Featured Articles from the Washington Post

A modern global auto plant has no discernible nationality. Aside from language and perhaps the ethnicities of its workers, the inside of the latest engine plant on one continent is identical to the same location in a similar plant on another continent. That was clear at the opening of Volkswagen's 100th global manufacturing and assembly plant yesterday, in Silao, Mexico. The Silao engine plant will supply a new generation of VW's newest engines, known by the designation EA888.

CINCINNATI — An Ohio murder trial that hinges on whether a dying, paralyzed man identified his shooter by blinking his eyes went to the jury on Tuesday, and initial deliberations failed to produce a verdict. Jurors met for about two hours Tuesday and were scheduled to resume deliberations Wednesday in the trial of 35-year-old Ricardo Woods, of Cincinnati, who is accused of fatally shooting David Chandler. Prosecutors told jurors in their closing arguments earlier Tuesday that Chandler identified Ricardo Woods as his shooter, while the defense said the Chandler's blinks weren't conclusive.

Lose a pound a day! Relieve your indigestion! Look younger! Cure cancer! Scour the Internet and you'll see a slew of Web sites promising to improve your health if only you follow their alkaline diet, drink alkaline water or buy a water ionizer to get it from your tap. But the evidence supporting any of the health claims for alkaline products is murky at best. Here's what you need to know about this health fad. The claim The main idea put forth by marketers of alkaline products is that many people have an imbalance of acid in their body because of what they claim are acid-producing foods such as meat and processed goods.

After Netflix's blockbuster earnings sent its stock soaring this week, the company's chief executive made a bold prediction: TV as we know it is coming to an end. Billions of people around the world will abandon remote controls and begin tapping video apps across an array of devices, Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings said. They will choose what to watch like they order food off an a-la-carte menu rather than be force-fed hundreds of channels. Instead of CBS, NBC and ABC, a new set of names will dominate, he said.

Company: Volkswagen Group of America. Location: Herndon. Employees: 500 locally; 500,000 worldwide. Upon arriving at Volkswagen's U.S. headquarters, corporate communications manager Jeannine Ginivan said a visitor would instantly notice a trend among employees. "If you came to our facility and saw the parking lot, you would definitely see there are very, very few other brands," she said. And part of reason that so many staffers are inclined to drive Volkswagens is because they get a good deal on them.

Adapted from a recent online discussion . Dear Carolyn: My boyfriend of 1 1 / 2 years and I are breaking up. Our fights have turned into World War III and he was tired of my being upset because I caught him lying to me a half-dozen times. The kicker is that none of the lies were deal-breaker issues or worthy of the brawls they caused. He feels like the lies might keep a fight at bay and I feel like lying over insignificant matters just adds fuel to my fire.

They're back. Seventeen years after a major swarm of bug-eyed cicadas staged one of nature's weirdest — and loudest — mating rituals, their offspring are preparing to rise in Washington's suburbs and the Mid-Atlantic. Once the ground temperature hits 64 degrees, it's on. A swarm of cicadas known as Brood II will climb from buried lairs from North Carolina to Connecticut with a very short to-do list: find a mate, make babies and die. It will be the largest cicada population to arrive in the region since Brood X surfaced in the Washington area, the Northeast and the South in 2004.

No big deal, software consultant Ed Williams thought, when he developed an itchy red rash after playing in a golf tournament in the summer of 2004. Williams suspected he'd wandered too close to a patch of poison ivy or touched something that had triggered an allergic reaction. "I figured it would just clear up," recalls Williams, who lives in a suburb of Rochester, N.Y. But when the rash on his arms, legs and back persisted, Williams, who had not had skin problems previously, consulted a dermatologist.

Leaving aside the seriousness of lawlessness , and the corruption of our civic culture by the professionally pious, this past week has been amusing. There was the spectacle of advocates of an ever-larger regulatory government expressing shock about such government's large capacity for misbehavior. And, entertainingly, the answer to the question "Will Barack Obama's scandals derail his second-term agenda?" was a question: What agenda? The scandals are interlocking and overlapping in ways that drain his authority.

Q: We live on a cul-de-sac on a wooded lot with a creek, and love the country living. There are families of deer, coyote, fox, beaver and all sorts of birds. The problem? Squirrels. One year, they ate through the top of a new sofa on our front veranda. They devour fresh pumpkins (so much for fall decorating) and routinely dig up and redistribute my bulbs. Recently, my husband installed new screens and a new ceiling to the screened porch on the back of our house, giving it a finished, beachy, outdoor-family-room feel (an idea we picked up from one of your columns)

If you're a kid, chances are you either crack your knuckles or know someone who cracks theirs. You might have been told (by annoyed parents, perhaps?) that you'll develop arthritis if you keep up such knuckleheaded behavior. First, you need to know a bit about your knuckles, the common name for the joints in your fingers. A joint is a place where two bones come together to allow movement. The bones that make up a joint are held together by tough, flexible tissue called ligaments.

Author Sheri Koones is on a mission to educate American homeowners about home building. Her first three books focused on the basics on home construction, borne of her own experience as a frustrated homeowner trying to remodel her Greenwich, Conn., house. At that time, she said in a recent interview, there was almost no information to help her make intelligent choices as she faced an endless number of decisions about this or that flooring material, plumbing fixture, roof shingle and on and on. Koones's last four books have zeroed in on prefabricated, factory-built housing.

She was a real-life heroine of the CIA hunt for Osama bin Laden , a headstrong young operative whose work tracking the al-Qaeda leader serves as the dramatic core of a Hollywood film set to premiere next week. Her CIA career has followed a more problematic script, however, since bin Laden was killed . The operative, who remains undercover, was passed over for a promotion that many in the CIA thought would be impossible to withhold from someone who played such a key role in one of the most successful operations in agency history.

U.S. Special Operations forces rescued an American hostage and her Danish colleague in Somalia early Wednesday in the kind of daring raid that the Obama administration has said will be the hallmark of future U.S. military missions. Officials said the raid, by members of the Navy SEAL Team 6 unit that killed Osama bin Laden in May, demonstrated President Obama's focus on the narrow, targeted use of force after a decade of large-scale military deployments. The mission is "yet another message to the world that the United States of America will stand strongly against any threats to our people," Obama said in a statement Wednesday morning.