"It was innocent," insisted Gov. Mark Sanford, while recollecting his first encounter with Maria Belen Chapur on a beach-side Uruguayan dance floor.

Oh, really? You're in my wheelhouse now, Mr. Sanford. I know a thing or two about dancing.

That sultry evening at Punta del Este...

Updated 5:00 PM

ANN ARBOR, MI -- Years ago an Iranian named Ahmad repaired part of my piano. The ex-pat lived and worked in the basement of a nondescript apartment building on the leafy University of Michigan campus. His "space" was lined with musty old books and metal filing cabinets....

Updated 6.23.09 and 6.25.09

Look closely at the images of peaceful demonstrations taking place in Iran this week and you will spot thousands of brave women taking to the streets to protest an election they say was stolen. "We feel cheated, frustrated and betrayed," said an Iranian woman in a...

All over the earth, people once danced in public. It's a universal image of joy -- like those two barefoot kids who danced in the rain during the finale of the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire. But in Afghanistan, where music was banned for five years by the Taliban...

By day, Russian teenager Artur Ryno painted devotional pictures of Christ and the saints at a Moscow icon painting school, where he carefully burnished thin sheets of gold leaf onto the kind of religious paintings that centuries ago were thought to protect the devout from evil. But by night, he...

TIME.com followed several members of the "elite Twitterati" as they attended the White House Correspondents' Dinner in the ballroom of the Washington Hilton on Saturday. They followed the tweets of Meghan McCain, Newt Gingrich, Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, and -- to my astonishment -- John McCain's presidential campaign advisor...

For centuries tourists have traveled to the walled city of Shibam in eastern Yemen to see the world's oldest skyscrapers: 500 mud-brick structures rising up to 16 stories high, earning Shibam the nickname Manhattan of the desert. Several weeks ago, four South Korean tourists had their picture taken while...

Ben & Jerry's lied and I'm pretty *issed about it. The company's owners -- I assume their names are Ben and Jerry -- or does the company lie about that, too? -- created a fake website that promotes cloned milk, in a deceptive attempt to discourage people from buying milk...

Japan endured a painful 10-year economic slump after its stock-and-real-estate bubble burst in 1989. Today, experts are saying that what happened in Japan could never happen in the U.S. Or could it? I put that question to Adam Posen, who wrote the book on the policy mistakes made...

In the summer of 2007, the investor Bill Browder (of the $4 billion Hermitage Fund) spotted a small news item in his morning paper. For the first time an American auction of debt from leveraged buyout deals failed to draw enough bidders and had to be shut down. Browder...

Just last month and for the first time in history, a Saudi king appointed a woman to his council of ministers. Noor Al-Fayez is the new deputy minister for women's education in Saudi Arabia, a country where women are still not allowed to drive a car. The astonishing...

***UPDATED 4.29.09

Reading DailyKos.com diarist TocqueDeville's post promoting Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne's hoity-toity theories on naked short selling of stock was almost as funny as watching MSNBC quote Martin Eisenstadt last year.

Remember Eisenstadt? The supposed McCain campaign staffer who said Sarah Palin didn't know Africa was a...

Updated 6.5.2009

How could an army of business reporters blow the biggest story since The Great Depression? That's the musical question posed by former Wall Street Journal business and investigative reporter Dean Starkman, while he was doing a little freelancing this month for Mother Jones magazine.

Starkman said you...

Late last night, Bnet media analyst and blogger David Weir predicted that Newsweek magazine will be gone by this time next year due to mounting advertising losses.

Newsweek already is scaling back its mission and audience substantially, shedding half of its former mass audience of 3.1 million to concentrate...

How's that for a ridiculous headline? Hang on... I'll stoop even lower. I'll share (nearly) everything I know about body frosting.

Because I lost a bet? Nope, I was put up to this by a HuffPost colleague in an orange hoodie, while we were idly chatting on a street corner...

Wait a minute... isn't today National Buy A Newspaper Day? Why would an industry on life support tell a generation of potentially new customers to drop dead? I'm no Ben Stein, but even I know that's bad for business.

"It makes no sense, but newspapers aren't targeting Generation Y,"...

And oh! The towering feeling
Just to know somehow you are near.
The overpowering feeling
That any second you may suddenly appear.
People stop and stare. They don't bother me.
There's no where else on earth that I would rather...

During his seven years covering the White House for the New York Times, Chief Washington Correspondent David E. Sanger has had extraordinary access to U.S. presidents and world leaders. On Thursday, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter gathered with friends and family at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington D.C....

The newspaper industry is in big, big trouble. That should be obvious by now. But if it isn't, consider this: America's flagship newspaper, the New York Times, is considering selling its stake in the Boston Red Sox just to stay afloat in 2009.

The Atlantic magazine speculates...

Four days after Israeli air attacks against the Gaza Strip began, hospitals are already overwhelmed by the influx of wounded patients. Medecins Sans Frontieres teams are now in Gaza helping to ease the hospitals' burdens. They brought with them a truckload of life-saving drugs and medical supplies -- there...