By MICHAEL CIEPLY LOS ANGELES — Film counts are down. Production is going elsewhere. And yet big Hollywood studios are planning to expand.
By JOE COCHRANE JAKARTA, Indonesia — Tree-lined Cendana street in an upscale neighborhood in central Jakarta has not changed much in recent decades, save for the demolition of a few Dutch colonial homes in favor of modernist villas.
By DECLAN WALSH RUK, Pakistan — Resplendent in his gleaming white uniform and peaked cap, jacket buttons tugging his plump girth, the stationmaster stood at the platform, waiting for a train that would never come. "Cutbacks," Nisar Ahmed Abro said with a resigned shrug.
By CHARLES V. BAGLI NEW YORK — Only 10 floors have been completed in what is intended to be the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere — a slender, 84-story tower on Park Avenue at 56th Street in Manhattan.
By MARK LANDLER and MICHAEL D. SHEAR President Barack Obama, struggling to find his footing after one of his most turbulent weeks in office, will try to push past the moment's political furor with a focus on the few pieces of legislation he believes have a chance in Congress and on executive actions that do not require Republican approval.
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM, JAMES GLANZ and RANDY KENNEDY The all-night games were held in rarefied settings like a suite at the Plaza Hotel. One pink chip was worth $25,000. Masseuses were on hand to help relieve the tension, while the players were fueled by food and drink. And the stakes climbed into the stratosphere, with as much as $2 million on the table to be lost or won.
By DAVID W. DUNLAP The wreckage had not been cleared from ground zero when planners and neighbors began imagining how the devastation of 9/11 could be redeemed — in some way — by a new World Trade Center, one that would be fully joined to the rest of Lower Manhattan rather than standing apart in chilling isolation.
By BEN HUBBARD The black flag of jihad flies over much of northern Syria. In the center of the country, pro-government militias and Hezbollah fighters battle those who threaten their communities. In the northeast, the Kurds have effectively carved out an autonomous zone.
By JAMES DAO and ANDREW W. LEHREN After Spc. Freddy Hook, a medic with the Army's 82nd Airborne Division, killed himself in 2010, the trail of possible causes seemed long.
"If I had a dollar every time they asked me for the next Honey Boo Boo Child," said James Bearb, a Louisiana native and the president of Hollywood South Casting, "I swear I would be the next millionaire."
By JOHN SCHWARTZ Mauney, 42, lives in an apartment tower in this city's Uptown neighborhood, a pedestrian-friendly quarter with new office buildings, sparkling museums and ambitious restaurants. He so seldom needs to drive that when he does go to retrieve his car in his building's garage, he said, "I always forget where I parked it."
By THOM SHANKER One day this month, a pair of Russian Mi-17 assault helicopters delivered two teams of Afghan commandos, their faces obscured by black masks, in a touch-and-go landing at this camp in a lush valley encircled by frosty peaks about 50 miles from Kabul, Afghanistan.
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE Over the last two years, government watchdog groups filed more than a dozen complaints with the Internal Revenue Service seeking inquiries into whether large nonprofit organizations like those founded by the Republican political operative Karl Rove and former Obama administration aides had violated their tax-exempt status by spending tens of millions of dollars on political advertising.
By HENRY FOUNTAIN As a gastronomic delicacy, the 5-ounce hamburger that Mark Post has painstakingly created here surely will not turn any heads. But Post is hoping that it will change some minds.