Kurt Vonnegut, Novelist Who Caught the Imagination of His Age, Is Dead at 84  —  Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Cat's Cradle" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan.

Bush aides' use of GOP e-mail probed  —  WASHINGTON - The White House said Wednesday it had mishandled Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts used by nearly two dozen presidential aides, resulting in the loss of an undetermined number of e-mails concerning official White House business.

NBC News Drops Imus Show Over Racial Remark  —  NBC News dropped Don Imus yesterday, canceling his talk show on its MSNBC cable news channel a week after he made a racially disparaging remark about the Rutgers University women's basketball team.  —  The move came after several days …

Prosecutors Drop Charges in Duke Case  —  RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - Prosecutors dropped all charges Wednesday against the three Duke lacrosse players accused of sexually assaulting a stripper at a party, saying the athletes were innocent victims of a "tragic rush to accuse" by an overreaching district attorney.

Suing a Blogger  —  Big, powerful law firms like Nashville's King & Ballow really ought to hire someone with journalistic and new media experience to advise them on how to handle clients who complain about things published by bloggers.  Then they wouldn't do stupid things like issue threats …

The Rebirth of Civility?  —  A revolt against people who are behaving badly.  —  And so it came to pass in the year 2007 that a little platoon came forth to say unto the world: Enough is enough.  —  Two leading citizens of the Web, Tim O'Reilly and Jimmy Wales, have proposed a "Bloggers Code of Conduct."

In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud  —  Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

Gates Announces Longer Tours for Active-Duty Army Soldiers  —  Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced this afternoon that all active-duty Army soldiers currently deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan could serve extended tours of up to 15 months in combat, meaning more than 100,000 troops …

McCain campaign to cut back on staff  —  WASHINGTON - Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record)'s troubled presidential campaign is eliminating some non-senior staff positions and cutting some consultants' contracts.  —  The Arizona senator's campaign characterized the moves as …

Blair blames spate of murders on black culture  —  Patrick Wintour and Vikram Dodd  —  Tony Blair yesterday claimed the spate of knife and gun murders in London was not being caused by poverty, but a distinctive black culture.  His remarks angered community leaders, who accused him of ignorance …

Racist Literature Distributed in Berkeley  —  A study in hate, the left/right convergence, and media spin  —  During the first few days of April, 2007, racist literature was distributed in several Berkeley, California neighborhoods by members of an out-of-town white supremacist group.