Let's go off the beaten track, to a rural school a few kilometers south of this dusty small city in Thailand's remote northeast, a dominion of rocky hills and endless rice fields turned green-gold at the harvest.

Not that it's likely to haunt me to my grave, but a sound I heard the other day has been hard to get out of my mind.

Our readers are smart enough to evaluate what we have to say about people who want to run for office.

If John Kerry manages to short-circuit George W. Bush's presidency, we may be able to reflect back on an accusation that echoed through the debates as one of Kerry's keys to victory.

Was there a problem with the method North Carolina was using to kill condemned prisoners by lethal injection? Not that anybody with the state would admit.

It now seems quite possible that along with choosing a commander in chief for the next four years, we'll be deciding whether George W. Bush or John Kerry will be the one who gets to revive an old Washington ritual.

It's been 23 years since we lived in the colonial-era borough of Yardley, Pa., where the Delaware River is both postcard beautiful and a lurking threat.

There is a national debate over pain risks associated with lethal injection.

Since what goes around comes around, can anybody be surprised to see President Bush now being dogged by accusations that his time in the military was clouded by dereliction of duty?

It didn't take a genius to predict that the war would become a white-hot issue in this year's race for the White House.

When you walked through the wards of an evacuation hospital in the Republic of Vietnam, as I did on occasion as an Army photographer, you saw people whose right to wear the Purple Heart would never be challenged.

The new memorial erected by the North Carolina department of the Military Order of the Purple Heart is tucked modestly beneath a couple of trees along Raleigh's North Salisbury Street, across from the Legislative Building.