MAUREEN O'CONNELL Consulting Queen Fresh out of high school, O'Connell, 42, developed her finance talents at a New York City company that sold plants. Her career has since sprouted: she's had CFO stints at Bertelsmann's BMG Direct, Publishers Clearing House and Barnes & Noble. Now Gartner, the world's top IT research and consulting company, has named the Bronx, N.Y., native its president and COO. O'Connell plans to add important new voices to Gartner's analyst reports: clients who actually use the ...

Hispanic advocates often tell the story of a Census Bureau worker who visits a Puerto Rican household in New York City's East Harlem neighborhood. Seeing the family's caramel complexion, the Census taker asks which race he should put down for them — white or black. To which the family answers: "Puerto Rican." The story could substitute a Mexican-American family — or Colombian- or Nicaraguan-American ones for that matter — but the gist would be the same. Many, if ...

Indignantly denying that during his exile at Rome he has become a Roman Catholic, ex-King Amanullah of Afghanistan landed last week at Jidda on the Red Sea, the port for Mecca. After a purifying pilgrimage to the Holy City, Amanullah will try to stage a comeback. He lost his throne in the first place , chiefly because Afghanistan's fanatical mullahs raised the rabble against his "impious innovations"—such as store clothes, champagne, beard-shaving. With a Meccan pilgrimage to his credit, ...

Ending a trial that had dragged on for almost 18 months, a court in the south German city of Munich on Thursday convicted 91-year-old John Demjanjuk of being an accessory to the murder of 28,060 Jews at the Sobibor concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland and sentenced him to five years in prison. The presiding judge, Ralph Alt, said the court found that Demjanjuk served as a Nazi guard at the camp in 1943 and, as such, played ...

Grief hangs over the frail face of Bui Thi Me, a communist intellectual contemplating the deaths of three of her sons. For a year in the late 1960s, she had no idea that two of her missing children had perished in central Vietnam while fighting U.S. soldiers. "It took the government a long time to deliver the news in 1969," says the 83-year-old, a retired propagandist and Social-Affairs Minister in Ho Chi Minh City. "I almost gave ...

To get in shape for her October wedding, Dawn-Samantha Cahill, 25, a production coordinator in New York City, tried every exercise routine she could think of. But the upended positions that yoga required made her feel self-conscious. Running on a treadmill was a bore. And lifting weights was just too difficult. Frustrated, Cahill started overeating instead of exercising, and her weight, on a petite, 5-ft. 2-in. frame, ballooned to 212 lb. Cahill was nearly ready to give up, ...

Word leaked out almost as soon as the giant U.S. Air Force C-5A transport plane touched down in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz. As U.S. embassy spokesmen in the capital city of La Paz and Defense Department officials in Washington tried to downplay the matter, headlines in Bolivia and the U.S. were blaring the news: in the first use of a U.S. military operation on foreign soil to fight drugs, Army Black Hawk helicopters, armed with .30-cal. machine guns ...

You've gone to take the famous waters in the southwestern English city of Bath. And if there's anything more relaxing than a hot swirling mineral soak, it's following your wallowing with strong drink and hearty fare. For that, check out one of the city's newer eateries, the modern British restaurant and bar Hall & Woodhouse. Named after a family-operated brewing company that has been in business since the 1770s, and is today run by the fifth generation ...

Taliban fighters carried out a series of coordinated attacks across the embattled southern Afghan city of Kandahar Saturday — a campaign that Afghan President Hamid Karzai characterized as "revenge" for the death of Osama bin Laden. Insurgents first assaulted the provincial governor's palace with rocket propelled grenades and small arms fire and then launched a series of strikes across the city on the headquarters of the Afghan National Police and the Transportation Police, on Police Sub-station ...

The four helicopters chuffed urgently through the Khyber Pass, racing over the lights of Peshawar and down toward the quiet city of Abbottabad and the prosperous neighborhood of Bilal Town. In the dark houses below slept doctors, lawyers, retired military officers — and perhaps Osama bin Laden, the world's most wanted fugitive. Half a world away, it was Sunday afternoon in the crowded White House Situation Room. President Barack Obama was stone-faced as he followed the ...