By BARTHOLOMEW SULLIVAN, Scripps Howard News Service

Roy A. Hallums, who endured 311 days in captivity as a hostage in Baghdad, has a way of stating what might appear hyperbolic with a calm earnestness.

A man being deployed to Iraq as a member of the Air Force Reserve has sued a company he applied to for a job because he thinks the application's questions about reserve status can be used to discriminate.

Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir wasn't old enough to vote last November but on Tuesday night she sat at President Obama's left elbow, breaking her Ramadan fast, after he introduced her as "an inspiration to all of us."

Ken Carter can't have imagined how many lives he'd touch by satisfying his curiosity about a piece of black granite and its connection to a soldier killed 39 years ago.

When Ken Carter found the name of DONNIE S. BARTLETT etched into the polished black granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, he sat on the ground and took off his hat.
A question he's been asking for 27 years was answered.
"I've always wondered who it was," he said.

The American Legion is trying to stop the May 28 release of photographs showing American personnel abusing detainees in Afghan and Iraqi prisons.
The Department of Defense agreed last month to release some of the requested photographs in response to an American Civil Liberties Union Freedom of Information Act request.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee this week made it easier for unions like the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to organize FedEx employees.

After terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. dependence on imported oil "represents the biggest single threat to our nation's economy and national security," FedEx CEO Frederick W. Smith told a National Press Club audience this week.

It all began with a mother's call to the Haywood County Sheriff's Department in Brownsville, Tenn., last Wednesday night.

CINCINNATI -- The Delta Queen stern-wheeler is on what is likely its last trip down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers as a passenger-carrying steamboat.On Friday, it loses its exemption to carry overnight passengers, and will travel from Memphis, Tenn. down the river to New Orleans with just its crew. The American Queen, full of passengers, will accompany her south.