He is charged with the shooting death of an old boyfriend and is a suspect in the fatal bludgeoning of another acquaintance. He is wanted for questioning in connection with the slashing and torture of a prominent Chicago tycoon who suffered, in the words of his 96-year-old mother, ““a worse death than Christ.’’ On Friday night, as Cunanan allegedly fled eastward, police suspect he struck again, murdering the caretaker of a cemetery in New Jersey with a single shot to the head....

The dapper, organized 33-year-old lives in Syria with his wife and parents. Back in Baghdad recently to check out the prospects for a return, he reflected on what the last five years had meant for the country’s depleted merchant class. “In the beginning, I was happy the Saddam regime was finished. He was a dictator,” says Jabbar, a Shiite Muslim. “He made war with Kuwait and Iran.” Jabbar recalls spending 17 days in his house in downtown Baghdad during the U....

Even though it was losing $4 billion, the company was sending the signal that it was business as usual. Stempel was saying GM’s problems were recession related. They’re not. The overhaul must be a lot more than the president. They must start getting rid of the dead-wood at the top. Chrysler asked everyone to sacrifice. GM must do the same. How could GM expect union support when it continued to raise the dividend?...

The College Football Playoff selection committee kept reiterating its mission to find the “best four teams” in the nation, and until this year, everyone had assumed those teams came from a pool of conference champions. That’s about to change. Ohio State, which finished second in the Big Ten East, is virtually a lock for the playoff despite not playing for a Big Ten title. The precedent of devaluing conference championship games has been set with ranking the Buckeyes at No....

The four-team playoff is all but certain, and there are several scenarios that could complicate the situation even more. Let’s take a look at some of the not-so-crazy what ifs. We only have a month to sort this out. How it could happen: If LSU beats Alabama, Alabama beats Mississippi State and Auburn, and Ole Miss beats Mississippi State, we’re there. Impact: Familiarize yourselves with the SEC divisional tiebreaking procedures just in case....

I would like to offer (cautiously) some cause for optimism. Natural winegrowers from Alsace to Vermont, from Mendoza to Marsala are leading a raucously civil and rootedly cosmopolitan insurrection against all the forces conspiring to wrestle the planet to death. Their engagement in completely material, agricultural questions (without ever losing the spiritual dimension) have created a model for rural renewal and may hold a key for a reinvigoration of urban culture as well....

How had Giuliani–national symbol of safer streets and an early favorite for the U.S. Senate–allowed a local tragedy to turn into a prime-time crisis? The mayor said his enemies were using Diallo’s death for political sport, and in some cases he had a point. After all, murders are down 70 percent under Giuliani, and the rate of fatal police shootings is lower than in such cities as Chicago and Dallas....

But Walton, who died on April 5 at the age of 74, was no ordinary working stiff. He lived to compete–whether it was to become Missouri’s youngest Eagle Scout or to surpass K mart and Sears in sales–and fueled his ambitions with an almost comical self-assurance. " It never occurred to me that I might lose," he writes. Winning often meant shoplifting other people’s ides–“most everything I’ve done I’ve copied from somebody else....

But what to do with Russia long term? This looming problem is perhaps an even bigger one for the United States and NATO countries to confront than what to do right now. Of course, there are many examples of dictators under stress who have resorted to military action to shore up domestic support, only to be repelled by NATO and Western intervention. Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo and the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein are two such examples of “managed” dictatorships with limited room to maneuver who were neutralized as a potential threat to the global order....

I had long suspected that this was true, but not until I stumbled across “The 1995 Yearbook of Experts, Authorities & Spokes-persons” did I realize how true. The Yearbook amasses more than 900 pages of experts on everything from “Addictions/Boredom” (The Boring institute) to “Bird Baths” (The National Bird Feeding Society) to “Health Fraud/Quackery” (The American Preventive Medical Association) to “Legal Issues/Hypnosis” (The American Council of Hypnotist Examiners) to “Relationships/Couples” (The Institute for Creative Solutions)....

It’s called star quality, and it’s likely to make Jerry Brown Oakland’s next mayor. Never mind that he’s lived here for only three years, or that he’s the only white candidate in a largely black city. Never mind that he can’t stop talking about glo bal warming and has no specific proposals for what to do about, say, the empty storefronts along Broadway. ““I don’t want to announce plans at this moment,” Brown tells a group of contractors, ““but I see a people-friendly downtown with a lot of shops, a nd a lot of people being there....

Fifteen years after the last authorized U.S. soldier left the country, Vietnam now seems eager for Americans to return–as businessmen. With unemployment in the cities hitting 30 percent and the economy a shambles, foreign investment is sorely needed to get the nation back on its feet. “There’s a perception that if America comes back, things will be better,” says Gage McAfee, a Hong Kong-based American lawyer who recently took a delegation of foreign–but not American–businessmen to Vietnam to meet with top officials....

In the Post series, Quayle passed through a metal detector of political credibility set up by two of the paper’s most formidable reporters, Bob Woodward and David Broder. In book-length detail, they cleared Quayle of a host of charges: that he had pulled strings to get into the National Guard, that he stood to inherit millions, that he was merely a handsome young man in the right place at the right time when Bush was casting about for a running mate in 1988....

It has been five months since Spann was killed during a prison uprising in northern Afghanistan. Shannon, 32, has endured the hero’s burial at Arlington, the appearance at the State of the Union, the round of television interviews. But in the flurry of the incident’s aftermath, one thing has been forgotten: Shannon is a CIA operative, too. Before taking maternity leave, she worked as a counterterrorism officer in the agency’s Directorate of Operations (DO), its shadowy espionage branch....

As he rose to stardom in the mid-1990s and began to dominate the sport, consistently beating such popular stars as Dale Earnhardt and Rusty Wallace, fans quickly turned on him. Though he carried himself with class and professionalism both on and off the track, there was no driver fans loved to hate more than the young hotshot driver from California. For more than a decade, Gordon was the target of more disdain than any driver....

It seemed almost too easy. With eerie precision, “smart” bombs dropped down air shafts and burst through bunker doors. Cruise missiles, lethal robots launched from warships in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, slammed into the Defense Ministry and the presidential palace in Baghdad. Hot streams of antiaircraft fire lit up the night, while bomb explosions bloomed above the skyline. Out in the desert, the Iraqi Air Force hid in its hardened shelters; the few pilots who came up to challenge the intruders were quickly shot down or turned tail and fled to the north....