Andrew W. Mellon was far from a culture vulture. Primarily a Pittsburgh banker, he devoted nearly all his life to making money, something he did unusually well.

I'd like to know the source for Linda Parnell's contention (May 21) that former U.S. Sen. Max Cleland , D-Ga., did not lose his limbs fighting in Vietnam, as he and others claim, but lost them in a warehouse accident working with equipment. I've done a search and can't find any support for this assertion. (Editor's note: In April 1968, Mr. Cleland mistakenly picked up a live grenade as he was disembarking from a helicopter.)Susan Kinney, Waynesboro

Imagine that all the people who work at Savannah River Site, along with their families, schoolteachers and shopkeepers, lived in an opulent,

SOMA, Japan - Water levels dropped precipitously today inside a stricken Japanese nuclear reactor, twice leaving the uranium fuel rods completely exposed.

DENVER -- From an orbit 280 miles above Earth, a new satellite produces images clear enough to distinguish an SUV from a pickup, the lines on a tennis court and the shadows of a foursome on a golf course.

MOSCOW -- There is probably no economic event so terrifying as a bank failure. So why aren't more Russians losing sleep over predictions that a third or more of the country's banks might soon collapse? The fact is, most Russians sleep quite soundly knowing that their savings are stuffed in the mattress beneath them. And some economists say widespread bank closings could only help the national economy by cleansing it of dubious financial operators who scarcely meet anyone's definition of a banker.

...highest echelons of the United States government. Alger Hiss, the patrician former president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who died Friday at age 92, epitomizes such treachery. A State Department memorandum once described...