We've devoted a lot of space here in recent weeks to Twitter, and for good reason: the June 12 elections in Iran were a major turning point for the social network. Whatever you think of Twitter - a lark, a waste of time, a brain-busting sociological malady - it's incontrovertible that the service allowed Americans a peek into a world that would otherwise have been sealed up pretty tightly.

Twitter. It is a simplified Facebook for some, a way to connect with celebrities for others, and now a reliable news source? I beg to differ.

Twitter users are able to share their ideas and beliefs on topics and provide followers with various insights. I would say there are upsides and downsides to using twitter as a news source.

Mr. Flood, who has served 10 years in prison over crimes involving crack cocaine, had been scheduled for release in 2013. Under new sentencing rules that came into effect on Tuesday, however, he is one of more than 1,800 prisoners eligible for release right away.

To transform himself into an aging J. Edgar Hoover, Leonardo DiCaprio sat for hours at a time while makeup artists gave him liver spots, yellow teeth and big, bulbous love handles. He spends a good chunk of Clint Eastwood's film "J. Edgar" that way, sweating and sneering in the unforgiving lighting of F.B.I. headquarters.

A London court ruled on Wednesday that Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, can be extradited to Sweden for questioning over allegations of sexual abuse there last year. He will seek a final appeal to the Britain's highest court, according to a person close to Mr. Assange

Lurching around the Great Pyramids on a camel was part of the trip-of-a-lifetime experience that Farag Abu Ghaneima once touted dozens of times a day, but he recently sold three of his five camels to the butcher.

With the government teetering on the verge of collapse, the Greek cabinet offered its full support early Wednesday to Prime Minister George A. Papandreou for his surprise plan to call a referendum on the Greek financial crisis.

A major study of nearly 360,000 cellphone users in Denmark found no increased risk of brain tumors with long-term use.

Just when you think you might have figured out some order amid the sports chaos, weekends like this one come along and it turns out chaos was just sitting back, waiting for another chance to turn all of your expectations into punch lines. It's kind of like that annoying uncle who finds just the right opening to mess up your hair at family gatherings.

Tan and ruddy-faced, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta took his seat in a hearing room one morning this month ready for battle. The enemy, he warned lawmakers ominously, was "a blind, mindless" one that could "badly damage our capabilities" and "truly devastate our national defense."

The head of Libya's interim government announced the creation of a formal committee of inquiry on Monday to examine the circumstances surrounding the death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the country's former leader, while in the custody of his captors after he fled his final refuge last week.

With a new sense of urgency, the leaders of the 27 European Union nations grappled directly on Sunday with their thorniest financial and economic problems, and made progress that they promised could yield a complete package of measures within days.

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The cactus-lined highway that leads to this international gateway between Gaza and Egypt was draped in green bunting and flags on Monday, as Hamas stamped its Islamist mark across the scene of a long-awaited Israeli-Palestinian prisoner exchange scheduled for Tuesday.

Stories of eye-popping waste and abuse of power among Greece's bureaucrats are legion, including officials who hire their wives, and managers who submit $38,000 bills for office curtains.

teacher warned her third graders that a standardized test question was "tricky," and they all changed their answers. A high school coach in Brooklyn called a student into the hallway and slipped her a completed answer sheet in a newspaper. In the Bronx, a principal convened Finish Your Lab Days, where biology students ended up copying answers for work they never did.

Any old pond will do. Michael L. May set out one recent Wednesday morning from his cramped office at the Rutgers University entomology building to collect a few dragonflies.

Just before the American-led strikes against Libya in March, the Obama administration intensely debated whether to open the mission with a new kind of warfare: a cyberoffensive to disrupt and even disable the Qaddafi government's air-defense system, which threatened allied warplanes.

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