In the late '90s, software entrepreneur John Zitzner was pretty close to being bankrupt. Yet within six months — in one of those typical "holy crap" dotcom-era stories — Zitzner had sold his company and become "a very modest millionaire." Fantastic. And in one of those typical "What do I do with all this money?" stories, he decided to help make the world a better place — specifically by co-founding a charter school in Cleveland. That was three ...

Investigators are still sorting through the wreckage of Monday's crash of two Metro rail cars in Washington, D.C., the deadliest in the system's 33-year history, which killed nine people and injured scores of others. Federal officials said on Tuesday that the train that rear-ended another was an older model that lacked equipment that might have helped avert the collision and, according to the Washington Post, had been overdue for needed brake work. The D.C. Metro is hardly the only ...

A blogger and Internet radio talk-show host in New Jersey was arrested Wednesday for allegedly threatening to kill three federal appeals court judges in Chicago, Illinois. Those strikes followed a major blast that killed 64 people and injured about 150 others at a Baghdad market early Wednesday and a deadly blast in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk on Saturday that killed 80 people. The Interior Ministry said seven deadly attacks hit Baghdad from Wednesday night into Thursday ...

A long line of hospital staff wraps around the corridor outside a small conference room in New York to catch a glimpse of the precious cargo. Inside are the three frail bodies in open wooden crates causing all the commotion. Another body -- a prince no less -- is a few rooms down in a computer tomography scanner. The bodies are part of the Brooklyn Museum's collection of 11 Egyptian mummies, transported to the North Shore University Hospital to be ...

For a few months after his departure as Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld occupied a suite of government-provided transition offices in a high-rise building in Rosslyn, Virginia, up the Potomac River a short way from the Pentagon. There he began sorting his papers for a memoir and charting his next course. Rumsfeld's roots were in Chicago, where he and his wife Joyce still enjoyed an extensive network of friendships and where he had returned after his first stint as ...

To the leaders of the Republican Party, a public health-care insurance option is a "non-starter," the first step on a slippery slope to socialized medicine; in the eyes of the American Medical Association , it could "restrict patient choice"; and for President Barack Obama, as he put it Monday during his speech to the AMA in Chicago, it's an essential part of any health care reform package that will "put affordable health care within reach for millions of Americans." ...

The average price per gallon of self-serve regular gasoline is $2.66, up 16.68 cents from two weeks ago, the Lundberg Survey found. The price, an average of thousands of gas stations nationwide, is $1.34 lower than a year ago. Last year in June, retail gas prices were nearing $4, and stayed at that level or above until late July. The most recent increase is not a reflection of increased demand, according to survey publisher Trilby Lundberg. "It's a ...

The Windy City is one of America's sports meccas: home to the Bears and the Bulls, the Sox and the Cubs, and, Chicagoans are only recently willing to admit, the Blackhawks. But can it become Surf City, U.S.A.? This week, Chicago Park District's governing board empowered the city superintendent to lift a decades-old ban on the use of flotation devices like boogie boards on the city's waterways. The move will effectively legalize surfing in the heart of ...

Expecting moms can determine whether they're carrying a boy or a girl as early as 10 weeks after conception, according to an over-the-counter gender prediction test by a Plano, Texas, company. IntelliGender, the creator of the "Boy or Girl Gender Prediction Test," say scientists isolated certain hormones that when combined with a "proprietary mix of chemicals" react differently if a women is carrying a boy or a girl. It claims that within 10 minutes of taking the urine test, a ...

To Koma Gandy, the folks who mix her favorite tunes were always like the Wizard of Oz. "You go out to this party and the deejay is this mysterious entity behind a wall, where all this magic happened," says Gandy, 34, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. "I've always wanted to see how the magic was constructed." Thanks to the recession, Gandy and many others are finally getting a chance to connect with their inner-MC. After she lost her hedge ...