The next time you pass through an airport and have to produce a photo ID to establish who you are and then must remove your shoes, take off your belt, empty your pockets, prove your laptop is not an explosive device and send your briefcase or purse through a machine to determine whether it holds weapons, think about this: In a single day, more than 4,000 illegal aliens will walk across the busiest unlawful gateway into the U.S., the 375-mile ...

I woke up this morning to discover that, despite my best efforts, I was still only married to my job. I had spent part of the night in Greenwich Village with the crowds outside the Stonewall Inn celebrating the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York state. I proposed to several passersby but every single one laughed. The thumping of "Y.M.C.A." on an adjacent boombox killed any possibility of romance. I had wandered down from a party about ...

Inside a crowded apartment in upper Manhattan, the executive producer of the FX comedy Louie needs to confer with the director, the star, the writer and the editor. Fortunately, they're all the same guy. Louis CK is choreographing a scene in which his character, Louie — like him, a comedian and divorced single dad — has woken up to cries of agony from his pregnant sister, who is crashing on his couch. In quick order, Louis adds a line making ...

There are few finer views of the new India than from the cliff-top terrace of manufacturing magnates Parmeshwar and Adi Godrej. At night on the horizon, like a diamond necklace, streetlights trace a shoreline curve past the high-rise bank offices and apartment blocks of downtown Bombay, skirt the bars, gyms and boutiques of Marine Drive, and encircle Chowpatty Beach, ending in the rocky surf below. On a warm, monsoon night this summer, the pool lights ...

Itching for a good after-school science experiment? Researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey have created a homemade bedbug trap using a plastic cat-food dish, an insulated jug and some dry-ice pellets. According to Wan-Tien Tsai, who reported her findings in December at the annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America, the dry-ice-and-thermos combo captured the bloodsucking critters in an infested apartment just as effectively as, if not more so than, equipment used by professional exterminators. The most ...

In his apartment overlooking Manhattan's Central Park, Abraham Feller sat nervously one morning last week, chatting with his wife. For two weeks he had been acting strangely, had even mentioned suicide. Mrs. Feller left him only momentarily to call the family doctor, then returned to the living room."I tried to cheer him up," she said later. "He was an idealist, and his whole life was devoted to the United Nations. He thought he wasn't doing his job well. He was a perfectionist."Book on a Table. But ...

Really it's a sad story. The Kissels are rich, or used to be, so it's tempting to savor the elaborate murders and betrayals the family has endured as a long lost episode of Knots Landing. But five young kids have lost their fathers, and paterfamilias William Kissel, 78, has lived through the killings of two of his three children. Hong Kong financier Robert Kissel, 40, was drugged and then bludgeoned to death by his wife Nancy in 2003, and now ...

In May, David Steward, a former president of TV Guide, and his partner Pierre Friedrichs, a caterer, hosted an uncomfortably crowded cocktail party at their Manhattan apartment. It was a typical gay fund raiser--there were lemony vodka drinks with mint sprigs; there were gift bags with Calvin Klein sunglasses; Friedrichs prepared little blackened-tuna-with-mango-chutney hors d'oeuvres that were served by uniformed waiters. Billionaire philanthropist Edgar Bronfman Sr. was there; David Mixner, a gay activist and longtime friend of Bill Clinton's, was ...

On the 4th floor of an old shadowy apartment building in the heart of downtown Cairo, the tech savvy leaders of the 6th of April Youth Movement, are busy planning the Revolution. "We're receiving calls and making calls to our members in the street," explains Mohammed Adil, the director of the groups media office and website. "Today is the million man march so we are calling the leaders of all of our groups. We have them everywhere ...

When a plane crashes or the earth shakes, we tend to view the survivors as the lucky ones. Had they been in the next seat or the apartment across the street, they would have perished. We marvel at the whimsy of the devastation. The recent earthquake in China and the cyclone in Burma, not to mention the battery of tornadoes and wildfires ripping through the U.S. this season, remind us that disasters are part of the human condition. We are ...