Ann Marie Hall sat next to her husband on the green sofa, trying to talk the gun out of his hands. "You know you can't kill yourself," she said. "Think about the boys, and your mother, and your brother and me. How will we feel?" Michael admitted he wasn't thinking straight. "It's not about anything but you and me," he said. Even as cops' marriages go, theirs was badly bruised. They had fallen in love fast; he proposed five months ...

Outside of Academia, does anybody read Gertrude Stein anymore? Most of her major works are too strenuously experimental to be much fun. Better to remember her as the bohemian Buddha of Paris, where she and members of her family assembled the 20th century's most fearless collections of modern art. "The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde," a phenomenal new show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gathers highlights of those hugely influential and long-dispersed collections for ...

Abby Barnes' hand shoots up nearly every time her teacher asks the 19 squirmy first-graders in her suburban Philadelphia public school to match letters of the alphabet to the sounds they make. Sitting up front with her pinchable cheeks framed by long blond hair, Abby, 7, looks as eager as any of her classmates to blurt out an answer. But every time the teacher calls on her, Abby freezes. Her face tightens. She strains to respond. And even if an ...

A Connecticut woman who was mauled and blinded by a berserk chimpanzee has received a new face in the third such operation ever performed in the U.S. and is looking forward to chewing her meals again after months of pureed food. Charla Nash underwent a full face and double hand transplant late last month, but the hands failed to thrive as she struggled with pneumonia and were removed, Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, leader of the ...

The pit was dark, almost unbearably claustrophobic. The dirt walls, where captors unknown to him had shackled his arms and legs, were so close together that he found it impossible to stretch out his lanky 6-ft. 2-in. frame. As for food, which they provided irregularly, he quickly realized he should eat the bananas first and save the more durable fruits for later. He never gulped down the water, uncertain when his kidnappers would deliver the next ration. A far greater ...

It could not have been easy being Elliott Roosevelt. If the alcohol wasn't getting him, the morphine was. If it wasn't the morphine, it was the struggle with depression. Then, of course, there were the constant comparisons with big brother Teddy. In 1883, the year Elliott began battling melancholy, Teddy had already published his first book and been elected to the New York State assembly. By 1891—about the time Elliott, still unable to establish a career, had to ...

How close did Gary Faulkner, the shaggy Colorado construction worker arrested in Pakistan on Sunday, come to tracking down his prey, Osama bin Laden in the mountains along the Afghan border? Very close, according to his brother, Scott, a physician in Fort Morgan, Col. Scott says that during his last two visits to Pakistan, wanna-be bounty hunter Faulkner had located a cave on an 18,000 ft mountain where he saw "a bearded man in a white robe ...

He's the unguarded foil to his buttoned-up brother, and for years he's been considered a playboy prince. But Prince Harry — he who wore a Nazi uniform to a costume party, he who called a Pakistani military comrade a "raghead" on camera — now finds himself Britain's most eligible bachelor. As Prince William prepares to walk down the aisle on April 29, single women the world over are looking with renewed interest at his younger brother Prince ...

Guided by burning flares, a transport plane dipped down out of the night over Biafra last week and landed with a shipment of condensed food for the secessionist state's starving population. When soldiers guarding the airstrip saw its cargo, they burst unashamedly into tears. On a country road a few miles away, relief workers held out bits of food to a group of hungry children. They ran, not knowing what to do with it. "We are going to have to ...

Liz, a Shi'ite in her late 20s, is afraid to leave her house. She says that the last time she went out, government-hired thugs stopped her car at one of the many checkpoints that litter Manama, the capital of Bahrain. They pulled her out, asked for her identity card and tried to ascertain one thing: whether she was Sunni or Shi'ite. "It's pure racial profiling," she says a few days later, sitting in her family's living room in ...