Wives

It was a sultry summer afternoon on the wooded campus of Sarah Lawrence College, where Julianna Margulies got her start onstage as an undergraduate in the late 1980s, and the actress was reminiscing about what she used to hear from casting directors. "They would always say, 'Well, you'll never do TV,' " she recalled. "I was either too Jewish-looking, too European-looking, too Greek-looking. Ethnic. But yet I wasn't ethnic, so no one knew what to do with me. . . . I just thought, 'OK, so I won't do that.

KANO, Nigeria - He should be tall. Kind, of course. And generous, especially when it comes to buying all those little trinkets that a woman desires. "A little handsome," but not too much, says Altine Abdullahi. "It's a danger. " In northern Nigeria, it is a truth almost universally acknowledged that a woman of a certain age, and in a certain situation in life, must be in want of a husband. But if the woman in that certain situation is a divorcee or a widow, finding a husband isn't easy, even without the shopping list of desirable qualities ticked off by Abdullahi (a divorcee)

A judge dismissed a first-degree murder charge Monday against the wife of a Persian Gulf War veteran who was shot to death less than 24 hours after returning to his family from his tour of duty in the Saudi desert. District Judge Vesta Svenson freed Toni Cato Riggs, accused in the March 18 death of Army Spec. Anthony Riggs. Her brother confessed to the killing, saying it was part of a plot to reap insurance benefits.

JACOBABAD, Pakistan — Rachna Kumari, 16, was shopping for dresses in this city's dust-choked bazaar when it happened. The man who her family says abducted her was not a street thug. He was a police officer. Nor was he a stranger. Rachna's family knew and trusted him. He guarded the Hindu temple run by her father, an important duty in a society where Hindus are often terrorized by Muslim extremists, and he had helped Rachna cram for her ninth-grade final exams. After she disappeared from the market, he did not demand a ransom.

The wife of actor William Shatner was discovered dead on the bottom of the couple's swimming pool after an apparent drowning, police said Tuesday. Nerine Shatner, a model by trade, an actress by aspiration, accidentally drowned while swimming alone Monday evening, police said. The Shatners had been married nearly two years, although William Shatner had filed for divorce last fall, according to court records.

A newspaper story about a human calamity has a beginning, middle and end for readers, but there is no easy closure for those whose misfortunes provide fodder for such accounts. It has been more than three months since Richard Worthington, armed with a pair of guns and a bomb, burst into a Utah hospital maternity ward intending to kill the doctor who had performed a tubal ligation on his wife.

The central temple ceremony in the Mormon Church has been changed to eliminate the woman's vow to obey her husband and other elements that some members said were offensive and outdated. In the new version of the rites, women now pledge to obey God and to merely listen to the advice of their husbands.

At first, the murder seemed to have all the markings of an attempted carjacking. When Los Angeles police officers reached the scene on the dark Boyle Heights street July 26, they found affluent software designer Bruce Cleland lying in a pool of blood across the street from his new black 4Runner. His distraught wife, Rebecca, said she had been knocked unconscious when she got out of the vehicle to check the tailgate and awoke to the gruesome sight.

He fell in love with his first wife because she was sincere and eager to please. His second wife, a cousin, was irresistible because she did everything he wished and nothing he didn't. "That alone made me love her. " His third wife won him because she submitted to his every request. "I saw her, I liked her. I went to her parents and asked for her hand in marriage. " Wife No. 4 was very obedient. So was wife No. 5. Wife No. 6, the same. As were wives 7 and 8 and 9 and … Well, by then — it was the late 1980s — things had taken off for Bello Maasaba, an Islamic faith healer in this city in Niger state.

Here’s some breaking news: A study by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh’s Sleep Medicine Institute has found that wives can be grumpy with their husbands if they don't get a good night’s sleep. Perhaps future research can determine whether husbands tend to hog the covers, whether the other side of the pillow is in fact cooler or whether the setting sun has some effect on darkness. The researchers likely could have made the same discovery by simply talking to anyone who has ever been married.

Breakout British boy band One Direction made history Wednesday as its Stateside debut, "Up All Night," bowed at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart after selling more than 176,000 copies last week, according to Nielsen SoundScan. That made it the first British group to take the top spot in the United States with its debut release. "Up All Night" is only the second disc of 2012 to unseat the chart-topping run by One Direction's Columbia Records label mate Adele following Bruce Springsteen's "Wrecking Ball.

What legendary Oscar-winning film actor's first of five wives, Josephine Dillon, was 17 years older than him? Clark Gable

In one of the wildest days of a tumultuous presidential campaign, one candidate quit, another was stripped of his victory in Iowa and a third was scalded by an ex-wife in a brutal national television interview. By the close of Thursday, however, the contours of the Republican race remained about where they were 24 hours earlier: with a jostling field of contenders vying to emerge as the alternative to front-runner Mitt Romney by scoring a breakthrough in South Carolina. In that way, the upheaval served only to underscore the dynamic of a contest that has been unsettled for months, save for one constant: Romney's good fortune as a series of twists has kept any single opponent from gaining desperately needed traction.

As hopes faded Tuesday for the rescue of 39 workers still missing after an oil rig capsized in a fierce winter storm off the east coast of Russia, the wife of one of the men called the towing of the platform through icy waters a suicide mission. The multi-ton Kolskaya oil and gas drilling platform sank Sunday in the Sea of Okhotsk about 146 miles off Sakhalin Island while being towed to its new destination in Vietnam. Fourteen crew members were rescued and 14 were found dead Sunday, officials said.

When all else fails, try breaking bread together. As the White House and congressional Republicans continue on a seemingly endless loop of political partisanship, Vice President Joe Biden has invited Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the House Majority Leader, to dinner this evening. The two seemed to hit it off earlier this year, an odd couple of sorts as they holed up in negotiations on a bipartisan deficit-reduction proposal. But Cantor abruptly bolted from those talks and it became clear compromise was not to be found.

Libya's new leaders declared their nation "liberated" on Sunday, paving the way for elections and a constitution that the revolutionary government says will put the country on a path to its first representative democracy. The long-awaited pronouncement came with a heavy dose of Islamist sentiment, as Mustafa Abdul Jalil, leader of the transitional government, embraced the Muslim code known as Sharia law as a foundation for future legislation. During his more than four decades in power, Moammar Kadafi viewed Islamists as a threat and jailed hundreds of suspected religious militants.

South Africa is spending more than $2 million a year to support polygamist President Jacob Zuma's wives and children, almost double the budget from a year ago, a minister said on Tuesday. The 68-year-old Zuma, who currently has three wives, recently admitted to fathering his 20th child out of wedlock with the daughter of a friend, drawing flak for a cavalier attitude to sex in a country with one of the world's biggest HIV/AIDS caseloads. In a written answer to a parliamentary question, Collins Chabane, a minister charged with monitoring government performance, said the state had a 15.5 million rand budget for Zuma's family this year.

To the Southern Baptists who have declared that wives must "submit graciously" to their husbands (June 10), I have just one humble question: Suppose they don't, then what? ROBERT TSOU Rolling Hills Estates

David Dutcher met Sharon on Match.com in late 2008, a few months after separating from his wife. "We had a lot in common," he recalled. Sharon loved four-wheel-drive trucks and sports. They met for coffee, then dinner. Sharon was tall, slender, blond and beautiful. She moaned that she had not had sex in a long time. She told him he had large, strong hands and wondered if that portended other things. She described his kisses as "yummy. " "It felt a lot like Christmas," said Dutcher, 49, a tall, burly engineer with wavy red hair.

A roundup of entertainment headlines for Thursday: Controversial evangelical pastor Ted Haggard will trade wives with celebrity Gary Busey on an upcoming episode of "Wife Swap. " ( Los Angeles Times ) After 31 years of making music together, R.E.M. calls it quits. ( Los Angeles Times ) "Bones" star Emily Deschanel welcomes baby boy Henry. ( People ) Meanwhile, sister Zooey Deschanel's sitcom "New Girl" topped the ratings. ( Los Angeles Times ) Arnold Schwarzenegger is writing an "unbelievably true" memoir called "Total Recall.