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 ...

In New York City, where they never roll up the sidewalks, illegal social clubs are a long tradition. There are more than 1,000 such clubs strewn across the city's five boroughs, dispensing cheap booze, loud music and a touch of the home country to immigrants. Many of them have something in common: the lack of a liquor license. All too many also offer their patrons something besides the prospect of a hot time on the town: the high risk of ...

Tech pundits have a bizarre habit of declaring products dead long before they're actually goners. Me, I do my darndest to avoid the temptation to play premature coroner. I will say this, though: If the PC does end up mortally wounded someday, we may look back at early June of 2011 as the moment when its death warrant was signed. In the past eight days, Microsoft and Apple have shown off upcoming versions of their respective ...

With the end of school around the corner, the options for summer camp have gotten endlessly niche: there's rock-star camp, circus-arts camp, Hollywood-stunt camp. But in what may be a backlash to the glitz of it all, the hippest new kid on the block is the lowly farm camp, with tilling the earth now seen as a wholesome and character-building respite from video games and texting. The American Camp Association has surveyed its members to ...

It's important in sports and it's important in entertainment to stand out. Randy knew that. Right away, he wanted to leave his mark, and to do that he was aware he had to make himself different from everyone else. One way he did this was concentrating on his outfits, those brightly colored costumes with foot-long fringe that became his trademark. He brought to wrestling a unique look and style. Randy, who died in a car crash May 20 at age ...

Anne Adriance thought her architect was kidding. She couldn't fathom the idea of building a 3,000-sq.-ft. coastal retreat in Maine out of cargo containers. Yes, the same rectangular shipping containers that you see piled high in ports worldwide are being recycled as homes, office buildings and even traveling museum exhibits. Architectural use of the containers doubled in 2010 compared with the previous year, according to Barry Naef, founder of the Intermodal Steel Building Units Association. And ...

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 ...

The question of where life began is one of the enduring mysteries of science. Charles Darwin himself speculated that it might have happened in "a warm little pond," while modern biologists think the superheated water around seafloor volcanic vents is a more likely spot. But a far more exotic proposal has been floating around for years: maybe life first arose in outer space and came to earth fully formed. It's an astonishing idea, but it's not completely ...

When the congregation of Grace Baptist Church held services in its new building last month, no protesters marched outside to mark the occasion. It's doubtful that protesters will gather later this month when the church throws an all-day party to dedicate the new brick building on the corner of Bradyville Pike and Veals Road. The words "Not Welcome" will probably not be spray-painted on the new church's sign. The same cannot be said for the Islamic Center of ...

By my watch, the takeoff roll for Air France flight 380 lasted 35 seconds. "39 seconds," corrected Laurent Bonnard, a French historian, as we chatted in a lounge area later. Either way, all the planiacs on board Air France's inaugural A380 Airbus flight from New York City to Paris agreed the takeoff was a thing of beauty. Imagine an apartment building with wings that steps into the sky with the quiet grace of a ballet dancer. The lack of ...