What exactly does a normal child look like? We've long since passed the time when childhood was an ungraded test--take your time, build your forts, play your games, the clock does not start until high school, maybe college. We give homework in first grade now. We're very busy people. And your parents will do anything, just anything, to help you get ahead. "We lived with it," says Tim, of his daughter's behavior--the tantrums, the hitting, covering herself in Vaseline head to ...

At 4:30, when most of Wall Street is winding down, Walter Zimmermann begins a high-stakes, high-wire act conducted live before a paying audience. About 200 institutional investors—including airlines and oil companies—shell out up to $3,000 a month to catch his daily webcast on the volatile energy markets, a performance that can move hundreds of millions of dollars. "I'm not paid to be wrong—I can tell you that," Zimmermann says. But as he clicks through dozens of screens and graphics on ...

In the basement of a Cape Cod on a suburban street in northern New Jersey, a teenage boy turns to a friend and asks impatiently, "What did you get? I'll give you some of this"--indicating a bottle of Ritalin stuffed into the front pocket of his backpack--"for some of that painkiller." As a rap song plays just loud enough not to disturb the neighbors, his friend eyes the bottle suspiciously. "Is this generic, or is it the good stuff?" he ...

To see the conflict and our part in it as a tragedy without villains, war crimes without criminals, lies without liars, espouses and promulgates a view of process, roles and motives that is not only grossly mistaken but which underwrites deceits that have served a succession of Presidents. —Daniel Ellsberg THE issues were momentous, the situation unprecedented. The most massive leak of secret documents in U.S. history had suddenly exposed the sensitive inner processes whereby the Johnson Administration ...

Barack Obama's autopen does not sleep. So, unlike the President, who was roused from a hotel bed recently at 5:45 a.m. in a French resort town to approve a last-minute extension of the Patriot Act, the machine never missed a wink. As the minutes ticked toward midnight on May 26 in Washington, Obama wrote a document authorizing an immediate phone call from the hotel hallway to the White House, where, in an undisclosed room in the building next door, the ...

LORI CROWN THOUGHT she was doing the right thing last year when she moved to a dryer climate in Bakersfield, California, after being plagued by asthma attacks during her six years in Hawaii. A few months later, Crown, 35, was suffering from severe headaches, a prolonged fever of 102 degreesF, swollen feet and painful bumps on her hands and legs. The diagnosis: "valley fever," or coccidioidomycosis, a dust-borne disease caused by the microscopic spores of a fungus, Coccidioides immitis. As ...

When news of the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn broke in France, Emmanuel Pierrat remembered the young woman who came seeking legal advice about half a decade ago. She said she had had an encounter with Strauss-Kahn and, says the lawyer Pierrat, "wanted to know whether I thought what I heard would form the basis for a solid legal case against him." Pierrat says the news out of New York City last weekend was "something I had heard ...

Getting by is hard enough in middle school. It's harder still when you've got other things on your mind--and Andrea Okeson, 13, had plenty to distract her. There were the constant stomach pains to consider; there was the nervousness, the distractibility, the overwhelming need to be alone. And, of course, there was the business of repeatedly checking the locks on the doors. All these things grew, inexplicably, to consume Andrea, until by the time she was through with the eighth ...

Tucson, Ariz., has regained a semblance of normalcy four months after the crime that drew worldwide attention. Last week, it was business as usual at the Safeway supermarket where Jared Lee Loughner was arrested on Jan. 8 after shooting 19 people — killing six and leaving Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords severely injured. A pair of tables set up for a used-book sale in the exact spot where the assault took place was piled high with titles like Divine ...

As the news of Osama bin Laden's death moves from exhilarating novelty to accepted reality, one group in the U.S. government will emerge as key to the win: the Central Intelligence Agency. From the earliest identification of a Bin Laden courier, the pursuit of leads, the assessment of evidence and the execution of the raid in Abottabad, Pakistan, the CIA can rightly claim the most credit for finding and killing the world's most wanted terrorist. Taking credit for ...