson, for 25 years.

COALINGA, Calif. - Downtown is quiet in the baking summer heat, but this rural hamlet's only courthouse is humming with activity. A judge is calling the morning calendar, and the pace is brisk. Chained prison inmates in red and white jumpsuits fidget while awaiting their hearings. California Highway Patrol officers called to testify in traffic cases linger in the back. Prison guards stifle yawns and eye their charges. The small, modest courtroom is nearly full, noisy with the patter of the judge and lawyers dispatching cases amid the constant buzz of a metal detector at the door.

To the little girl, going to work with her father felt like visiting a petting zoo, with chickens, ducks, doves and rabbits in cages in the back of the shop. Even as she fed the animals, she knew about the other part of Al Salam Polleria. The part with things like the boiler, the de-featherer and the cutting station. "But I guess, yeah, if you think of it as a butcher shop then that might be weird," said Iman Elrabat-Gabr, now 37. "But the memories I have of it are not a butcher shop, more of a farm.

The northern lights bring fabulous streaks of greens, blues, yellows and pinks across the night sky in northern climes including Alaska, Canada, parts of the northern U.S. and Europe. Canadian outfitter Brewster Vacations offers a "quick escape" tour with two nights spent viewing the surreal color fest at Fort McMurray, an 1870 Hudson Bay Co. trading post in Alberta, Canada. Guests check out the town by day and then stay up late for guided viewing of the aurora borealis. Be prepared for cold and snow on this trip (warm clothes come with the package)

For months many Israelis shrugged off the mosque burnings, the uprooted Palestinian olive trees and even the death threats against Jewish leftists. But when young settlers this month vandalized army bases and stoned Israeli soldiers, the question of Jewish terrorism turned into a national emergency. The recent flare-up in settler violence has puzzled many because it comes when there are no peace talks that might lead to land concessions, Palestinian attacks in the West Bank have dropped to new lows, and Israel is led by a conservative government that is expanding settlement construction.

Flip back in time to downtown Los Angeles nearly five years ago — before tiny dogs were everywhere and fancy strollers anywhere, before you could walk 10 minutes south of City Hall and find cafe after cafe serving lattes. Picture living in a loft on a quite lonely stretch of Main Street on the edge of skid row, short on the necessities that most residential areas take for granted. Then imagine one day finding a new store full of crisp hardcovers. "I thought, 'Oh my God, we're civilized,' " said Jacqualine Mills-Lord, a writer who shed tears of joy at the sight of Metropolis Books.

Area 51 has been ground zero for conspiracy theorists for decades. Flying saucers. Bug-eyed aliens. Staged moon landings. The government hasn't helped alleviate speculation — it hasn't even acknowledged that the military outpost exists. If it did, it would be deep in the Nevada desert about 100 miles outside of Las Vegas. But the National Geographic news website has posted photos that provide a rare glimpse inside the clandestine site. It recently published never-before-seen, declassified photos from 1963 of a military plane crash and its coverup by the government, according to the website.

In what has become a near-daily drumbeat of insurgent attacks on Afghan government and security installations, a team of gunmen and suicide bombers on Sunday stormed a police outpost in an eastern city, killing six people, most of them Afghan police and soldiers. The four assailants died as well, officials said. The early-morning onslaught in the city of Khowst typified a pattern of insurgent strikes that has taken hold as the spring "fighting season" gathers force — a coordinated assault on a site that somehow symbolizes the authority of the central government.

In what has become a near-daily drumbeat of insurgent attacks on Afghan government and security installations, a team of gunmen and bombers on Sunday stormed a police outpost in an eastern city, killing three police officers. The four assailants died as well, officials said. The early-morning onslaught in the city of Khost typified a pattern of insurgent strikes that has taken hold as this spring "fighting season" gathers force -- a coordinated assault on a site that symbolizes government authority.

It has been a hallmark of the series "Law & Order" that its format — which lasted two decades in its original flavor and lives on in the current first season of NBC's "Law & Order: Los Angeles," or "LOLA" — has mattered as much as the characters who inhabit it. But of the many actors who have passed through this system over the years, perhaps none has departed quite as remarkably as did Skeet Ulrich, formerly the top-billed star of the L.A. franchise,...