Civil War

The U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will cost taxpayers $4 trillion to $6 trillion, taking into account the medical care of wounded veterans and expensive repairs to a force depleted by more than a decade of fighting, according to a new study by a Harvard researcher. Washington increased military benefits in late 2001 as the nation went to war, seeking to quickly bolster its talent pool and expand its ranks. Those decisions and the protracted nation-building efforts launched in both countries will...

BEIRUT — Syrian President Bashar Assad said in a newspaper interview Saturday he won't step down before elections and that the United States has no right to interfere in his country's politics, raising new doubts about a U.S-Russian effort to get Assad and his opponents to negotiate an end to the country's civil war. In the capital Damascus, a car bomb killed at least three people and wounded five, according to Syrian state TV. It said bomb experts...

In 1986, filmmaker Ken Burns received a copy of a long-forgotten Civil War soldier's letter that a scholar thought he might find interesting. Burns, then working on his award-winning PBS documentary about the war, began to read it out loud to his wife, brother and another staff member in his Walpole, N.H., headquarters. "My dear Sarah," the letter began, "the indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days. . . . Lest I should not be able to write again, I feel...

This Week in The Civil War, for week of Sunday, May 19: Union assaults on Vicksburg, Miss. This week 150 years ago in the Civil War, Ulysses Grant hurled his Union forces at heavily fortified Vicksburg, Miss., in hopes of a swift conquest of the Mississippi River city. Union artillery began the assault early on May 19, 1863 before troopers stormed through a series of Confederate obstacles of downed trees and other obstructions toward the Confederate lines. But Southern fighters responded with withering fire, driving back the federal forces with heavy...

BEIRUT — Syria will supply "game-changing" weapons to Hezbollah, the chief of the Lebanese militant group said Thursday, less than a week after Israeli airstrikes on Damascus targeted alleged shipments of advanced Iranian missiles bound for Hezbollah. Israel has signaled it will respond with airstrikes to any future weapons shipments, meaning it could quickly get drawn into Syria's civil war if the Hezbollah chief's declaration is more than an empty threat Tension has been rising in the...

The defendant was an immense man, well over 300 pounds, but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larger still. He hunched forward in the sturdy wooden armchair that barely contained him, sobbing softly into tissue after tissue, a leg bouncing nervously under the table. In the first pew of spectators sat his wife, looking stricken, absently twisting her wedding band. The room was a sepulcher. Witnesses spoke softly of events so painful that many lost their composure. When a hospital emergency room nurse described how the defendant...

Under a deadly barrage of artillery fire, wave after wave of Union troops hurled themselves across an open field outside of Fredericksburg on a bitterly cold mid-December day and charged up a steep hill in a futile attempt to dislodge Confederates dug in atop Marye's Heights. By nightfall, nearly 13,000 Union troops lay dead or wounded — double the number of fallen Confederates — and a "young and good-looking" corporal from New Jersey that a comrade described as "a real soldierly,...

Lonnie Bunch Founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture The notion that Abraham Lincoln purposely provoked the Civil War by attempting to resupply Fort Sumter in April 1861 became a cornerstone of the reinterpretation of the Civil War after the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865. Most notably, the memoirs of the president and vice president of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis and Alexander H. Stephens, argued that Lincoln wanted war and...

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Yang Jingtao did what many young, brave Chinese did — he left his home as a teenager to fight the invading Japanese in World War II. The problem was he fought while wearing the uniform of the Nationalist Chinese Army, condemning Yang to be shunned and reviled in China's often brutal politics after the Communist Party defeated the Nationalists and took control of the country four years after the end of the war. But now,...

We might as well scratch the itch right at the start. As the United States begins observing the 150th anniversary of the Civil War , let's ask whether it's moral to honor both sides even though one of them — the Confederacy — tried to break up the nation primarily to defend the institution of slavery. I admit I'm prejudiced on the subject. I grew up with strong Yankee sympathies, inherited from Minnesota and Michigan forebears. But Lincoln urged charity for all. It would spoil the observances to...

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said Thursday that the U.S. and Turkey will keep ramping up pressure to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad from power, but there's "no magic formula" to stop his violence. At a news conference with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the White House Rose Garden, Obama says the only way to resolve the crisis is for Assad to hand over power to a transitional government. "We're going to keep increasing the pressure on the Assad regime and working...

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is looking at new ways to pressure Iran over its nuclear program. The State Department's nuclear negotiator with Iran, Wendy Sherman, and the Treasury Department's sanctions chief, David Cohen, are telling Congress that the U.S. is exploring different ways to press Tehran into making nuclear concessions. These range from possible executive orders to military signals to U.S. efforts to end the civil war in Syria, a key Iranian...

TRIPOLI, Lebanon — Lebanese members of the Syrian leader's Alawite sect fear their tiny community will be a casualty of the civil war raging in the neighboring country. Already, Sunni Muslim extremists have stoned a school bus, vandalized stores and beaten or stabbed a number of men in a wave of attacks against Lebanese Alawites, stoking fears of even more violence should Syrian President Bashar Assad be removed from power. In one particularly humiliating case, angry Sunnis...

WASHINGTON — Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates says he thinks direct U.S. intervention in Syria's civil war — particularly direct military involvement — would be a mistake. Gates, who served both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, says he oversaw wars that began with quick regime change "and we all know what happened after that. " He asks on CBS' "Face that Nation, "Haven't we learned that when you go to war, the outcomes are...

In 1888, four years before he died, the aging poet Walt Whitman showed a friend an old leather shoulder bag hanging on the wall of his home in Camden, N.J. It had an adjustable strap with a decorative buckle and had seen hard use. He'd gotten it long ago, in the Civil War , Whitman said. He'd sling it over his shoulder on his legendary visits to the hospitals in Washington, to carry food and gifts to wounded and dying soldiers. "A souvenir of those days," he told his friend.

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Yang Jingtao did what many young, brave Chinese did — he left his home as a teenager to fight the invading Japanese in World War II. The problem was he fought while wearing the uniform of the Nationalist Chinese Army, condemning Yang to be shunned and reviled in China's often brutal politics after the Communist Party defeated the Nationalists and took control of the country four years after the end of the war. But now,...

A few minutes into "War Witch," the film's 12-year-old heroine is faced with a hellish choice: Kill her own parents, or watch them be killed by the rebels who have kidnapped her and who intend to turn her into a child warrior. This is only the first horror visited upon Komona (Rachel Mwanza) in Canadian filmmaker Kim Nguyen's harrowing, Oscar-nominated drama, which, though filmed in Congo, is set in an unspecified African nation beset by civil war. By the time Komona is 13, she has been elevated to the position of war witch, a kind of supernatural...

Almost as soon as he took office in 1862, Francis E. Spinner's job as U.S. treasurer began to spin out of control. Many of his employees had resigned to join the Army — just as a revolution in the country's money system was underway. He clamored for more clerks. "The work has been performed by devoting not only almost every hour of each day, (Sundays not excepted,) but many hours of night, to continuous labor beyond the endurance of most men," Spinner wrote in a report. To help pay for...

Today is Saturday, May 11, the 131st day of 2013. There are 234 days left in the year. Today's Highlight in History: On May 11, 1973, the espionage trial of Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo in the "Pentagon Papers" case came to an end as Judge William M. Byrne dismissed all charges, citing government misconduct. On this date: In 1647, Peter Stuyvesant arrived in New Amsterdam to become governor of New Netherland. In 1858, Minnesota became the 32nd state of the Union.