On the night that Ralph Reed and his wife celebrated their 19th wedding anniversary, the couple had also hoped to celebrate something else: a victory for Reed in Georgia's Republican primary for lieutenant governor. But Georgia voters decided differently, and by 10:00 p.m. on July 19 Reed conceded the race to Casey Cagle. By early the next morning, Cagle had claimed 56 percent of the vote.

CHARLOTTE-When FBI agents uncovered a well-oiled Lebanese terror cell deep in a sophisticated plot to fund top Hezbollah terrorists through a multimillion-dollar cigarette-smuggling operation, one of the biggest surprises was the bust's location: The raid didn't go down in New York City or Washington, D.C., but in Charlotte, N.C., a mid-size city known as a hotbed for NASCAR races, not terrorist activity.

Move the letter "d" to the end of the first word in "Dunkin Donuts" and you get "unkind donuts." Flip an "h" and an "s" in the phrase "Noah's ark" and you get "No, a shark." Crossword puzzle constructor Merle Reagle confesses that this is how crossword devotees think in Wordplay, a documentary about puzzle enthusiasts.

Salim Hamdan is likely the most jubilant prisoner in Guantanamo Bay. The former driver for Osama bin Laden hasn't won his release from the U.S. military prison in Cuba, but he has won something he many never have thought possible: a boost from the U.S. Supreme Court.

That same high court doled out a flurry of decisions, dealing mostly with crime or politics, the week before it began a three-month recess early this month.

Nine-year-old Eman Waleed was in her pajamas when her family gathered in the living room of their small home in Haditha, Iraq, for the last time. The 11 members of her family had awakened to the thunderous blast of an improvised explosive device (IED) in the post-dawn hours of Nov. 19, 2005. Less than 150 yards away, U.S. Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, 20, lay dead near his shredded humvee, fallen to an insurgent attack that wounded two more Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marine Regiment.

When disbarred attorney Ralph Woods appeared in a North Carolina courtroom for his arraignment on fraud charges, U.S. Magistrate Judge Carl Horn asked Mr. Woods a question he didn't expect: Do you live alone? When Mr. Woods replied that he lived with a woman to whom he wasn't married, Judge Horn issued an order he didn't expect: If Mr. Woods wanted to post bond, he'd have to move out or get married.

UN Ambassador John Bolton refuses to "put lipstick on a caterpillar and call it a butterfly." But Mr. Bolton recently told the House International Relations Committee that's precisely what the UN has done by electing notorious human-rights abusers to its newly formed Human Rights Council. The panel of nations charged with exposing and reversing human-rights abuses around the world includes China, Cuba, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Russia.