'Restrepo' offers frontline seats to Afghanistan's war, as Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington document a 15-month deployment of a U.S. platoon in the dangerous Korengal Valley.

When spies become news – as they did this week with the swap of US and Russian spies – there is often a disparity between real-life espionage and the images spun by popular film and fiction.

State governors are entering a weekend of talks in Boston about policy matters. Here are four indicators of the 'state of the states.'

AP - With the conclusion of the biggest spy swap since the Cold War, the U.S. has defused a thorny diplomatic problem quickly and cleanly — and avoided damaging recent efforts to improve relations with Russia. And Moscow has escaped further embarrassment over a group of spies that over the years apparently had little if any success in ferreting out any useful secrets.

AP - The value of one highly touted facet of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill cleanup — the small navy of vessels skimming oil from the surface — has proven all but impossible to measure, which could make it difficult to figure out how much damage BP is liable for when the gusher is finally stopped.

AP - Undersea robots manipulated by engineers a mile above will begin work Saturday removing the containment cap over the gushing well head in the Gulf of Mexico, the first part of a plan that could lead to the containment of all the oil as soon as Monday.