After a month of controversy, Rick Warren's performance Tuesday at the inauguration of President Barack Obama was like a good short story: in the end, it was both inevitable and surprising.
The first surprise was Warren's evident awkwardness as he stepped up to the podium, as though his fast public rise over the past four years—meetings with Bono and Bill Gates, trips to Davos and Aspen—have transferred upon him none of the polish one expects from world leaders. Warren is quite genuinely a man who looks and feels more at home at his megachurch in sunny Southern California, wearing his Hawaiian shirts and preaching to a crowd drinking Starbucks. The inauguration of the 44th president was exactly the kind of frigid Eastern pageant Warren spent the early years of his career working against. (Churches, he said, should not be constrained by traditional songs and liturgy.) A ... Read more »

Christopher Meunier, 7, had not been sick since he was a toddler, but in late November, he suddenly had a high fever and bloody diarrhea and started vomiting.Skip to next paragraphMultimedia



“He was just in screaming pain,” said his mother, Gabrielle Meunier of South Burlington, Vt. “He said, ‘It hurts so bad, I want to die’ — something you don’t expect to hear out of a 7yearold’s mouth.”
Hospitalized for six days, Christopher had salmonella poisoning, making him one of more than 500 people sickened across the country after eating peanut butter or peanut products made at a Peanut Corporation of America plant in Blakely, Ga.
The Food and Drug Administration has charged that the company knowingly shipped contaminated products to some of the largest food makers in the country from a plant that was never designed to make peanut butter safely, causing on ... Read more »

CHILIBRE, Panama — The land where Marta Ortega de Wing raised hundreds of pigs until 10 years ago is being overtaken by galloping jungle — palms, lizards and ants.

The United States economy shrank at its fastest pace in a quarter century from October through December, the government reported on Friday, in the broadest accounting yet of the toll of the credit crisis. Consumer spending and business investment all but disappeared, and economists said the contraction was likely to continue at an alarming pace well into the summer.

The gross domestic product — a crucial measure of economic performance — shrank at an annu ... Read more »