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Like Greece, Portugal is sinking under the weight of debt, and unemployment is soaring. Unlike Greece, Portugal has former colonies rich in natural resources and in need of labor. Now, Portuguese workers are seeking visas to places such as Angola, a country rich with oil and diamonds.

Thomas Mallon's new novelization of the infamous political scandal re-imagines the events through the eyes of the perpetrators. Critic Heller McAlpin says Mallon manages to capture both the metastasizing dishonesty and the ludicrousness of this great American tragedy of political ambition run amok.

Marie Colvin, an American who was the Sunday Times of London's chief war correspondent for a quarter of a century, was killed Wednesday. Colvin was in the embattled Syrian city of Homs and died alongside a French photojournalist and one of Syria's best known citizen journalists. All three died in a district of Homs which has been under bombardment by Syrian government forces since early this month.

How much do we read into ourselves when we write a diary? Author Patrick DeWitt recommends the dark, deep journal of a man suffering from a nervous breakdown.

When Brian O. Selznick wrote The Invention of Hugo Cabaret — a graphic novel about an orphan in 1930s Paris — he imagined the secret spaces of a Paris train station. For inspiration, he visited Grand Central Terminal in New York City. But the scenes in the book — hidden tunnels, secret rooms, the giant clock tower — were all drawn from Selznick's imagination and later turned into the movie Hugo by Martin Scorcese, which is nominated for 12 Academy Awards. Selznick recently got to explore Grand Central's secrets for the first time and it turns out that life imitated art in shockingly faithful ways.

Back when refrigeration wasn't up to modern standards, Fat Tuesday was a time to clear the house of rich, indulgent foods. A Swedish church in Portland, Ore., keeps the Swedish version of the baking tradition alive, if not the religious observance.

Every Sunday, Mo Rocca's grandmother made homemade ravioli for the family dinner. He says he deeply regrets not learning her recipes before she passed away. In My Grandmother's Ravioli, Rocca asks other people's grandparents to teach him how to cook.

You'll never suffer from writer's block as long as you've got a copy of Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots. Prolific pulp novelist William Wallace Cook turned his fiction production methods into a wacky manual for aspiring writers. Originally published in 1928, it has just been reissued.

A consortium of consumer and environmental groups says there's too much lead in lipstick. The Food and Drug Administration says there's nothing to worry about.

This month, the bees from 1.6 million hives — many of them trucked in commercially from as far away as North Dakota — will pollinate California's almond orchards. Then beekeepers will pack up their colonies and drive them back to the northern Plains, where bees can graze for the summer. But scientists says that floral feast in the Great Plains is shrinking because of high corn prices.