Cleveland resident Cedric Cowan was asleep on an overcast spring morning when the roaring sounds of splintering wood and falling rubble jolted him awake.
Cowan lives in a neighborhood hit hard by foreclosures. He initially thought someone was moving into the house on the other side of Fairport Avenue.
Instead, he woke that morning to find a crew tearing down the two-family house.
Over the course of three hours, an excavator smashed, crushed and ripped apart the abandoned house while a worker sprayed the rubble with a hose to keep the dust down.
Six-term Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana is facing his first primary challenge since winning the job in the 1970s. The race is attracting big money from outside groups and superPACs, and is seen as a test of the strength of the Tea Party movement versus the power of incumbency.
Selina Gray of Sanford, Fla., shows her sign at a rally protesting the death of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed teen shot by a neighborhood watch volunteer. Authorities have cited the state's "stand your ground" law as a reason charges have not been filed in Martin's death.
Two of America's best-known companies, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, have dropped their memberships in the American Legislative Exchange Council, a low-profile conservative organization behind the national proliferation of "stand your ground" gun laws.
This room, known as the Cenacle on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, is venerated as the site of Jesus' Last Supper. Jews and Muslims also consider the building to be a holy site, and it has been a source of contention for years. Israel and the Vatican may be nearing an agreement.
If there's one building in Jerusalem that represents the city's tangle of religions, this is it. The ground floor is a Jewish holy site said to house the tomb of the biblical King David. The second floor is the Cenacle, a Christian holy site, the room believed to be the site of Jesus' Last Supper. On the roof, there's an old minaret from when this place was marked a Muslim holy site.
One building, three religions, decades of property disputes. And the fight isn't over.
Twenty years ago this week, the Bosnian war began with the siege of Sarajevo, the capital. In this photo, smoke billows from a building in downtown Sarajevo, April 22, 1992, after a Serbian mortar attack.
Credit Peter Andrews / Reuters /Landov
A man carries a bag of firewood across a destroyed bridge near the burnt library in Sarajevo, in this picture taken January 1, 1994 (top), while a man carries a box over the same bridge, now repaired, April 1, 2012, in this combination picture made April 4, 2012.
Credit Mike Persson / AFP/Getty Images
On April 6, 1992, a Bosnian special forces soldier (third from right) returns fire from Serbians opposed to Bosnian independence as civilians seek cover in downtown Sarajevo. The day marked the beginning of the 44-month siege of Sarajevo, which left 100,000 dead.
Credit Oleg Popov / Reuters /Landov
A Bosnian teenager carrying containers of water walks in front of destroyed trams at Skenderia square in the besieged Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, in this picture taken June 22, 1993 (top), and a woman passes through the same square, April 1, 2012.
Credit Tom Stoddart / Getty Images
In this photo from 1992, women run across "Sniper Alley" under the sights of Serb gunmen during the siege of Sarajevo.
April 6 marks the 20th anniversary of the start of the Bosnian war and the siege of Sarajevo. It was the longest siege of a capital city in modern history, and produced the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II.
Over three-and-a-half years of war, 100,000 people were killed, and half of Bosnia's population of 4.4 million — made up of a plurality of Muslims — fled their homes.
Virginia Klausmeier (left) makes her pitch for Garage Technology Ventures to invest in her clean diesel fuel company, Sylvatex, to Bill Reichert and Joyce Chung, two of the firm's general partners.
Credit Courtesy of Arthur Rock
Credit Courtesy of Arthur Rock
Arthur Rock in the 1970s. In 1968, he helped Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce found Intel — the only company he invested in that he was certain would succeed, he says. Rock was later a founding investor in Apple Computer.
Think of the most technologically innovative companies of the past 50 years, such as Intel, Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter. Each company has a Silicon Valley address — and each one got backing from venture capitalists. Over the past decade, more than 35 percent of the nation's venture capital has gone to Silicon Valley startups.
High-tech and venture capital go hand and hand in the valley where technology and venture capital grew up together.
A final report from Los Angeles coroner is shedding some light on Whitney Houston's last hours.
According to the report, the pop super star complained of a sore throat and an assistant suggested she take a bath. By the time the assistant got back to the room after running an errand, she found Houston lying face down on in the tub "in approximately 13-inches of water," People Magazine reports.
What's plentiful in upstate New York? Cows and prison inmates, to name a few things.
Reformists in the two communities don't make natural allies, but organizer Lauren Melodia is trying to do just that.
"I was living in this prison town, and at the same time, the dairy industry was in a lot of turmoil," Melodia tells The Salt. "We thought this [dairy] might be the perfect ally in trying to build a different economy in upstate New York, and shift some of the economic dependency away from the prison system."
Much of the Republican political establishment, many GOP voters and political analysts were telling Rick Santorum that the time had come for him to end his quest for his party's presidential nomination even before Tuesday when he failed to win any of three primaries.
Those calls had only increased by Wednesday as Santorum fell further behind Romney in the delegate count.