Scott Kraft

The view over Sydney’s harbor is postcard-perfect.

Haitians prepare for boat journey to Florida

She yanks their food chains

‘Fair Game’ star Naomi Watts really knows her character, Valerie Plame

Paul Allen, the taciturn computer programmer who founded the software behemoth Microsoft with Bill Gates when he was 22 and walked away eight years later with what would become one of the largest fortunes in the history of American capitalism, died Monday in Seattle.

Some years ago, my father and I celebrated milestone birthdays with a wonderful six days of golf in Scotland.

The last time I visited the little house on Vilakazi Street, Nelson Mandela was sitting in the backyard, shaded by rustling trees and surrounded by a handful of men and women whose names today grace streets, bridges and schools.

As the nighttime lights of Shanghai winked to life late on a damp Saturday afternoon, the tour guide said she had one last stop in mind: the marriage market in People's Park.

A love of maps is every true traveler's secret pleasure.

Even before the Haiti earthquake, life was a struggle for 11-year-old Clifford, one of Port-au-Prince’s thousands of street children. He spends his days hustling for coins and queuing for food.

Joseph and Summer McStay’s home sat on a quiet cul-de-sac, beneath a mountain thick with avocado trees. The fenced backyard was perfect for Bear, Summer’s Akita, and there was plenty of room upstairs for their two toddlers. Soon after they moved in, in late 2009, Summer had launched a big renovation — paint, tile flooring and granite countertops. She also adopted a puppy. Six weeks later, on a chilly Thursday evening in February, the family piled into their Isuzu Trooper and drove away. Then the…

Donald Bren’s legacy

In tiny Seville, trouble on tap

Getting under their skin

Jilly Rizzo had spent hours preparing for his 75th birthday party, a soiree the next day that was to include his friend Frank Sinatra and other Rat Pack luminaries. A few minutes after midnight, he got into a white Jaguar and headed for his girlfriend’s house. As his car slowly crossed Gerald Ford Drive, Rizzo probably didn’t see the Mercedes blazing down the rain-slick street. The driver was Jeffrey Perrotte, a 28-year-old alcoholic, a local man with a rap sheet of DUIs who had the papers for c…

The grass in Pocket Park is trimmed and fragrant, the jungle gym and swings freshly painted. It’s the kind of place where parents exhausted after a day in the lettuce fields can let their children run free. But when dusk settled on that urban sanctuary one evening in March, the only people around were a few tattooed gang members wearing the signature blue of the Sureños. A car full of young men wearing the red colors of the rival Norteños drove past on East Laurel Drive, and a passenger fired a…

When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt arrived here in 1934 to mark the end of America’s occupation of Haiti, he insisted on toasting the hand-over with local Barbancourt rum. Two decades later, the visiting Vice President Nixon personally mixed a Barbancourt rum collins for Haiti’s president (who was, ahem, a whiskey drinker). And every voodoo priest and priestess in Haiti knows that soaking the ground with the golden rum -- not the three-star version, mind you, but the five-star, aged twice…

Piles of the dead finally buried in Titanyen, Haiti’s ‘valley of death’

Haiti boy, 5, survives nearly 8 days under rubble

Not long ago, Henrik Fisker was dashing up Interstate 5 to San Francisco when a highway patrolman clocked his Aston Martin roadster -- a car that Fisker himself designed -- going 97 mph. He protested. (“It was 90 at the most.”) He got a ticket and set the cruise control at 70. For the next four hours, “I was overtaken by every grandmother,” he said. Running late, he pressed down the pedal. This time, the radar gun caught him going 88 mph. “How long since your last ticket?” the officer asked. Fis…