Officials in the U.S. offshoot of the church are accused of taking funds meant for Russian Bibles and for rebuilding a church.

Hundreds of Afghan soldiers with tanks and grenade-launchers surrounded Kabul's main prison Sunday after convicted terrorists incited a riot by inmates and seized control of much of the facility, officials said.

Gunmen hold sway over streets lined with concrete bomb-blast barriers and razor wire. Entire neighborhoods are too dangerous for police to enter.

Fifty years ago Saturday, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech at the 20th Communist Party Congress changed both his country and the world.

In 1988, when the Soviet Union first started to open up, I took my American-born wife to the Donskoye Cemetery in Moscow, then known as the Crematorium. This is where my grandparents are buried, along with other members of the Soviet middle class and intelligentsia. Many are ethnically Jewish, having migrated to Moscow from the Pale of Settlement after the Revolution. Unable to read the Cyrillic on the headstones, my wife passed the time by computing dates. To her horror, she found that the average age of the diseased was 60 to 65. It so happens that her own roots are from the same genetic stock -- except her grandparents went to New York, not Moscow.