Between the Vermilion and Illinois rivers, 100 miles southwest of Chicago, is the glacier-born wilderness of caves, forests and canyons called Starved Rock State Park. There, according to Indian legend, a band of Illinois was besieged by an enemy tribe. Driven to the highest cliffs, they fought bravely until the last starved Illinois perished. There too, last week, along the snow-carpeted trails that weave into the panorama of canyons and frozen waterfalls, wandered three vacationing women. And there they died at the hands of a killer or killers ...

Osama bin Laden wanted to talk to his followers. This time the U.S. government was only too happy to help. Within a day of hearing the scratchy audiocassette of the al-Qaeda leader praising the recent bombings in Bali and the Moscow theater assault, intelligence sources tell TIME, U.S. agents paid a visit to one of bin Laden's senior operatives, Ramzi Binalshibh, held for interrogation at a safe house somewhere overseas. They played the 3-minute tape for Binalshibh, who has begun ...

For more than a decade, Bonnie Burnett and her husband Truman have owned a second home in the hilly farmland of Bradford County, in northeastern Pennsylvania. It was a getaway for the Burnetts , a place to take their grandchildren for a swim in the wooded pond that lies just a few steps from their front door. "It used to be heaven here," says Bonnie. "We were going to move here to live." The Burnetts say their plans changed when a natural gas ...

Koji Haga wasn't just near the tsunami that devastated northern Japan on March 11. He was on top of it. Somehow the fishing-boat captain kept his pitching vessel upright as the churning force of the wave attacked the shore, turning his coastal community of Akaushi into a graveyard of rubble and probably killing upwards of 10,000 people in the country's north. I met him barely 24 hours after he'd returned to the spot where his house once ...

Public interest in "The Real Housewives" of hither and yon notwithstanding, the well-behaved trophy wife is not, generally speaking, a character we're dying to know more about. And beautiful Pippa Lee is a trophy wife of the highest order. Polite, restrained and seemingly vacant, the heroine of writer/director Rebecca Miller's The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, cooks a mean butterflied lamb, keeps a meticulous house and floats around in silky pajamas, all the while gazing fondly at her ...

Earlier this month, Lieut. Colonel William F. McCullough, commanding officer of the 1-5 U.S. Marines in Afghanistan's Helmand province, took part in an exercise in insurgent reintegration. He rose from a dusty couch and extended his hand to one Abdul Khalik, whom his men had detained for the previous three days on suspicion of insurgent activities. "What do you want him to do now," asked McCullough's translator. "Anything he wants," said McCullough, taking Khalik's hand and shaking it, "so ...

Every year, thousands of workers arrive at the sapphire and ruby mines of Pailin, Cambodia, risking their lives to unearth gems in the landmine-ridden territory. Soon, however, they could be the ones to put millions of others at risk. On the Thai-Cambodian border, a rogue strain of malaria has started to resist artemisinin, the only remaining effective drug in the world's arsenal against malaria's most deadly strain, Plasmodium falciparum. For six decades, malaria drugs like chloroquine and mefloquine have ...

It's hard to fight an epidemic when no one wants to talk about the cause. In China, a country whose last decade has been defined by economic growth and social opening, silence still enshrouds many aspects of the nations' sex life, and not, health experts say, without consequences. While most industrialized nations have seen HIV/AIDS death rates steadily decline in the past 10 years, China announced in February that the HIV virus took the lead as the deadliest infectious disease in the nation in 2008, ...

The persistent sexual politics behind the scenes at late-night talk shows is far from a joke, believes former "Late Night with David Letterman" writer Nell Scovell.Under the international agreement between Washington, D.C. and Baghdad signed by the then-outgoing Bush administration, America's war in Iraq has all but ended with command of the war shifting permanently to the Iraqi government. Al Qaeda attacks took place during the U.S. command and now persist under Iraqi command. While many are thwarted, while car ...

Technologies that let employees work remotely have given rise to a growing phenomenon -- virtual internships. Businesses are realizing that commonplace Internet technologies like email, instant messaging -- which can also enable video chats -- and social media can be used to free interns from the confines of the office. For students, new graduates and career switchers looking to work in a different industry, working as an intern can be a valuable way of gaining work experience, and the flexibility ...