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Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. arrived in Ramallah to meet with Palestinian leaders a day after Israel said it would build new housing units in Jerusalem.

Boris A. Berezovsky, who fled Russia in 2003, won a lawsuit against a Russian broadcaster that had linked him to the high-profile death of Alexander V. Litvinenko.

Ibaraki Airport, which opens Thursday about 85 kilometers, or 52.7 miles north of Tokyo, aims to be a completely new type of Japanese hub.

Plans to move more Israelis into Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem have been met with opposition from Israelis who favor the establishment of a Palestinian state with its capital in that part of the city.

As his visit overlapped with that of the U.S. defense secretary, the Iranian president said the U.S. occupation was doomed to fail.

The incomplete results will offer an incomplete picture of the vote but will nevertheless provide the broad outlines of the country’s political landscape.

Prosecutors accused Colleen R. LaRose, who called herself “JihadJane,” of involvement in a plot with militants.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates will discuss military cooperation and Iran’s nuclear program, officials said.

"The Paranoid Style of American Politics," published in 1964, is being invoked to analyze developments like the Tea Party movement, the stardom of Sarah Palin and the claims of right-wing talk radio.

A fugitive Islamic militant killed by Indonesian security forces traveled to Indonesia from the Philippines within the last few months, police officals said.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s plan to provide free care for the growing elderly population faces opposition at a time of record deficits.

As much as half the food aid sent to Somalia is diverted to a web of corrupt contractors, a report found.

The ruling military junta announced a new election law that would likely prevent Daw Aung San Suu Kyi from participating in coming elections.

From www.jgballard.ca With so much of Shanghai's historical architecture disappearing day by day, you might think that most Shanghailanders, ourselves included, have become desensitized to the frequent reports of demolition and destruction. Looks like that isn't true, as we are still heartbroken over Malcolm Moore's recent story on the latest casualty of Shanghai's relentless urban development, British author J.G. Ballard's childhood home.

Ballard, who passed away last year, was born in Shanghai in 1930 and is best known for "Empire of the Sun" - a work of autobiographical fiction that draws extensively on his childhood in the city's colonial era and his experiences during World War II. His old home at 31a Amherst Avenue (now 508 Panyu Lu, now a concrete block) was a mock Tudor mansion built by English architects in 1925, and featured prominently in his memories of Shanghai. It was a "magical" place where his family enjoyed the glamorous life of club receptions and horse-racing before the 1937 Japanese invasion led to their internment at Longhua Camp in the south of the city (now Shanghai Zhongxue).

Ballard's house has been a sort-of pilgrimage site for historians and fans. In 2008, Shanghaiist accompanied Canadian Rick McGrath on his search for Ballard's home and other places related to the author's boyhood experience in the city. This wasn't some impulsive, hurried trip on McGrath's part, but an extensively planned journey that involved years of correspondence with other Ballardians, and hard work compiling maps and satellite views of Ballard's Shanghai. The story of McGrath's trip, and photos of the house, are meticulously recorded on his website.

James Fallows also took a tour of Ballard's childhood home, which he recounts here.

The house that McGrath and Fallows both visited was, at that point, an upscale restaurant called SH508. The original structure of the house had been left intact, and the property listed as a heritage building. But when the restaurant's lease on the property expired by October last year, the house fell into the hands of rabid developers. While the house has not been torn down, it is now unrecognizable - according to Moore, it has been stripped down to its beams and rebuilt in concrete, while plans are afoot to add a fake front and increase floorspace. You can watch a video tour of the current cemented-over monstrosity on The Telegraph.

Photo by Dan Butterfield, November 2009. From www.jgballard.ca

And so the battle between preservation and development continues, the former seeming on the losing side. With every small victory, tens of cemented-over former architectural glories appear.

But what would J.G. Ballard himself have thought of the gutting of his former home? Judging from his letters to Rick McGrath, he might have been a little desensitized himself, and accepted it as the inevitable. While he was excited and immensely curious about his fans' journeys to his old Shanghai haunts, he wrote that "one would expect any city in the world to have changed virtually out of recognition in 40 years, and know that the emotional pickings from the nostalgia dish to be pretty meager". In response to McGrath's news that his home had become a restaurant, his seemingly flippant reply was "if it's a restaurant, let's hope it's a McDonald's or KFC". He also revealed that these trips into nostalgia felt a little "intrusive" due to the length of time gone by; "In an odd way it's quite reassuring that everything has changed so much -- the Shanghai I knew, along with 31 Amherst Avenue and Lunghua camp, only survive inside my head."

Reassuring it may have been to Ballard, but not to us. Perversely, perhaps his home should have been a McDonald's or KFC - maybe if it had been a hopping commercial fast food establishment, the house would have been spared its fate as a cement block.

After months of delay and discord, negotiators are making a fresh effort to wrap up a long-delayed arms control treaty.

Israel, widely believed to have nuclear weapons and possessing no oil, said on Tuesday that it intended to develop civilian nuclear plants for energy.

The countries are the last two major economic powers to agree with the aims of the nonbinding agreement.

Robert M. Gates’s visit to the village of Now Zad — and his first walk through a market during wartime in Iraq or Afghanistan — would have been unimaginable even three months ago.

MOIVE fans must say goodbye to 3D sci-fi blockbuster "Avatar" next Monday as local cinemas will remove it from screens, the Oriental Morning Post reported today. Fans can still enjoy the IMAX version of "Avatar"...

As much as half the food aid sent to Somalia is diverted to a web of corrupt contractors, Islamist militants and local U.N. staff, according to a report.