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Google has paid $1 billion for a huge Mountain View business park, the Bay Area’s largest real estate purchase this year. It is the second-largest property purchase in the U.S. this year, eclipsed only by another Google acquisition, the $2.4 B paid for Chelsea Market in Manhattan. The newly acquired site in Mountain View, where Google has been the primary tenant, is larger than the property that accommodates the company’s Googleplex headquarters a few blocks to the west and also exceeds the size of the parcel across the street where Google is building an iconic “dome” campus that features canopies...

In an interview with Matt Bai published in today’s New York Times Magazine, Kerry made a very, very, very significant statement about how he would fight the war on terror. Kerry compared the war on terrorism with eradicating prostitution or illegal gambling. ''We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance,'' Kerry said. ''As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it...

LAJITAS -- Strange tales have always sprung from the Big Bend -- the Marfa lights, the discovery of an alligator in the Rio Grande -- but none stranger than the growing epic of the assault on the mayor of Lajitas. It's a story with larger-than-life elements: a millionaire and a movie star, an irate stone mason and a stealthy act of violent revenge in a border town, the castration of a magistrate in the dark of night. Added is the singular nature of the victim: Clay Henry III, a duly elected figure who happens to be a red and...

Eighty-year-old Fred Hubbell, tired and cranky after facing a gantlet of searches at Bradley International Airport, made a sarcastic remark about a rifle that he quickly came to regret. Suddenly he found himself in handcuffs - with a firsthand sense of what the Transportation Security Administration means by "zero tolerance." It was a new experience for the retired engineer and World War II veteran. He got to stroll through the crowded concourse Thursday escorted by a state trooper while onlookers wondered if he was some kind of terrorist. Click here for rest of article