The release of two American hikers held in the Islamic Republic for two years — which seemed imminent on Tuesday – has been cast into doubt just 24 hours later.
Iran’s Justice Ministry has denied, via the nation’s state television network, that the release of Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal is imminent, directly contradicting remarks on Tuesday by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who told two American media outlets the men could be freed this week.

“The two Americans …

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WASHINGTON — Even though the Great Recession technically ended in 2009, incomes fell, poverty rose and the number of Americans without health insurance jumped again in 2010, the federal government announced Tuesday.

The nation’s poverty rate increased to 15.1 percent in 2010, up from 14.3 percent in 2009 and the highest level since 1993, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage report for 2010. An additional 2.6 million people landed …

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Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan— Insurgents staged a brazen attack Tuesday in the heart of the Afghan capital, firing rockets apparently aimed at the U.S. Embassy or the nearby headquarters of the NATO force.

Heavy explosions echoed near a central square, as terrified Afghans fled the sound of fighting. “Again, again!” said an elderly shopkeeper as he hastily rolled down the metal shutter protecting his carpet store and prepared to flee.

Insurgents appeared to have seized a tall …

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LONDON — President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has said two American hikers jailed for espionage in his country last month will be freed within “two days,” NBC reported on Tuesday, citing an exclusive interview with the Iranian leader.

The development was confirmed by the semi-official Fars state news agency, which quoted a lawyer for the two men as saying they would be freed on bail of $500,000 each and allowed to leave Iran.

The two, Shane M. …

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THE mass media, including interactive social-networking tools, make you passive, can sap your initiative, leave you content to watch the spectacle of life from your couch or smartphone.

Apparently even during a revolution.

That is the provocative thesis of a new paper by Navid Hassanpour, a political science graduate student at Yale, titled “Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest.”

Using complex calculations and vectors representing decision-making by potential protesters, Mr. Hassanpour, who already has a Ph.D. in …

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Even before Libyan rebels could take full control of Tripoli, Foreign Minister Franco Frattini of Italy said on state television Monday that the Italian oil company Eni “will have a No. 1 role in the future” in the North African country.

Mr. Frattini even reported that Eni technicians were already on their way to eastern Libya to restart production. But Eni quickly denied that it had sent any personnel to the still-unsettled region, which is Italy’s …

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TRIPOLI, Libya — Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi remained at large Monday morning, and loyalist forces still held pockets of the city, stubbornly resisting the rebels’ efforts to establish full control after their astonishingly speedy advance into the capital appeared to signal the end of the Libyan leader’s four-decade grip on power.

“We do not know if he is inside or outside Libya,” Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, the chairman of the rebel government, the National Transitional Council, said of Colonel …

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by Naomi Klein

I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities—window smashing in Athens or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten.

But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, been other mass lootings in recent years, and perhaps we should talk about them too. There was Baghdad in …

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SAN FRANCISCO — Civil libertarian groups have backed away from threats to legally challenge the Bay Area Rapid Transit system’s wireless service shutdown last week after the agency refused a repeat amid rush-hour protests that shuttered four San Francisco stations.

The American Civil Liberties Union met with BART’s police chief late Monday even as demonstrators protested the agency’s action to block wireless reception Thursday to disrupt a planned protest against police brutality. After the meeting, ACLU …

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LONDON—News Corp. came under fresh attack Tuesday as new, written evidence submitted to a U.K. parliament committee suggested that voice-mail interception was “widely discussed” at its News of the World tabloid and showed several former executives bluntly contradicting recent testimony by Deputy Chief Operating Officer James Murdoch.

The U.K. Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee released written statements from Mr. Murdoch, several former top executives and a law firm that was retained by the media …

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